Tag: science

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Noted Astronomer Found Artificial Pieces of an Interstellar Meteor

By Monica Grady Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University

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Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, has recovered 50 tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that he claims may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship.

Loeb is linking his finding with the passage of a fireball in January 2014. The meteor was observed by sensors of the US Department of Defense that track all objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. It was recorded as travelling faster than most meteors and eventually broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea.
Data on the object is held by Nasa’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The meteor’s official name is CNEOS 20140108, and is also referred to as IM1 (for interstellar meteor).
We have already had at least one visitor from interstellar space – the comet ‘Oumuamua. The appearance of 1I/2017U1, the official name for ‘Oumuamua, was certainly an unusual event. The object was observed in 2017 as it was leaving the Solar System. Its trajectory is different from the near-circular orbits of the planets and elliptical orbits of comets.
The comet’s path was traced back, with scientists discovering that it had come from well beyond the outermost fringes of the Solar System. Scientists were excited but also intrigued – although its shape was not captured on camera, the way that light reflected from it as it rotated suggested that it had an odd shape like a cigar when viewed side-on or a plate when viewed from the top.
In a thoughtful article written in 2018, Loeb speculated that ‘Oumuamua might be artificial, rather than natural in origin – the product of an alien civilization. He suggested that we should keep searching for interstellar debris in the Solar System.
In pursuit of such debris, Loeb’s team interrogated the CNEOS database, looking for objects with unusual orbital characteristics. That’s when they found CNEOS 20140108 and, based on its high velocity, suggested it was an interstellar meteor – giving it the more manageable name of IM1.
Modeling the path of the fireball, Loeb identified a specific area of the South Pacific where he believed debris from IM1 would be deposited. Following a dredging operation in the area with a powerful magnet, he now claims to have found material from IM1.
But what are the chances that he has found genuine interstellar debris at all, never mind a spaceship?
The metallic spherules that have been recovered are each about half a millimeter in diameter. It isn’t impossible for them to be of extraterrestrial origin: several previous expeditions have recovered spherules from space from the seabed.
The first expedition to find such samples was HMS Challenger in 1872-76. Material dredged from the ocean floor contained many metallic droplets, described at the time, quite accurately, as “cosmic spherules”. Droplets from space are spherical because they solidify from molten material torn from the surface of meteorites as they traverse the atmosphere.
Subsequent expeditions throughout the 20th century have also found cosmic spherules at the bottom of the ocean, but it has become harder to identify them. This is because, in the 150 years since the Challenger expedition, the amount of pollution has increased on Earth.
In 1872, the industrial revolution was in its infancy in Europe and practically non-existent in the southern hemisphere. Hence pollution such as “fly ash” (waste from burning coal) and particles from vehicles was minimal. Many of these pollutants are also spherical in appearance and metallic in composition.
Today, products from industrial processes and vehicles are everywhere. So, without an actual analysis of the composition of the spherules and a comparison with analyses of meteorites (and common terrestrial pollutants), it is not possible to identify any as extraterrestrial.
But Loeb doesn’t just think the material is from space, he thinks it is from interstellar space – arguing “this could be the first time humans put their hands on interstellar material”.
This is simply not true. We have an abundance of interstellar material on Earth. Some of it is almost certainly on the ocean floor, but not in the form collected by Loeb.
The interstellar material to which I am referring comes in several different varieties. It is well known by astronomers that the interstellar medium – the space between stars – is not empty, but contains several different molecules, many of which are organic (made up of chains or rings of carbon). A portion of these molecules got mixed into the region of space where the Solar System was starting to form.
Stars themselves have also contributed material to the interstellar medium, as they evolved or exploded as supernovas. Some of this material comes as tiny diamonds or sapphires – rare mementoes of stars that lived and died before the Sun was born. These grains became part of the dust cloud that collapsed to form the Solar System, and were eventually carried to Earth in meteorites.
Loeb’s evidence for an extraterrestrial source for the material – never mind an interstellar origin – is rather shaky. He has found metallic spherules. For me (and many others) to accept that these spherules are extraterrestrial, I’d need firm analytical evidence. What is their composition? What is their age? Can we rule out terrestrial pollutants? Can we rule out debris from extraterrestrial material from within the Solar System?
The first question, about composition, has been answered: analysis of the spherules shows them to be mainly iron with a few trace metals.
We know meteors from our Solar System contain iron and nickel, echoing the relative abundances of these metals in the Sun. But the spherules apparently contain “negligible” amounts of nickel – thus indicating that they are almost certainly not from meteors within the Solar System. This does not, however, prove they are interstellar – it merely makes it more likely that they’re terrestrial pollutants.
The most convincing evidence would be to measure an age for the spherules greater than that of the Sun – which would identify them as interstellar.
And that would be amazing, but it would not necessarily identify them as having an artificial, rather than natural origin. I am not sure what evidence would be sufficiently convincing for this – maybe the autograph of the alien engineer who built the spacecraft?

s synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy or SX-STM. X-ray spectroscopy in SX-STM is triggered by photoabsorption of core level electrons, which constitutes elemental fingerprints and is effective in identifying the elemental type of the materials directly.

AR #122

MEGA Engineering In The Stars

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First X-ray Taken of a Single Atom

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Since its discovery by Roentgen in 1895, X-rays have been used everywhere, from medical examinations to security screenings in airports. Even Curiosity, NASA’s Mars rover, is equipped with an X-ray device to examine the materials composition of the rocks in Mars. An important usage of X-rays in science is to identify the type of materials in a sample. Over the years, the quantity of materials in a sample required for X-ray detection has been greatly reduced thanks to the development of synchrotron X-rays sources and new instruments. To date, the smallest amount one can X-ray a sample is in attogram, that is about 10,000 atoms or more. This is due to the X-ray signal produced by an atom being extremely weak so that the conventional X-ray detectors cannot be used to detect it. According to Hla, it is a long-standing dream of scientists to X-ray just one atom, which is now being realized by the research team led by him.

“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of. We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time,  and can simultaneously measure its chemical state,” explained Hla, who is also the director of the Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute at Ohio University. “Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences and maybe even find a cure that can have a huge impact for humankind. This discovery will transform the world.”
Their paper, published in the scientific journal Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06011-w) on May 31, 2023, and gracing the cover of the print version of the scientific journal on June 1, 2023, details how Hla and several other physicists and chemists, including Ph.D. students at OHIO, used a purpose-built synchrotron X-ray instrument at the XTIP beamline of Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.
For demonstration, the team chose an iron atom and a terbium atom, both inserted in respective molecular hosts. To detect X-ray signal of one atom, the research team supplemented conventional detectors in X-rays with a specialized detector made of a sharp metal tip positioned at extreme proximity to the sample to collect X-ray excited electrons – a technique known as synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy or SX-STM. X-ray spectroscopy in SX-STM is triggered by photoabsorption of core level electrons, which constitutes elemental fingerprints and is effective in identifying the elemental type of the materials directly.

AR #64

Power from the Night Side

by Susan Martinez

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Super-conducting People Movers, Proposed

The promise of superconductivity for electrical power transmission and transportation has long been held back by high costs. Now researchers from the University of Houston and Germany have demonstrated a way to cut the cost and upend both the transit and energy transport sectors by using superconductors to move people, cargo and energy along existing highway infrastructure.

The combined system would not only lower the cost of operating each system but would also provide a way to store and transport liquified hydrogen, an important future source of clean energy. The liquified hydrogen would be used to cool the superconductor guideway as it is stored and transported, reducing the need for a separate specialized pipeline system capable of cooling the fuel to 20 degrees Kelvin, or minus 424 Fahrenheit.

The concept, described in a paper published in April in the journal APL Energy, suggests a future in which air travel and traditional freight transport could become obsolete, replaced by a “super system” allowing personal and commercial vehicles to travel at speeds up to 400 miles an hour – maybe even twice that fast.

“I call it a world-changing technology,” said Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, who came up with the concept and is a corresponding author on the paper. “Superconductivity has had such promise to transmit electric power without power loss, to power magnetically levitating, super-fast trains and for energy storage. But it has not been economically viable, which is why it hasn’t happened at large scale yet.”

The modern era of superconductivity research began in 1987, when a team led by UH physicist Paul Chu discovered a compound which acted as a superconductor at a temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Since then, demonstration projects have proven that superconductors can be used to power magnetically levitated trains and to transmit electrical power without energy loss, reducing waste.
Magnetically levitating trains traditionally operate on a magnetized rail, with superconductors embedded in the train undercarriage. This concept flips that, embedding superconductors into the existing highway infrastructure and adding magnets to the undercarriages of vehicles, which avoids having to cool the superconductors on each vehicle. Instead, the liquified hydrogen would cool the superconductors as it moves across the system, with liquified nitrogen and a vacuum layer used to thermally insulate the liquified hydrogen.

AR #116

The Lost Arts of Levitation

by Steve Richards

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Long-Distance Quantum Teleportation Achieved

In a recent study published in the esteemed journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain have accomplished quantum teleportation. Led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Hugues de Riedmatten, Dario Lago-Rivera, Jelena V. Rakonjac, and Samuele Grandi were able to transfer quantum information from a photon to a solid-state qubit stored in a multiplexed quantum memory over a long distance.

Quantum teleportation is a technique that transfers quantum information from one location to another. Unlike science fiction’s portrayal of physical objects being teleported, quantum teleportation only transfers quantum information. The sender is not required to have knowledge of the specific quantum state being transferred, and the recipient’s location can be unknown. However, classical information must be sent from the sender to the receiver to complete the quantum teleportation process, and as a result, quantum teleportation cannot occur faster than the speed of light.


Quantum teleportation has gained significant interest in the field of quantum communications and quantum networks. It enables the transfer of quantum bits between network nodes over long distances using previously shared entanglement. This could lead to the integration of quantum technologies into current telecommunication networks and extend the ultra-secure communications enabled by these systems to very long distances. Additionally, quantum teleportation enables the transfer of quantum information between different kinds of quantum systems, such as between light and matter or between various types of quantum nodes.

AR #121

Beam Me Up Scotty

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Giant Water Reservoir Discovered on the Moon

The surface of the moon contains a new source of water embedded in millions of microscopic glass beads. Someday all that water, scientists say, might help astronauts produce drinking water, breathable air and even rocket fuel. The new findings come from a Chinese rover that spent two weeks on the moon in 2020.

Evidence of lunar water had only recently emerged from data collected by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). A large telescope on a modified Boeing 747SP jet was able to study the moon from above 99 percent of Earth’s atmospheric water vapor, permitting precise infrared observations without needing any space-based facilities. Another NASA paper published in the same issue of Nature Astronomy has studied permanently shadowed areas—known as cold traps—on the moon in which extremely low temperatures could freeze and preserve water essentially indefinitely, allowing it, over geologic time, to accumulate significant deposits. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01222-x)

Volatile elements and compounds, such as water, say researchers, are crucial to geological processes and will be vital for future in-situ resource utilization on the Moon. Thus, say scientists, it is important to understand the abundance of these elements, their location (i.e., locked in minerals or at depth as ice), and evolution through time on the Moon. Spacecraft missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have demonstrated that the lunar surface harbors water in at least some form. However, the origin of this water and its distribution across the lunar surface remains largely unknown. Compounding this is the fact that volatile elements likely migrate around the surface of the Moon and can be lost to space. An as-yet-undiscovered reservoir in the near-surface is required to replenish surface water and maintain the lunar water cycle.

In the recent Chinese discovery, Huicun He and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed 117 glass beads from a lunar soil sample collected by the Chang’e 5 robotic arm and returned to Earth on December 16, 2020. These beads showed water-poor cores but had elevated water abundances in their rims. This trend correlated with changing hydrogen isotope composition (the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium) from core to rim. This can be explained by the inward diffusion of water derived from the solar wind (primarily composed of pure hydrogen). The researchers also noted that one bead showed water loss at the outermost rim and suggested that this records water loss during daily surface temperature fluctuations.

Modeling-based estimates indicate that the amount of water that these glass beads could contribute to the lunar regolith is as much as 2.7 × 1014 kg. The researchers conclude, lunar glass beads might therefore provide the needed reservoir to maintain the lunar water cycle and act as a buffer for the global and daily variations of water abundance on the lunar surface.

AR #68

Does NASA Know Something We Don’t?

by John Kettler

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James Webb Telescope Challenges Big Bang Theory

In a posthumous presentation, the late astro-physicist Wal Thornhill has deconstructed the First Deep Field Image from the James Webb Space Telescope released on July 11, 2022. It’s a composite of different wavelengths totaling 12.5 hours—well beyond Hubble’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

Focused on a massive galaxy cluster, the center of the image is surrounded by stretched out curved objects. The Standard Model, propounded by today’s scientiific establishement, describes these curved objects as distant galaxies “gravitationally lensed” making them appear larger and brighter. In the Electric Universe Model, for which Thornhill and colleague Stuart Talbott are the primary theorists, the curved object effect is due to refraction through the neutrino sea aether that is denser around the massive galaxy cluster.

According to Big Bang theory, the earliest galaxies have not had time to evolve and grow by accretion, collisions, mergers, or cannibalizing smaller galaxies. The reddest objects should exhibit the least amount of smoothness and symmetric structure—but that is the opposite of what is observed—including the curved “lensed” galaxies.

Thornhill’s EU Model expects to see galaxies that get smaller and fainter, some bluer, some redder, to the limits of the telescope’s observational power—and that is exactly what Webb’s First Deep Field shows. Thornhill predicted this will be further confirmed when forthcoming ultra deep field images—after weeks of Webb observation—detect additional faint galaxies that simply show more of the same.

In the Electric Universe theory, space is not expanding. The Universe is of unknown age and unknown extent, possibly infinite. According to science reporter Steven Parsons, writing for Atlantis Rising Magazine, “By breaking from the pack and looking at observed facts with fresh eyes, Wal Thornhill has become convinced that planets and stars function in an electrically dynamic environment.” The Venusian tail, discovered last year, retains its rope-like or filamentary structure across 45 million kilometers because it is a current carrying plasma. These plasma structures, “Birkeland currents,” are well known to plasma physicists but remain unrecognized by astronomers. The very existence of Birkeland currents in the solar system demonstrates the existence of a flow of electric current in the plasma which fills the solar system. And this opens up a whole new way of seeing things.

Thornhill says that stars do not produce all of their light and heat by thermo-nuclear processes. Instead, our Sun and all other stars resemble great spheres of lightning. These spheres receive energy externally rather than from nuclear fusion at their core, he says. The accepted theory that stars produce energy by nuclear fusion suits the mindset of the atomic era but does not conform to actual observations.

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AR #102

Big Bang or Not

by William B. Stoecker

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Could a Mystery Planet End Life on Earth?

A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment at the University of California Riverside. 

UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. 

The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between. 

“In other star systems there are many planets with masses in that gap. We call them super-Earths,” Kane said. 
The other gap is in location, relative to the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. “Planetary scientists often wish there was something in between those two planets. It seems like wasted real estate,” he said. 

These gaps could offer important insights into the architecture of our solar system, and into Earth’s evolution. To fill them in, Kane ran dynamic computer simulations of a planet between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets. 

The results, published in the Planetary Science Journal, were mostly disastrous for the solar system. “This fictional planet gives a nudge to Jupiter that is just enough to destabilize everything else,” Kane said. “Despite many astronomers having wished for this extra planet, it’s a good thing we don’t have it.”

Jupiter is much larger than all the other planets combined; its mass is 318 times that of Earth, so its gravitational influence is profound. If a super-Earth in our solar system, a passing star, or any other celestial object disturbed Jupiter even slightly, all other planets would be profoundly affected.

Depending on the mass and exact location of a super-Earth, its presence could ultimately eject Mercury and Venus as well as Earth from the solar system. It could also destabilize the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, tossing them into outer space as well. 

The super-Earth would change the shape of this Earth’s orbit, making it far less habitable than it is today, if not ending life entirely.

If Kane made the planet’s mass smaller and put it directly in between Mars and Jupiter, he saw it was possible for the planet to remain stable for a long period of time. But small moves in any direction and, “things would go poorly,” he said. 

The study has implications for the ability of planets in other solar systems to host life. Though Jupiter-like planets, gas giants far from their stars, are only found in about 10% of the time, their presence could decide whether neighboring Earths or super-Earths have stable orbits. 

These results gave Kane a renewed respect for the delicate order that holds the planets together around the sun. “Our solar system is more finely tuned than I appreciated before. It all works like intricate clock gears. Throw more gears into the mix and it all breaks,” Kane said. 

The late Zecharia Sitchin explained the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as resulting from the destruction of a planet known as Tiamat after being struck by a rogue planet called Niburu. The story can be found, he said, in the cuneiform texts of Sumeria. Similarly, in a 1988 book, Catastrophism and the Old Testament, author Donald W. Patten theorized that a planet called ‘Astra’ had collided with Mars after breaking into pieces, much as the comet Shoemaker-Levy which hit Jupiter in 1994.

Many esoteric traditions, such as Theosophy, have long held that the asteroid belt is the aftermath of a collision between a planet known as Maldek and Mars. Many such sources claim Maldek was destroyed by the nukes of a mad civilization.

Usually discussed under the heading ‘Phaeton,’ this hypothetical world was also called the ‘fifth planet.’ The idea being that the solar system originally had just five planets.The notion that the asteroid belt resulted from a planetary collision has also been called the ‘Disruption Theory,’ though it has been summarily rejected by academia. New evidence, however, is forcing science to reconsider many ideas once dismissed as fringe.

In December, 2019 a new study led by University of Oklahoma astrophysicist Matthew S. Clements published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, took a new approach. Entitled “A record of the final phase of giant planet migration fossilized in the asteroid belt’s orbital structure,” the paper challenged the “Nice Model” , the standard theory for the dynamical evolution of the Solar System. According to Clements and his colleagues a comprehensive new analysis of orbital data indeed suggests that the asteroid belt should be viewed as the fossil record of a destroyed fifth planet (https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/492/1/L56/5672641).

AR #107

Ancient Nukes on Mars

by Martin Ruggles

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Most Intense Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Shocks Scientists

On October 9, 2022, an intense pulse of gamma-ray radiation swept through our solar system, overwhelming gamma-ray detectors on numerous orbiting satellites, and sending astronomers on a chase to study the event using the most powerful telescopes in the world.

The new source, dubbed GRB 221009A for its discovery date, turned out to be the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded.

In a new study that appeared in March, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, has shed new light on the decades-long quest to understand the origin of these extreme cosmic explosions.

The gamma-ray emission from GRB 221009A lasted over 300 seconds. Astronomers think that such “long-duration” GRBs are the birth cry of a black hole, formed as the core of a massive and rapidly spinning star collapses under its own weight. The newborn black hole launches powerful jets of plasma at near the speed of light, which pierce through the collapsing star and shine in gamma-rays.

With GRB 221009A being the brightest burst ever recorded, a real mystery lay in what would come after the initial burst of gamma-rays. “As the jets slam into gas surrounding the dying star, they produce a bright ‘afterglow’ of light across the entire spectrum,” says Tanmoy Laskar, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah, and lead author of the study. “The afterglow fades quite rapidly, which means we have to be quick and nimble in capturing the light before it disappears, taking its secrets with it.”

As part of a campaign to use the world’s best radio and millimeter telescopes to study the afterglow of GRB 221009A, astronomers Edo Berger and Yvette Cendes of the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) rapidly gathered data with the SMA.
After analyzing and combining the data from the SMA and other telescopes all over the world, the astronomers were flummoxed: the millimeter and radio wave measurements were much brighter than expected based on the visible and X-ray light.

“This is one of the most detailed datasets we have ever collected, and it is clear that the millimeter and radio data just don’t behave as expected,” says CfA research associate Yvette Cendes. “A few GRBs in the past have shown a brief excess of millimeter and radio emission that is thought to be the signature of a shockwave in the jet itself, but in GRB 221009A the excess emission behaves quite differently than in these past cases.”
She adds, “It is likely that we have discovered a completely new mechanism to produce excess millimeter and radio waves.”

In 2005 an explosion 50,000 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy, was characterized at the time as the largest of it kind ever seen on Earth. If it had been just 10 light years away it could have caused mass extinctions and severely damaged our atmosphere. As it was, the blast was more than 100 times more powerful than any previous explosion ever recorded. The exploding neutron star is called a magnestar for its intense magnetic fields. No bigger than a large Earth city, the explosion was said to produce more energy in a tenth of a second than our own sun turns out in 100,000 years.

Fortunately, scientists say, there are no such magnestars within 4,000 light years of Earth. Some scientists, like astrophysicist Paul LaViolette (whose work has been outlined in Atlantis Rising Magazine) have argued that catastrophic events in Earth’s history may have been the result of of just such stellar explosions (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/evidence-for-a-solar-flare-cause-of-the-pleistocene-mass-extinction/799A4720B75245B4627AFE412661B3B6).

AR #114

Is Anybody Home

by Martin Ruggles

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Shape Shifting Robots Are Here

Filmmaker James Cameron has been called a visionary, but it is difficult to imagine he ever envisioned fictional technology from one of his sci-fi movies materializing.

This team of engineers may not have cited “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” as inspiration for this development, but their miniature robots capable of shape-shifting between a liquid and solid state look like they could have come straight from Skynet. 

The material that makes this possible is called “magnetoactive liquid-solid phase transitional matter,” or MPTM, and the team recently published a study where they placed robots with this material in an obstacle course that tested mobility and “shape-morphing.”

A video from the study shows a small human-like figure that resembles a LEGO slowly escaping a cage by turning into liquid. It is then pulled through the bars by an external magnetic field. Once it is out of the cell, the figure restores its original state by flowing into a mold. 

The jailbreak wasn’t the only task the robots underwent on its obstacle course. They also jumped a 21-millimeter-deep moat, climbed a 12-millimeter wall and split up to cooperatively move objects before merging. The study also said the material could bear about 66 pounds and move at approximately 3.3 miles per hour. 

The team created MPTM by embedding magnetic particles in gallium, a metal with a melting point of about 85.6 degrees Fahrenheit. 

According to senior author and mechanical engineer Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University, the magnetic particles make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field and provide the robots the ability to move in response to the magnetic field. 

This differs from existing phase-shifting materials that require electrical currents, heat guns and other external heat sources to transform. MPTM also features an extremely fluid liquid phase compared to other shape-shifting materials. 
Study lead and engineer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Chengfeng Pan said that switching between liquid and solid states grants robots more functionality. 

Despite its resemblance to the T-1000, these robots will not be hunting down any Connor descendants. Instead, the team listed possible applications for the material that includes wireless circuit assembly and repair, assembling parts in hard-to-reach spaces, removing foreign objects from a stomach and delivering drugs to a stomach.

AR #127

Cyborg Eyes

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Giant Jurassic Bug in Arkansas Walmart

A giant insect plucked from the façade of an Arkansas Walmart has set historic records. The Polystoechotes punctata or giant lacewing is the first of its kind recorded in eastern North America in over 50 years — and the first record of the species ever in the state. 

The giant lacewing was formerly widespread across North America, but was mysteriously extirpated from eastern North America by the 1950s. This discovery suggests there may be relic populations of this large, Jurassic-Era insect yet to be discovered, explained Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab.
Skvarla found the specimen in 2012, but misidentified it and only discovered its true identity after teaching an online course based on his personal insect collection in 2020. He recently co-authored a paper about the discovery in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

“I remember it vividly, because I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building,” said Skvarla, who was a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at the time. “I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade.”

It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the giant lacewing would find its time to shine. In the fall of 2020, with the world in lockdown, Skvarla was teaching Entomology 432: Insect Biodiversity and Evolution at Penn State. He taught the lab course via Zoom, with students following along remotely on loaner microscopes, and used his own personal insect collection as specimen samples.

As he went to demonstrate the features of a specimen he had previously labeled an “antlion,” Skvarla noticed that the characteristics didn’t quite match those of the dragonfly-like predatory insect. Instead, he thought it looked more like a lacewing. A giant lacewing has a wingspan of roughly 50 millimeters, which is quite large for an insect, a clear indicator that the specimen was not an antlion, as Skvarla had mistakenly labeled it. The students got to work comparing features — and a discovery was made, live on Zoom.

“We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops,” said Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State. “We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing. I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn’t dim, the wonder isn’t lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course.”

For additional confirmation, Skvarla and his colleagues performed molecular DNA analyses on the specimen. Since confirming its true identity, Skvarla has deposited the insect safely in the collections of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, where scientists and students will have access to it for further research. 

AR #125

One-Hundred-Million-Year-Old Protein

By Nicholle Wahl