The death toll for Category 4 Hurricane Helene is now up to 64 .  Surprisingly enough, South Carolina is up to 23, with Florida at 11, with 10 of them from the Tampa Bay area.  Perry and Tallahassee had none.  Note that the dangerous quadrant is to the northeast ( 0 to 90 degrees ).  These numbers are expected to further rise.  There is particular worry about North Carolina.   4.8 million lost power.   Notice how the eye of Helene has circled back to Tennessee. I read an article by John Crisp on  Live on Mars? How about life on Earth? What should be the priority of NASA?  Send people to the Moon and Mars?  Or minimize mammoth expenses by focusing on telescopic explorations to find life in our solar system and beyond? I once worked on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the NASA Ames Research Center, and eight years ago Harry Jones, who works there, speculated that the  cost of the first human mission to Mars wo...

A week ago I posted on  Death by a Gamma Ray Burst?   This week, I focus on another space invader, a large asteroid.  PBS has had several documentaries on this topic:   The Asteroid and the Dinosaur  and   Dinosaur Apocalypse . The scientific term for the above is  Impact Event .  The biggest Earth event might have been the  Big Splash , or the Theia Impact: This when our Moon was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Theia, the mythical Greek Titan, was the colliding body, mother of Selene, the goddess of the Moon. The isotope ratios of lunar and terrestrial rock are identical. There are many theories, but one is that the Moon was formed by the tangential impact upon Earth of a body the size of Mars. Much of this giant-impact consensus emerged from a 1969 conference held at Kona, Hawaii.  Those who don't believe are called the agnostics. But our solar system is today quite different, and planet-sized impact neighbors are...

Before I go into my Wednesday science topic, one note about COVID-19.  Of course, with so many tests now taken at home and not reported, surely the 100,000 or so new cases/day in the U.S. must be higher.   Here is one estimate by the University Columbia's Jeffrey Shaman : Shaman's research group turned to using models to estimate the "ascertainment rate" — the portion of real infections that were being captured in official case counts. That rate has fluctuated — at the end of 2020, they estimated one in four cases were being counted. During the omicron surge it was closer to one in six.   Now with the widespread availability of at-home rapid tests that aren't reported to health departments, Shaman thinks the true number of cases may be in the ballpark of eight times higher than case counts. In other words, instead of 100,000 new cases a day, the true number may be 800,000 cases per day. As terrible as that may sound, I think there is a silver lining.   So m...

                                         From  Worldometer  (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82 July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572 Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130 Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82 Oct...