Author: Jen Pinkowski

 
There is a beehive in space, and tonight, November 18, the Moon will help you find it. Are you in?

You’re going to need a pair of binoculars. Around 11:59 p.m. EST, look east. You’ll see a giant disc in the sky marked with mysterious shadows that appear to be dark oceans. That is the Moon. Look a little to the left, and a little bit down, and for the first time in your life, you’ll probably see the constellation Cancer. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Cancer is the ninja of constellations. It’s hard to find, but when the skies are dark and clear and you manage to spot it, lots of things happen very quickly: First, you pat yourself on the back, because it is comprised only of a few faint stars, including one called Arkushanangarushashutu, which is Babylonian for “southeast star in the Crab.” Second, you wonder how the ancients got a crab out of that (it looks a lot more like a wishbone or Y). Third, you notice what appears to be a vague haze or cloud within its little crab body.

That’s what we’re after tonight! Within the crab is not a smear, but rather, a grouping of a thousand stars. (You won’t see that many.) This is the Beehive Cluster, also called Praesepe. It is an “open cluster”—that is, a collection of stars formed from the same stellar nursery. (Praesepe is Latin for “manger.”) Some of the stars in the Beehive are Sun-like with Jupiter-like gas giants orbiting them. You can see two of these planets, Pr0201b and Pr 0211b, highlighted in the top image—they are, NASA says, “the first b’s in the Beehive.” (You definitely won’t see planets tonight.)

Who first put the beehive on the map? The father of modern science himself, Galileo, who spied it with his paper telescope. That’s why you need binoculars tonight: Because unless you were born on Krypton, you cannot resolve these stars with the naked eye. That you need only a decent set of binoculars makes this a perfect celestial starter kit. You can enjoy the experience without figuring out how to aim and focus a telescope in the freezing night air (or, thanks to climate change, in the sweltering, mosquito-dense night air).

So what can you expect? Galileo saw 40 stars in the cluster. Forty might not seem all that special, but it’s an awful lot for such a small space, and if you can see even a quarter of that, you’ll be glad you took the time. The cluster’s stars—some small and dim, some larger and less dim—come together to form the appearance of an electric, 3D image of swarming bees. (They won’t be moving, though, and if they are, run.)

The usual terms and conditions apply. You will need to be in an area of very little light pollution. Cancer is really hard to see, and if you’re competing against the floodlights of a Walmart parking lot, you may as well save yourself the trouble and call it an early night. While the position of the waning gibbous Moon will help you locate the beehive, the light reflecting off it won’t, but we have to play the hand we’re dealt. Here’s the good news: Your binoculars are likely similar in power to Galileo’s telescope. They might even be better. So get out there and give it a try. If you can find the Moon, you can find a star cluster. And if you can’t, the Moon is reason enough to look up tonight. You really can’t lose.

The 2013–2016 West African Ebola outbreak claimed at least 11,325 lives and caused a recorded 28,652 infections before finally burning out.
 
What if we missed a quarter of those actually infected?

A new paper, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, lends further support to the idea that a significant number of individuals can become infected with Ebola but not show symptoms. The research team investigated Ebola virus survivors and their contacts, who often were quarantined together, between October 2015 and January 2016 in a village in Sierra Leone. Thirty-four cases of Ebola virus disease had been diagnosed before the research study began. Using antibody tests to identify potential infections lacking symptoms, an additional 14 potential infections were identified. Twelve of those—a full 25 percent of the 48 total infections—reported no symptoms at all. Two additional cases identified by antibody testing reported a fever but no other symptoms of disease.

We have recognized since 1989 that there is a species of Ebolavirus called Reston virus that can infect humans but appears to cause no symptoms. But even with the pathogenic species of Ebolavirus, it is becoming increasingly clear that the virus causes a spectrum of infections in humans, ranging from symptomless infections to death. This is not particularly surprising; though popular culture examples featuring Ebola–like pathogens, such as 12 Monkeys or Outbreak, suggest that almost 100 percent of those infected with their virus of choice will die, in reality, the severity of infection is a combination of many factors. If the host is generally healthy, usually they will be more likely to survive (though healthy hosts can, occasionally, make an infection more dangerous, as happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic). A host that has previously suffered a similar infection may have some immunity, and the disease will typically be less severe. Other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, may result in a more serious infection.

Prior work has come to similar conclusions with harmful species of Ebolavirus as well. Sixteen years ago, Ebola virus antibodies and low levels of viral RNA were detected in individuals exposed to body fluids from infected patients during outbreaks of the virus in Gabon. These individuals never themselves showed any symptoms of Ebola virus disease. During the first known Ebolavirus outbreak in 1976, reports suggested that 19 percent of the contacts of patients had also been infected, but with a very mild or asymptomatic infection.

However, studying Ebolavirus antibodies in the context of an epidemic is relatively easy—you have confirmed cases who have documented infections, so the timeline of exposure can be detailed even for those who were exposed and infected but did not develop symptoms. What has been more difficult to prove scientifically is that Ebolavirus antibodies in areas where there were not active outbreaks were a real phenomenon rather than a laboratory artifact.

A 1982 paper found evidence of Ebolavirus antibodies in Liberia—32 years before a full-blown outbreak surfaced there. A similar study of samples collected from 2006 to 2008 in Sierra Leone also suggested that 8.6 percent of those tested had antibodies to Ebolavirus. More than 5 percent of those tested in the Central African Republic, another country that has never seen an active Ebolavirus outbreak, also had antibodies. We can’t be sure these antibodies were due to asymptomatic cases—they may have been survivors of Ebolavirus infections that were misdiagnosed as Lassa fever, malaria, or other more common infectious diseases—but if this research had been accepted and circulated decades prior, perhaps additional surveillance could have identified the 2013–2016 outbreak earlier and responded appropriately before it spiraled out of control.

These studies suggest that the true burden of Ebolavirus infections is significantly underestimated. During an epidemic, many more people may be infected than is currently understood. An understanding of how commonly asymptomatic infections occur is critical, as an unrecognized population of immune individuals could alter the dynamics of the infection and modify mathematical models used to predict spread.

Indeed, when Reston virus was discovered, it was hoped that a virus that caused these asymptomatic infections could be used to create an effective and safe vaccine. That hasn’t worked in experimental work, but there is still hope that if we could understand why some individuals do not become ill from the pathogenic Ebola viruses, we could use that information to inform additional studies of vaccines or treatments.  

The recognition of asymptomatic infections also raises questions regarding long-term complications after Ebolavirus disease. Many survivors report chronic health problems years after the acute infection; could this happen in asymptomatic survivors too? We don’t know now because they’ve not been followed in these long-term studies.

Perhaps most importantly, can asymptomatic survivors transmit the virus to others? This seems unlikely given that when measured, the asymptomatic cases had much lower levels of virus than patients with symptoms. Furthermore, decades of epidemiological studies have repeatedly shown that the highest risk of acquiring Ebolavirus comes from contact with infected body fluids from a sick patient.

Finally, the increasing evidence for asymptomatic Ebolavirus infections suggests the need to test for the virus even in locations where no documented outbreaks have occurred. We were decades behind the ball looking for Ebolavirus in West Africa, and the result was the largest Ebolavirus outbreak on record by several orders of magnitude. Rather than playing catch-up, these findings should encourage us to get ahead of the curve and track more cases of Ebolavirus infection irrespective of symptom severity, before we end up with a repeat of the West African outbreak.  

The good news: Tonight is the best night of the year to spot the Leonid meteor shower. The bad news: There’s a giant moon up there washing things out. Those are just the breaks. Moreover, this is a weak year for the shower. Sometimes it’s strong. Sometimes it’s not. Activity correlates to the return of its parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle, which traverses the solar system in a 33-year orbit. Alas, the comet won’t be back to spice things up until the 2030s.

Still, to stare into the night sky is to stare thousands of years into the past. (Longer if you use a telescope.) And that big and bright Moon, while meddling with our meteor viewing, is gorgeous this week and worth your time—it’s the super beaver moon, after all. But the Leonids, too, have earned their keep. They gave birth to meteor astronomy in terrifying fashion, having once been thought to signal Judgment Day.

THE CRACK OF DOOM

In 1833, biochemistry was born. Slavery was abolished in much of the British Empire. Across the Atlantic, the city of Chicago was founded. A re-elected president took the oath of office. And the nation was plunged into chaos as the sixth seal was apparently broken, “and the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”

This was a pre-Edison world, and even gas lighting was in its infancy. The skies, in other words, were largely free of the eventual scourge of light pollution. They would have been painted with the Milky Way, and any motion at all, save the Moon and the planets, would have been obvious and noteworthy. So when thousands of shooting stars appeared in one crystalline night in November―when the sky became a dramatic field of streaking white―something was definitely wrong. This was no meteor shower. There were simply too many of them, too much, too frenzied in every direction. This was, well, it could only be one thing: a sign, and maybe the sign.

Scientists of the time weren’t necessarily on board with the Armageddon hypothesis, but they needed to move quickly to collect hard data on the phenomenon, determine how far the phenomena reached, build hypotheses on why this was happening now, and predict what might happen next. Scientific astronomy was paramount, as was the need to collect hard data from across the country (and perhaps around the world) before memories falsely inflated numbers and exaggerated meteor behavior. Now amplify the pressure of doing this when there was no way of communicating swiftly over great distances. This was a pre-telegraph world. It took weeks and months to bring the data together, but in the end they were successful.

So what was going on? Was this some sort of solar outburst? Were elements in the atmosphere ignited? Observations placed the radius of the shower in the constellation Leo. (Hence the eventual name “Leonids.”) In 1833, it was exclusive to North America, but there were reports of it the year before in Europe and the Middle East. Was it perhaps the work of some sort of particle field in space? It was in these fires of scientific inquiry about the Leonids that the field of meteor astronomy would be forged. The shower was particularly intense in 1833, these early meteor astronomers soon learned, because Tempel-Tuttle had returned in its 33-year orbit. After combing through some 2000 years of astronomical records, Yale College astronomer and mathematician H. A. Newton predicted the next spectacular shower would appear in 1866. He was right.

Because the world didn’t end in 1833, the terror of a sky lit in shooting stars would inspire people for years. Stories about that night were passed down for generations. The shower, for example, left an indelible mark on the people of Alabama, nearly a century later inspiring Carl Carmer, an English professor at the University of Alabama. He titled his literary exploration of the state, published in 1934, Stars Fell on Alabama. That phrase would inspire a song of the same name:

“We lived our little drama
we kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I can’t forget the glamour
your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Alabama last night”

CATCHING THE MAIN EVENT

The shower will peak after midnight tonight, in the early hours of November 18. If it’s too cold where you are to take chances on a quiet event, you can always watch the meteor shower on Slooh. You can also check out the Space.com feed. And of course there’s the old fashioned way: a dark area, a heavy coat, a blanket, an hour for your night vision to adjust, and a whole lot of patience. You might see 10 meteors an hour. And if you don’t, you’ll have a brilliant alabaster moon to keep you company.

 
In 1990, the Voyager I spacecraft took a mosaic of images known as the “family portrait”―a view of the solar system from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. In the image, Earth is captured as a single pixel later immortalized by Carl Sagan, who put the affairs of our “pale blue dot,” as he called it, into perspective:

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The past 26 years have yielded astonishing and wonderful revelations about the cosmos, including proof of the existence of exoplanets―worlds orbiting other stars―with many of them in “habitable zones” around their suns, areas where it’s not too hot and not too cold. These are planets, in other words, that might support life.

For all the artistic renditions, however, and the hypotheses of what such worlds might be like, the totality of our images of those planets exist mostly as waveform graphs, with a scattering of thermal images of gas giants analogous to Jupiter. No rocky world in a habitable zone has ever been imaged directly. Their stars are billions of times brighter than they are, and there is no hardware in space able to “turn off” the light of the star without turning off the habitable-zone planet.

Project Blue intends to change that. It is an effort by a group of scientists, engineers, and space organizations to launch a small telescope into space with the singular goal of directly imaging in visible light (i.e. the light we see with our own eyes) an Earth-like planet around one or more of the stars of Alpha Centauri, and to do so using private funds. Not only might the mission redefine humanity’s place in the universe, but it might also redefine how planetary science missions are funded, launched, and operated.

THE NULL RESULT

Since the 1990s, astronomers have been rigorously engaged in the study of Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own, and people have been talking about imaging planets around nearby stars for nearly as long. The Project Blue team, comprised of some of the best minds in the field, came together this summer to work through and settle on the different technical concepts that have long been considered necessary for this sort of mission. A perennial roadblock has been funding—it’s simply been too expensive to mount this sort of mission. That roadblock has finally given way.

Even when it was too expensive to attempt the imaging of a habitable exoplanet in Alpha Centauri, however, it was still a good bet. The Project Blue team has chosen to focus on the binary stars Alpha Centauri A and B. The stars are close to our solar system, relatively speaking, which means a space telescope needs only a half-meter mirror. Because the system contains two stars, there is promising potential for discovery. In fact, the Kepler space observatory already discovered a planet around Alpha Centauri B in 2012, though it could not be described as habitable: Its orbit is just 6 million kilometers from its star. (Just this summer, Kepler spotted a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a smaller, dimmer star that is closest to our Sun. It, too, has a tight orbit.) 

As for finding a habitable world, imagine you flip two coins. The possible results are: both coins turning up heads; one turning up heads, the other turning up tails; or both turning up tails. If you’re betting on heads, those are great odds. Consider further that in our own solar system, there are three planets in the habitable zone: Venus, Earth, and Mars. (Obviously, only one of the trio is a habitable blue dot.) Suddenly the likelihood of Project Blue successfully photographing something seems a lot higher.

To capture the image, Project Blue will launch a space telescope the size of a small washing machine, equipped with a coronagraph and deformable mirror. A coronagraph can “turn off” the light of the alien suns. That light is focused by the mirror. Because the twin stars in Alpha Centauri are so much like our own Sun, astronomers know where to look to find their habitable zones, and where planets have to be in those zones to host liquid water. Therein lies the key difference between NASA space telescopes and the one to be launched by Project Blue: NASA has to design its telescopes to service hundreds of targets. Project Blue has only one, and a precise target area within the system. If a NASA telescope fails to find something, it moves on to the next thing. If Project Blue fails to find its target, the mission is over.

NASA has passed over this sort of mission in the past because of this “null result”―the possibility of two tails turning up from our coin toss. Peer review panels normally look for a larger context for scientific impact, and however likely it is that habitable planets orbit one of these stars, what would it mean for exoplanets in general if no such planets exist? Very little. It wouldn’t tell us anything at all about how common or rare Earth-like planets are around other stars in the galaxy.

This isn’t to say there hasn’t been excitement for a mission like this. “Excitement” is an understatement. Directly imaging an Earth-like world is a holy grail of exoplanet study.

KICKSTARTING THEIR WAY TO SPACE (AT FIRST) 

The era of commercial space has arrived, and the logical next step is to bring space science into the fold. Such barriers as spacecraft control and access to space are now surmountable thanks to companies like SpaceX, the private company helmed by Elon Musk that is pioneering reusable rockets, and that presently launches orbital payloads and resupplies the International Space Station (with designs to launch astronauts in 2019 and put humans on Mars in the next decade).

“It’s a great time to be moving on a project like this using private funding,” Jon Morse, the CEO of BoldlyGo and one of the leaders of Project Blue, tells mental_floss. “It leverages what NASA has been investing in exoplanet research, along with pulling together the technologies and capabilities that commercial space has been developing, which has really brought a lot of the cost down.”

Project Blue is taking a three-pronged approach to raising funds for the mission. The first $1 million will be raised on Kickstarter, in a campaign that begins today. This is analogous to the way NASA funds “Phase A” studies, in which a small percentage of a mission’s cost is provided for scientists to develop a preliminary design. A methodical NASA-like approach to mission development is no accident. Before Jon Morse ran BoldlyGo, he was the director of the Astrophysics division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Crowdfunding this phase of Project Blue has the added benefit of raising the mission’s profile. If nothing else, the public can be invested, literally, in the mission’s success. Afterward, the mission leadership will engage private investors directly to raise another $24 million. Since its announcement last month, the project has been inundated with requests from companies to help provide such things as onboard computing and spacecraft control. “We could not conceive of doing this even a few years ago,” says Morse.

And NASA, while not strictly necessary for mission success, will not be excluded from this endeavor. Project Blue has also approached the agency to establish a Space Act Agreement, in which it will provide modest resources in exchange for a minority role in the mission. NASA has such an agreement with SpaceX. No money is exchanged, but NASA field centers—its facilities around the country—partner with SpaceX to provide expertise and institutional knowledge. For Project Blue, this might mean the use of test facilities, and NASA personnel assigned to the project. This is also analogous to NASA’s participation in certain international missions, where there is no exchange of funds, but in exchange for a small role, NASA provides certain technologies or technical support.

TARGET 2020

The Project Blue team believes it can get the science payload built and integrated into a spacecraft in roughly three years—four on the outside. “We have a pretty good idea of what to do to get the spacecraft built,” says Morse. “Look for it by the end of the decade. It won’t be earlier than late 2019―maybe 2020―to launch. This is a lean-and-mean assessment that’s based on our experience with other payloads that have been developed.”

And its effects on commercial and public-private partnerships for science missions would be tectonic. Capturing an image of a “pale blue dot” around one of the Alpha Centauri stars “would be a really compelling scientific result that we think would rival some of the most momentous discoveries in science and space exploration,” says Morse. It would also enable study beyond an imaged habitable world. Scientists could extract from the light wavelengths evidence of things like elements in the atmosphere, water, and perhaps extrapolate signs of life by way of such processes as photosynthesis on the planet’s surface.

That our own pale blue dot exists is something of a miracle. So much could have gone wrong, and might yet still. So little keeps the light of civilization flickering. We dream of other blue dots, and write stories, poems, and scholarly research to that effect, but to see it? To know with certainty that it’s there, and that it might too hold the dreams of a species? This recasts the question, “Why are we here?” as something parochial—albeit globally so. Suddenly, “we” encompasses so much more, and “here” so much less. And though Carl Sagan said this about our own dot, he might as well have been saying this about another: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”

 
Earlier this month, the head of the University of New Mexico’s Gallup campus was under fire for spending public money on a Bigfoot conference and expedition. Never mind that there are no fossils, no corpses, no DNA samples, nor any other hard evidence to suggest Bigfoot exists. Nearly 50 years after the famous Patterson–Gimlin footage was shot in northern California, people are still looking for hairy hulking apemen (fewer apewomen) hiding from us in the forests.

To the collective annoyance of skeptics, these stories aren’t likely to go away any time soon. Just take a look across the globe and back through history and you’ll find that lots of cultures have tales about shaggy, often smelly cryptids (animals of unproven existence). In their 2013 book Abominable Science, authors Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero acknowledge that Bigfoot myths might enjoy plausibility for a good evolutionary reason: There was a time when “footprints in the mud really did mean that another bipedal primate was lurking about.” Indeed, our human ancestors used to share forests with once-mysterious orangutans, gorillas, and, a very long time ago, the now-extinct primates like Gigantopithecus. Today, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, dominates the lore of North America. But here are 15 hirsute alternatives that show just how ubiquitous these mythical creatures are.

1. MOGOLLON MONSTER

The screeching, putrid-smelling, campsite-wrecking Mogollon Monster is said to stalk Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. The first record of a sighting might come from a 1903 edition of The Arizona Republican, in which a man named I.W. Stevens claimed he saw a clawed apeman that was covered in gray hair and had a matted beard that reached to his knees. This beast carried a club, drank the blood of cougars and “screamed the wildest, most unearthly screech,” according to Stevens. He himself never claimed it was a monster; instead, he speculated it was someone held hostage and then abandoned by Native Americans. Several decades later, future cryptozoologist Don Davis claimed he had his own encounter with the Mogollon Monster during a 1940s Boy Scout camping trip (he was 13 at the time), noting that the creature had deep-set expressionless eyes, a square head, and a stench so bad Davis thought he had soiled his sleeping bag in terror.

2. AM FEAR LIATH MÒR: THE GREY MAN OF SCOTLAND

Chemist J. Norman Collie believed in science. But still he was spooked by a shadowy presence while hiking alone on Scotland’s second highest peak, Ben MacDui. He told of the experience at the General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in 1925: “As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest. Whatever you make of it, I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDui and I will not go back there again by myself I know.” Collie wasn’t alone. Others have described similar run-ins with the yeti-like Grey Man, or Am Fear Liath Mòr. According to The Scotsman, these encounters seem more spiritual than physical, often accompanied by “uncontrolled terror, deep despair and huge negative energy.”

3. EBU GOGO

Apemen—and apewomen—come in all sizes. On the Indonesian island of Flores, “Ebu Gogo” means “the grandmother who eats anything.” These fabled creatures are said to be diminutive, hairy, and pot-bellied. Some believers have tried to link these cryptids to the hobbit-like human Homo floresiensis, whose bones were also found on Flores. But recent research suggests that species died out 50,000 years ago.

4. ALMAS

In Central Asia, Bigfoot takes the form of the Almas. This legendary apeman of the Altai Mountains is supposedly more humanoid in form than the North American Bigfoot, and some cryptozoologists have tried claiming that Almases might make up a holdout population of Neanderthals. Close encounters have not been limited to sightings of shadowy figures in the woods. In one troublingly racist episode from the 19th century, a woman of African descent named Zana was held captive in Russia by villagers who suspected she was an Almas. Worse, some scientists today are apparently still trying to prove she was not human.

5. YETI

Bigfoot’s best known (and perhaps most-sought) companion might be the Yeti, or “Abominable Snowman,” who roams the Himalayas. The Yeti has its origins in old Sherpa folklore, but it became the hulking shaggy apeman of pop culture after Western mountaineers started exploring Mount Everest in the 20th century and came back with sensational tales. In 1959, the American Embassy in Kathmandu released a memo notifying would-be Yeti hunters that they would have to apply for a permit with the Nepalese government and could photograph but not kill any Yeti they might find.

6. YOWIE

If you can take the witness sketches as accurate representations, the Yowie is sort of like a hairy luchador with a cone-shaped head and the posture of a gorilla. While alleged sightings are still reported in the wilds of Australia, the Yowie has its roots in Aboriginal legends, and European colonizers sometimes referred to the creature as the “Australian ape.” In 1882, a newspaper columnist in Sydney told of a sighting near Bateman’s Bay in New South Wales: “I should think that if it were standing perfectly upright it would be nearly 5ft high. It was tailless and covered with very long black hair, which was of a dirty red or snuff-colour about the throat and breast…On the whole it was a most uncouth and repulsive looking creature, evidently possessed of prodigious strength, and one which I should not care to come to close quarters.”

7. ORANG PENDEK

Malay for “short man,” the Orang Pendek supposedly lives in the jungles of the island Sumatra. This ground-dwelling, pint-sized creature is said to have long arms and broad shoulders. It apparently lacks special powers—though it might throw rocks at you if it feels threatened.

8 AGOGWE

During a lion-hunting expedition in Tanzania in the early 20th century, a man named William Hichens saw “mystery men-beasts” called Agogwe and lived to tell the tale. “They were like little men, about four feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair,” Hichens wrote. “The native hunter with me gaped in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime.” The locals also said that if you put a gourd of beer and a bowl of food out in your garden, the Agogwe would take the food and do some hoeing and weeding at night in return, which was just too much for Hichens to buy. “That, I can well believe, is myth.”

9. KUSHTAKA

Alaskans have a rather demonic version of Bigfoot: kushtakas. In the language of the Tlingit indigenous tribe of the Pacific Northwest, “kushtaka” means “land otter man.” Sure, otters are cute, but kushtakas have the not-so-cute ability to shape-shift, possess people, steal souls, and cause landslides. In The Strangest Story Ever Told, miner Harry D. Colp claimed that one of his companions was beset by a swarm of these sexless, sore-covered, monkey-like creatures during a prospecting trip in southeastern Alaska’s Thomas Bay in 1900. Undaunted by such accounts, actor Charlie Sheen reportedly took a private jet to Alaska to hunt kushtakas in 2013. He did not find any of the elusive creatures.

10. DE LOYS’ APE

 
In the 1920s, Swiss scientist George Alexis Montandon claimed he had evidence of a human-sized ape that lurked in Venezuela. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the so-called De Loys’ Ape was revealed to be a hoax based on a manipulated photo of a common spider monkey.

11. HIBAGON

People living around Mt. Hiba in northern Hiroshima during the 1970s claimed to see an ape-like man, shorter than the American Bigfoot and with a coat of reddish brown hair. The so-called Hibagon apparently created such a frenzy that police for a time escorted children to school. One grainy (and not very convincing) picture purports to show the Hibagon, but other than that, there’s no other evidence for this creature.

12. OHIO GRASSMAN

Besides Bigfoot, there are several other monsters said to terrorize North America. There’s Momo in Missouri, the Tuttle Bottoms Monster in Illinois, and of course the Ohio Grassman. According to one Bigfoot enthusiast website, the Grassman looks like an upright chesty gorilla who hangs out in cornfields and is known to kill dogs.

13. SKUNK APE

Roaming the wilds of the Florida Everglades is a man-beast covered in fur that is variously known as the Skunk Ape, Swamp Cabbage Man, or Stink Ape. It’s said to have the odor of rotten eggs—maybe because, as some claim, the Skunk Ape lives in muddy caves. The creature is occasionally drawn to campsites and cabins in search of food, but, according to other reports, the Skunk Ape might be a picky eater. Some say it’s been known to kill deer, tear open the carcass and only eat the liver.

14. MAPINGUARY

In the Brazilian Amazon, people claim to have had encounters with the sluggish and clawed Mapinguary, a name sometimes translated as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.” The legends about this creature could possibly be based on ancient memories of the elephant-sized giant ground sloth, Megatherium. This real-life sloth went extinct in South America a few thousand years ago, but fossil evidence shows that humans once hunted them.

15. MARICOXI

Another apeman said to be hiding out in the rainforests of Brazil is the Maricoxi. A decade before he disappeared while looking for an ancient lost city in the Amazon, explorer Percy Fawcett claimed he saw several Maricoxi in Brazil in 1914. Fawcett described them as “enormous” grunting creatures which were hairy like dogs. In one encounter, he said that he used his gun to scare off one of these bow-and-arrow–armed apemen.

Biological fieldwork can be grueling—and often dangerous. Countless researchers and support staff have died in the pursuit of knowledge that could protect vulnerable places and species, and enable people to live safer, healthier lives.

Journalist Richard Conniff, author of The Species Seekers, has compiled a “Wall of the Dead” on his blog to memorialize scientists, naturalists, and conservationists killed in the field. We’ve picked out just a handful of the dozens of names from that list. They are people whose passion and dedication to their profession ultimately cost them their lives. In some cases, they anticipated the risks. In others, they most definitely did not. Visit Conniff’s full list for a fascinating, and often somber, dive into the lives of these explorer-naturalists.

1. MARGARITA METALLINOU // ZAMBIA, 2015

Margarita Metallinou, a 29-year-old evolutionary biologist and herpetologist, had been working in Zambia’s Kafue National Park, studying the impacts of climate change on the area’s reptiles. While in the field with two colleagues one afternoon, she suddenly spotted an elephant charging toward them. Her scream warned the others, who were able to outrun the elephant. But Metallinou was trampled to death.

2. DIAN FOSSEY // RWANDA, 1985

Who killed Dian Fossey? The 53-year-old American primatologist studied and protected mountain gorillas on the Rwandan side of the border with a passionate love and ferocity that no one disputes earned her many enemies. Yet her 1985 murder in the Virunga Mountains remains unsolved more than 30 years later.

Fossey was known for confronting poachers, even going so far as to kidnap the child of a tribesman who had snatched a baby gorilla (both the child and gorilla were returned unharmed). One of Fossey’s student researchers and a former employee were ultimately charged with her murder. The student fled back to the United States; convicted in absentia by a Rwandan court after only a 40-minute trial, he has long insisted that he was a scapegoat. The tracker was later found hanged in his jail cell. But other theories emerged in the years following her death that cast suspicion on political elites involved in animal trafficking and those threatened by her opposition to ecotourism, which she feared would be detrimental to the endangered gorillas.

Fossey is often credited with bringing the plight of the mountain gorillas to the public. Through her research and engagement with media, she generated sympathy for gorillas and showed people that they were not the savage, violent beasts they’d been portrayed as, but curious, human-like creatures. Fossey’s legacy continues in the nonprofit conservation organization she founded, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. Three years after her murder, Fossey’s story was brought to the big screen in the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver.

3. JOHN CASSIN // UNITED STATES, 1869

A leading 19th-century ornithologist, John Cassin described nearly 200 bird species, several of which bear his name. He authored several volumes on birds identified in his travels, from North America to Chile to Japan. Cassin was a methodical taxonomist, working tirelessly as curator of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He died at 55—not due to some misadventure in the field, but from arsenic poisoning, the result of decades of handling bird skins preserved with the chemical.

4. SAFARI KAKULE // DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, 2009

In some places, conservation work is inherently dangerous. That’s certainly the case for the Congolese park rangers who protect endangered gorillas in Virunga National Park as violence flares endlessly around them. Since the 1994 Rwandan genocide prompted more than a million refugees to flee across the border and plunged the Congo into conflict, the park has been caught between armed groups seeking control of territory and generating revenue from deforestation, illegal crops, and poaching.

The rangers here do what’s been described as the most dangerous conservation job in the world: At least 140 have been killed in the past two decades, while hundreds more park staff and their families have been displaced. One of those killed was Safari Kakule, a young ranger who colleagues say showed the characteristic dedication of Virunga rangers determined to defend imperiled gorillas and other vulnerable wildlife despite low wages and constant danger.

In 2009, rebels attacked a ranger station in a section of the park that served as a refuge for 18 endangered eastern lowland gorillas. They killed the 33-year-old Kakule, shown here observing a male gorilla in the field the year before his death.

5. JEAN BAPTISTE AUGUSTE ETIENNE CHARCOT // ICELAND, 1936

Jean Baptiste Charcot left his career as a physician to become an oceanographer and polar explorer; this transition was made easier by the inheritance he had received from his father. At a time when interest in the polar regions was increasing, Charcot made several expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. He charted South Pole islands and led a series of summer expeditions to the Arctic. In September 1936, at age 69, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Iceland during a storm. Only one man survived; Charcot perished along with more than 30 others.

6. JOY ADAMSON // KENYA, 1980

Millions of fans know conservationist Joy Adamson from her 1960 bestselling memoir Born Free and its subsequent film adaptation. The book and film chronicle how Adamson and her game-warden husband, George, raised an orphaned lion cub at a Kenyan national park and eventually reintroduced it to the wild to save it from being removed to a zoo. The book and film helped shift public opinion about lions from dangerous predator to noble, imperiled creatures. It also stirred some controversy about the ethics of returning a semi-tamed animal to the wild.

Joy Adamson’s life ended violently at 69: she was found murdered at her camp in Lake Naivasha, not far from Nairobi in the Great Rift Valley. A former employee, a teenager named Paul Nakware Ekai, confessed and was convicted of the crime. Almost a quarter of a century later, Ekai claimed he had acted in self-defense after Adamson shot him in the leg. He claimed he had been tortured into confessing. But the following year, Ekai changed his story again, denying any involvement in the murder.

Nine years later, her husband and his two Kenyan assistants were shot and killed by poachers who ambushed their Land Rover.

7. GREGORY FELZIEN // UNITED STATES, 1992

For most of the 20th century, federal predator control programs all but eliminated mountain lions [PDF] from Yellowstone National Park. But by the 1990s, a small mountain lion population had reestablished itself in the park. Gregory Felzien, a 26-year-old biologist, was part of a University of Idaho team studying the lions. He was killed in February 1992—not by a lion, but in an avalanche.

Felzien had snowshoed to the base of Mount Norris in pursuit of a radio-collared mountain lion he was studying. According to the book Death in Yellowstone, Felzien paused in a steep drainage when the avalanche, 100 yards long, 10 yards wide and five feet deep, buried most of his body. He died before rescuers reached him.

8. PLINY THE ELDER // PRESENT-DAY ITALY, 79 CE

Roman military commander and naturalist Pliny the Elder produced several major writings, the most famous of which is the 37-volume Natural History. This expansive set of texts includes vast explorations of astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, geology, and medicine. The encyclopedic collection was a mixture of fact, observation, and superstition, but for centuries it was considered the authoritative text on the sciences (until the scientific method called into question its more speculative conclusions).

Pliny was commanding a fleet in the Bay of Naples in 79 CE when word arrived of a strange cloud emanating from Mount Vesuvius a short distance away. It turned out to be the massive volcanic eruption that destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny took to the shore to investigate and rescue a friend. He was killed by the powerful volcanic gases (or possibly a heart attack). He was 56.

9. NOEL KEMPFF MERCADO // BOLIVIA, 1986

On the fateful September day in 1986 when Noel Kempff Mercado landed in the Amazon Basin near the Bolivian border with Brazil, he and his colleagues thought they’d arrived at an abandoned air strip. The 62-year-old Mercado was a prominent Bolivian biologist and conservationist. He had traveled to the remote province to explore the newly-designated Huanchaca National Park, a vibrant wilderness area that contained an abundance of biodiverse habitats largely unknown to the outside world. Kempff Mercado had long advocated for its protection.

But the abandoned airstrip turned out to be a cocaine factory, and its guards killed Kempff Mercado along with a colleague and the pilot of their plane. The incident followed on the heels of scaled-up operations against cocaine labs by Bolivian authorities and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials, and there was speculation that the guards had mistaken the men for law enforcement. The murders led to a public outcry, and two years later the park was renamed the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in honor of its fallen champion. In 2000, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

10. RALPH HOFFMAN // UNITED STATES, 1932

Born and raised in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Ralph Hoffman moved to California and directed the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History from 1925 to 1932. He was an ornithologist and avid plant collector who made dozens of collecting trips to the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, sometimes dubbed the “North American Galapagos” for their incredible plant diversity and endemism.

Hoffmann made many important contributions to the understanding of the islands’ unique ecosystems, and probably would have made many more. But on a summer day in 1932 while collecting on the remote, windswept island of San Miguel, Hoffmann fell to his death from a cliff.

11. DAVID DOUGLAS // HAWAII, 1834

The Douglas fir is one of about 80 flora and fauna named for David Douglas, the son of a Scottish stonemason who transcended his humble origins to become a highly regarded and prolific botanist. He left school at 11 to begin working as a gardener on a series of large estates. At the age of 20, Douglas was appointed to the botanic garden at Glasgow University, where he befriended leading British botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker. He became Hooker’s assistant, and Hooker later got him a job as a botanical collector for the Royal Horticultural Society.

Douglas made three collecting trips to the Pacific Northwest and California. In 1833 he sailed to Hawaii, enthusiastic to continue documenting the endemic plants of the islands he had first encountered three years before. It was to be his last expedition. While walking one morning en route to Hilo, Douglas apparently fell into a deep pit covered over with dirt and brush, commonly used at the time to trap wild cows. It appeared that the 35-year-old Douglas, who had poor eyesight, went crashing through, where he was crushed and mauled to death by a bull who had also fallen into the pit.

Some have speculated that Douglas was actually murdered. Suspicions fell on the shady former convict with whom Douglas had met earlier that day, but the charge remains unproven. Douglas was buried in Honolulu, and the place where he died is now called Kaluakauka, translated as the “doctor’s pit.” There is a memorial to Douglas on the island of Hawaii and in the churchyard of the Scottish village of Scone, where he was born.

12. ABEL FORNES // ARGENTINA, 1974

Fornes was part of a scientific team trying to prevent the spread of bovine rabies by controlling populations of disease-carrying vampire bats. As Fornes was collecting bat specimens roosting in a water well he had treated with cyanide gas, his gas mask leaked and he fell to his death.

13. ULDIS KNAKIS // USSR (PRESENT-DAY REPUBLIC OF KALMYKIA, RUSSIA), 1970

For thousands of years, the saiga antelope have roamed across the harsh terrain of the Eurasian Steppe, migrating by the tens of thousands between summer and winter pastures. Today they are critically endangered, largely due to oil and gas exploration, road construction, the encroachment of domesticated livestock and illegal poaching for their meat and horns, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Uldis Knakis was a young Latvian biologist who devoted his life to studying and protecting the saiga. The week before he turned 31, Knakis was shot and killed by poachers unhappy with his efforts to crack down on illegal saiga hunting. The murderers were never identified.

14. FERDINAND STOLICZKA // INDIA, 1874

Ferdinand Stoliczka, a Czech paleontologist, geologist, and naturalist, participated in several expeditions to the Himalayas. During a time of heightened tension between the Russian and British Empires, Stoliczka was selected to participate in an enormous diplomatic expedition to Central Asia’s Chinese Turkestan (today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) that required thousands of horses and porters. He did not survive this final trip.

The expeditionary team succeeded in reaching their destination in Turkestan, but on the way back, the 36-year-old Stoliczka began to feel ill. He had extreme breathing difficulties and terrible headaches that intensified as they reached the barren Karakoram Pass, which straddles India and China at an altitude of 18,000 feet. According to accounts from others in his party, Stoliczka had frequently suffered from severe headaches during their mountain journeys. But this time, acute altitude sickness overwhelmed him. He died on the pass and was buried in Tibet.

15. KEITH CLIFFORD BUDDEN // AUSTRALIA, 1950

Only 20 years old, amateur herpetologist Keith Clifford Budden was in a remote part of Queensland searching for an extremely venomous snake, the coastal taipan. The snake is often described as the most dangerous snake in Australia, and although it prefers to slither away, when it feels threatened, it is prone to attack with a series of snapping bites.

Budden successfully caught the snake with his bare hands. But as he maneuvered it into a bag, the snake struck his hand. The following day he died from the powerful venom, which attacks the nervous system and interferes with blood’s ability to clot. Budden’s death was not completely in vain, however: researchers were able to “milk”—extract venom—from the live snake, a first step in creating the anti-venom necessary to treat victims of the coastal taipan.

Have you heard about the supermoon tonight? Have you heard that it’s going to be big? Huge! Terrifying! The last time a full moon appeared this large, they say, the astronaut corps consisted of a single monkey named Albert, who would soon be shot into space on a V2 rocket. (Things did not end well for Albert, nor for his successor, Albert II.) It hasn’t seemed this big since 1948! What celestial chaos can we expect?

Take a deep breath. Technically, the supermoon’s peak will occur tomorrow morning, November 14, at 8:52 a.m. EST. But we think you should go out tonight (and maybe tomorrow night too). It’s going to be a pretty big full moon, and yes, it will likely be the biggest you’ve ever seen (and will not see again until November 25, 2034), but “biggest” is a relative term. If you didn’t already know that this supermoon would be juicing, you probably wouldn’t have really noticed. So what’s going on up there?

OUR MOON IS WEIRD

Relative to the Earth, the Moon is really big. Only gas giants Saturn and Jupiter possess larger moons, though it seems more through attrition than anything else. They’re working with overwhelmingly superior planetary sizes and moon totals, in comparison to our pale blue dot. Jupiter’s diameter is 11 times that of the Earth; Saturn’s diameter, 9.5 times. The two colossal planets have in their orbits a total of 129 known moons—and yet all but four of them are smaller than the lone Moon of our little world (our newly discovered mini-moon–like asteroid excluded).

If our moon is unique, its orbit is even wackier. Some might call it downright weird. The Moon’s orbit is really far from Earth, and the tilt of its orbit is large to the point of being inexplicable. Scientists are pretty certain that a massive collision between the Earth and another planet sent debris into space that would eventually coalesce to form the Moon. Existing models for this, however, have never adequately been able to account for the moon’s large tilt.

One recent hypothesis for the Moon’s odd behavior states that the “Big Whack” changed our axial tilt by as much as 80 degrees and sent us spinning incredibly fast. That initial high tilt―the Earth might once have spun on its side―would explain how we managed eventually to slow back down. According to the same model, the Moon’s orbit of the Earth on the outset was 15 times closer than it is today, and that as it migrated away from the Earth, the Sun began to exert influence on its orbit. The whack, the tilt, the speed, the Sun―taken together, they offer a compelling explanation for the Moon’s odd orbital tilt today.

ENJOY TONIGHT’S MOON FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Because the Moon’s orbit is elliptical, when it is closest to the Earth in a revolution―a.k.a. at perigee―it appears larger; when it is at apogee, or farthest away, it appears smaller. Perigee and apogee are not identical from orbit to orbit. The Earth and the Moon both fall under the gravitational influence of the Sun.

When perigee coincides with a full moon, you get what is colloquially called a “supermoon.” (Not an astronomy term.) The full moon in November is called the Beaver Moon. (Also not an astronomy term.) Long ago, this was considered the time to set your beaver traps so that you would have enough pelts to make winterwear. Because tonight’s perigee brings the surfaces of the Earth and the moon a scant 216,486 miles apart, the supermoon will appear up to 14 percent bigger. But unless you’re a devoted Moon watcher, you might have a hard time spotting that. The moon will also be 30 percent brighter, NASA says, because of the Earth’s proximity in its orbit from the Sun. In all, it’s going to be a gorgeous super beaver moon, but it won’t change your life. Set your expectations accordingly.

So hope for clear skies, go outside―maybe even dust off the telescope, uncork a bottle of wine, and make an evening of it―and enjoy the Moon for the same reason you enjoy the constellations, meteor showers, the movement of the planets, and the appearance of the International Space Station. (If it’s cloudy, check out the livestream from Slooh.) Because space isn’t somewhere out there. Earth is as much “in space” as any other object in the universe. We are part of space. And to peer into the night sky is to look simultaneously at the distant past of the universe, and the near future of humankind.

 
As the largest gulf in the world, the Gulf of Mexico has long played a significant role in the economy and ecology of the United States—and beyond. Here are a few things about this impressive body of water you might not have known.

1. IF STRETCHED ACROSS LAND, THE GULF OF MEXICO WOULD SPREAD FROM LOS ANGELES TO NEW YORK.

From the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to the island of Cuba, the Gulf’s shoreline extends for 3500 miles. According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, the Gulf holds 643 quadrillion gallons of water and reaches a depth of more than 12,000 feet. It contains half of the nation’s coastal wetlands, 90 percent of its seagrass, and all its mangrove habitat.

2. ITS WATERS ARE TEEMING …

This sea boasts incredible biodiversity—scientists have inventoried 15,419 species in the Gulf ecosystem, ranking it in the top five ocean areas globally. Residents include hundreds of species of fish, hundreds more of crustaceans, four species of whales, 28 species of dolphins, five species of sea turtles, and many sharks, including hammerhead, tiger, thrasher, and great white. The Gulf contains one of only two breeding grounds for Atlantic bluefin tuna. It also hosts two large tarpon populations: one that spawns off Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and follows the Texas coast to northern waters and another that spawns offshore near Florida.

3. … BUT LESS SO EVERY DAY.

This rich ecosystem is in trouble; 52 of its species appear on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. These include Bluefin tuna; whooping cranes; Kemp’s ridley, loggerhead, and green sea turtles; grouper species; blenny species; corals; blue, finback, and sperm whales; and sixteen species of sharks. Because of overfishing and destructive fishing practices, as well as declining water quality—including oil spills, pollution, and debris from coastal development—as well as invasive species and climate change, many species are on the decline.

4. A LOT OF RIVERS RUN INTO IT.

Forty percent of the continental U.S.—the entire landmass between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, covering 31 states—drains into these waters. Thirty-three major rivers drain into the Gulf, the largest of which is the Mississippi. That means the Gulf has to handle the agricultural runoff from the Mississippi basin. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers and oxidized nitrogen from fossil fuel combustion flow from the Mississippi into the waters of the Gulf. These unnaturally high levels of nutrients significantly increase growth of phytoplankton and algae. As these plants die and bacteria feed on them, it uses up oxygen in the water. This process has created an ever-growing hypoxic area, a region where the concentration of dissolved oxygen in the water falls so low that plants and animals die. This “dead zone” grows every summer, and it’s the largest human-caused dead zone in the world. In 2106, it is expected to grow larger than the state of Connecticut.  

5. BUT FOR NOW, EAT UP!

While many fish species are in decline, seafood is still big business here. In 2014, commercial fishers landed 546,478 metric tons of seafood in the Gulf of Mexico, representing a dockside value of more than $989 million. Shrimp accounted for more than half of that. Commercial fishing in the Gulf accounts for a lot of jobs: 26,000 in 2012, with another 6,720 in seafood processing, 11,459 in seafood wholesale businesses, and 59,098 in seafood retail. That’s not to mention casual fishing: Recreational anglers spend around $1.5 billion a year on fishing trips in the Gulf, and about twice that on related equipment like tackle and boat expenses.

6. IT’S NOT JUST PARADISE FOR SEAFOOD CONNOISSEURS.

The Gulf is just as popular with corals. Caribbean-style coral reefs grow on top of salt domes rising from the floor of the Gulf near the edge of the continental shelf, the northernmost reefs in the U.S. and some of the healthiest in the world. The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 100 miles off the Texas and Louisiana coasts, protects three of the Gulf’s almost 20 reef areas. Sanctuary scientists monitor these three areas annually as part of a long-term program that began in 1988, making it one of the longest such coral reef research programs anywhere in the world.

7. LARGER CRITTERS LIKE IT TOO.

Whale sharks gather in groups as big as 100 to feed near the mouth of the Mississippi River during the summers. The world’s largest fish, growing up to 50 feet long, whale sharks eat primarily plankton. While they mostly feed at the surface, they can dive 4,500 feet deep. Sharks tagged by Belize-based shark researcher Rachel Graham proved that individual animals travel between Belize, the Yucatan and the northern Gulf of Mexico, an impressive distance. Unfortunately, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List ranks this species as endangered. They are targeted for their meat and fins, killed when caught in nets set for other species (especially tuna), and injured or killed by ships.

8. YOU COULD CALL IT AN AQUATIC HIGHWAY.

The Nature Conservancy recently analyzed data on 26 species from more than 100 scientists for a report identifying four major migratory pathways—dubbed “blueways”—criss-crossing the Gulf. These routes are used by fish, mammals, sea turtles, and birds, with migrations occurring year-round. But the organization notes that less than one percent of these aquatic corridors, and less than 20 percent of area used as stopovers by migratory birds, are currently protected or managed areas, and few multinational agreements provide protection to migrating species.

9. THE GULF DOESN’T ALWAYS STAY IN THE SEA.

One of the reasons it’s such a popular spot for animals and birds is Sargassum, a gold-colored, floating algae that provides resting, feeding, and breeding areas for many species. The gulf annually produces about a million pounds of the seaweed. It rides on currents from the Gulf to collect in the Sargasso Sea, a 1.5-million-square-mile area in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. It also circulates onto Gulf beaches, sometimes piling up in significant, stinky quantities. Many communities that depend on tourism clear it from the beach as fast as they can, but scientists discourage this, as Sargassum likely contributes to beach and dune stability (providing increased protection from storms), and provides food for a variety of creatures. Galveston, Texas, recently put up educational signs and handed out fliers asking visitors to be tolerant and recognize the seaweed’s importance. The Galveston Park Board even organized a Bucket Brigade, training volunteers to introduce beach-goers to the interesting creatures living in the seaweed.

10. GULF ENERGY POWERS MUCH OF THE U.S.

Oil production from the Gulf in 2011 accounted for 54 percent of U.S. total, and natural gas production from the region accounted for 47 percent. The area also contains almost half the country’s refining capacity. There have been thousands of wells drilled in the Gulf, the first in 1938 in 14 feet of water about a mile from the Louisiana coast. The first offshore well out of sight of land was drilled 10 miles off the coast in 1947. Today, offshore rigs drill in waters deeper than 10,000 feet.

11. WE’RE STILL FIGURING OUT THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF REPEATED OIL SPILLS.

 
This oil and gas development can come with a price. The three-month-long Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 poured an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil (nearly 206 million gallons) and an equivalent volume of gas into the Gulf, with about 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants added by BP. It represents the second major spill in the Gulf; the first was Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 well in the Bay of Campeche, which blew in June, 1979, spewing 140 million gallons of oil until it was stopped almost a year later. These two Gulf spills are the largest accidental marine oil spills in history, and both occurred due to platform blowout, John W. Tunnell Jr., endowed chair for biodiversity and conservation science at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, tells mental_floss. Tunnell was one of the few scientists who studied the ecological impact of Ixtoc when it happened. Funding for research on its effects quickly dried up, though, which Tunnell calls a missed opportunity—one that became clear after Deepwater Horizon. In 2015, Tunnell received funding for a three-year project to document residual impacts from Ixtoc as part of efforts to predict the long-term impacts of Deepwater Horizon. It’s still ongoing.

 
When you look up at the night sky tonight, November 4, do not panic. You are not seeing a celestial harbinger of the election on Tuesday. (Probably.) Rather, you are witnessing the sustained bombardment of the planet Earth by the remnants of the comet Encke. The remnants vary in size from dust particles to pebbles, but at 65,000 miles per hour, they create a beautiful glow.

Around midnight, the Southern Taurid meteor shower will peak, and sky watchers can expect to see a few meteors per hour. Quantity isn’t what the Taurids are known for, however. What you’re looking for tonight is quality. The Taurids are all about their breathtaking fireballs: bright, powerful shooting stars slicing across the night sky.

It’s not guaranteed to happen―you need the cooperation of the sky, the ground, and cometary debris. The sky needs to be free of clouds. The ground needs to be free of light (as always, get out of the city). The debris field was created over a span of tens of thousands of years, so those cards are already shuffled, and what happens, happens.

Also―and I don’t want to worry you too much―there might be an explosion with the force of an atomic bomb that is capable of leveling hundreds of square miles of forest. Definitely be on the lookout for that: if you survive, your pictures will be the toast of Instagram.

THE POSSIBLE TAURID-TUNGUSKA CONNECTION

OK, that’s hyperbole. You’ll never be able to purloin Taylor Swift’s adoring Instagram acolytes. And no, there will almost certainly be no catastrophic explosion. But a little more than a century ago, there was, and it might be related to the source comet of the Taurids.

In 1908, a mysterious blast hit an area in Russia near a stretch of the Stony Tunguska River. Its exact cause is still unknown. It might have been an asteroid. It might have been a small black hole that collided with the Earth. (Really!) It might have been a natural gas explosion. Or it might have been a very large fireball that disintegrated in the air, releasing a tremendous amount of thermal energy. One possible culprit for the fireball is the comet Encke. The explosion even corresponds with the Beta Taurid meteor shower in the summer, whose debris was produced by the same comet as the Taurids tonight.

The good news is that if the skies do unleash an apocalyptic fusillade this evening, it won’t even be the worst thing to happen in 2016.

THE TAURIDS COMPLEX

The Taurids consist of two streams: the Southern Taurids―which are reaching a crescendo this weekend―and the Northern Taurids, which peak on November 11. Collectively, they are called the Taurids Complex. And though they’re not dense with activity like the Geminid meteor shower will be next month, assuming you’ve escaped light pollution on the ground, the light from the sky above is doing its part to help. The Moon is waxing crescent and just a shade over a sliver, meaning its light won’t interfere. 

An hour or so before midnight, find your way to a clownless field somewhere, lay out a blanket, and let your eyes adjust. (Keep your phone off.) The big show starts around midnight and ends at dawn. If you can’t get out to see them, don’t worry―the Taurids will be around for a bit longer, and when one of their bright meteors decides to make an appearance, you’ll definitely notice.

 
Archaeologists have discovered a cozy but artifact-rich rock shelter in Australia’s arid interior where people ate rhino-sized marsupials and emu eggs around campfires up to 49,000 years ago—about 10,000 years earlier than previously reported. The cave might be the oldest archaeological site in the southern interior, and its treasure trove of data, covering tens of thousands of years of periodic occupation, could help prove that early human settlers spread quite quickly through the continent. The researchers published their findings [PDF] today in the journal Nature.

Giles Hamm, an archaeologist at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, discovered the so-called Warratyi Rock Shelter on a craggy slope in the Flinders Ranges—about 340 miles north of Adelaide—as part of his doctoral research about six years ago. He had been looking at prehistoric rock art along a nearby gorge when he found the cave and noticed its blackened roof—a sign of past campfires. A test pit proved that the soil was full of artifacts and animal bones as deep as 1 meter below the cave’s current floor. “We realized we hit pay dirt,” Hamm tells mental_floss.

 
The cave was probably only big enough to house a small family, Hamm says, but humans kept coming back to the site for tens of thousands of years, likely because it was near resource-rich springs with water, vegetation, and animals like wallabies and lizards for hunting.

Within the cave’s layers of dirt, Hamm and his colleagues found red ochre and white gypsum powder that might have been used as pigments for body painting. They found a 40,000-year-old needle that could be Australia’s oldest bone tool (see below). They also found innovative stone tools like spears and blades that are 10,000 years older than similar tools found elsewhere in Australia.

 
The oldest deposits in the cave date back to 49,000 years ago, not too long after the first humans are thought to have arrived in northern Australia. That means people migrated to the southern part of the continent over a relatively short time span. Hamm thinks these prehistoric pioneers might have even traveled by a north-south route through Australia’s harsh interior desert landscape, rather than by a strictly coastal route.

After Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, they ventured out into the rest of the world. But because of gaps in the genetic and archaeological record, there’s lively debate about how and when these early migrations occurred. Today the prevailing theory among scientists is that humans arrived in Southeast Asia around 70,000 years ago, and then island-hopped to Australia at least 50,000 years ago, founding the modern-day Aboriginal population.

“We’ll probably never know the the date for the first people to step on the continent,” Gifford Miller, a geologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder who was not involved in the Nature research, tells mental_floss. “But the new study supports lots of recent work showing that humans were pretty much established throughout the continent earlier than most people thought.”

Archaeologist Mike Smith, who was also not involved in the new research, concluded in his 2013 book The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts that the interior of the continent was probably settled by at least 45,000 years ago. But he tells mental_floss that researchers had been missing significant parts of the archaeological record older than 35,000 years.

There have been some scattered finds that suggested humans spread throughout Australia traveling across some dry desert landscapes quite soon after they arrived on the continent. Radiocarbon dates from Devil’s Lair—a cave near the southwestern tip of Australia that was excavated in the 1970s—showed that humans had occupied the site at least 48,000 years ago. And according to another study published by Miller and his colleagues in Nature Communications earlier this year, there are more than 200 sites across Australia (including some in the interior) with evidence that humans had been cooking eggs of the flightless, human-sized bird Genyornis newtoni, a species that went extinct about 47,000 years ago.

Smith says the Warratyi Rock Shelter helps fill a gap in Australian pre-history with solid evidence.

The animal bones left in the cave also offer new information about how early settlers adapted to and took advantage of their environment. The shelter is the first known site to have human artifacts alongside the bones of the extinct species Diprotodon optatum, a giant marsupial that looked almost like a hippo covered in wombat fur. (See top image.) This could be the first real evidence that humans hunted these lumbering marsupials, and it could help settle the debate about whether human predation pushed the species to extinction.