A Brief History On September 9, 1972, an exploration team mapping the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky discovered that the Mammoth Cave system was linked to the Flint Ridge cave network, making it the longest cave passageway in the world. Digging Deeper Upon the discovery by the Cave Research Foundation team, the entire cave system is now known as the Mammoth–Flint Ridge Cave System. In fact, the Flint Ridge portion is even longer than the part previously just called Mammoth Cave. A 52,830-acre National Park since 1941, the caves boast over 426 miles of surveyed passages, one and a half…
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A Brief History On September 8, 2016, NASA launched its OSIRIS-Rex mission to near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu with the goal of returning to Earth with a sample of the asteroid. The sample size is to be at least 2.1 ounces. Digging Deeper The sample is to be returned to the Earth about September 24, 2023. The rendezvous with the asteroid took place in 2018 and the sample was not collected until October of 2020 when the spacecraft made a landing on the space rock. Despite mechanical difficulty, a sample between 400 and 1,000 grams was collected. NASA hopes to find…
A Brief History On September 7, 1936, Benjamin died. Ben was the last Thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, a carnivorous marsupial of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. The introduction of Dingoes and climate change cut into their population, and hunting pressure did the rest. Digging Deeper Now that we have no living Thylacines, should scientists use cloning to resurrect the species? Are there any moral or practical reasons not to? What about other extinct species? Some of the critters we would like to see brought back through cloning include the Wooly Mammoth and the Wooly…
A Brief History On September 6, 2013, ivory poachers in Africa poisoned and killed 41 elephants at the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The WWF reports about 20,000 elephants are killed illegally each year in Africa by poachers, out of a world wide total of only 415,000 African elephants. Incredibly, in 1930 there were about 10 million wild elephants in Africa! Digging Deeper Despite strict anti-poaching laws, poaching takes a terrible toll on many types of animals. There may be about 30,000 Rhinos left in Africa, of which only 6000 are Black Rhinos, which numbered over 100,000 as recently as…
A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania. The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations. Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host. Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …
