Category: Geeking Science

Geeking Science: Climate Change Second Layer Worldbuilding

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I love me some good worldbuilding. When a writer adds magic to the world, what are the other impacts socially, technology, and emotionally? If the magic is defined that everybody can use it or only a few? If only a few can use it, do they become elite or enslaved? What does isolating specialists do to everyone else? You cannot tweak one thing and not have everything else change around it.

Witness: the cell phone. Telling children about being stuck on the side of the road waiting for someone to drive by and help…”Why didn’t you just call?” “Yeah, that area has really good reception.” Or talking about arguments about what the lyrics of a song were. “Why didn’t you look it up?” Or getting lost? “You didn’t just Quest it?” Their world is infinitely different than the previous generation. Every change changes everything.

It makes some good worldbuilding with the unintended consequences. Encyclopedias have disappeared out of houses, maps out of cars, and worry about what happened to someone showing up late diminished.

Onto climate change. The world is getting warmer, with the added impact of climate becoming less stable. Currents, air and water, are changing paths. Predictable rainfalls and snowfalls are modified. The EXTREMES of temperature mean colder winters and warmer summers, impacting the survival of wild and agriculture plants and animals. These are expected. But what other unexpected consequences are happening? Today for Geeking Science, I will cover three: opportunities for navigation clearing, bee populations, and fires interfering with deep-space astronomy.

Navigation Clearing: In 1944, the Germans scuttled boats during their retreat from Russia. Partially to deny them the resources, and partially to prevent them from traveling down the river. Over two hundred wrecks along the Danube River have impacted shipping ever since. The wrecks had been sunk to prevent boat traffic; they continue to do the job to present day. Removing them is a nightmare as unexploded munitions and other surprises are hidden in the river muck. Thanks to climate change bringing droughts, these wrecks are now visible above the water line and inspection is much easier. (Andrew)

Bee Populations: Flowering food requires bees; bees require flowering food. But if climate change disrupts when flowers bloom, putting them out of synch for when the bees come out, then the bees starve and the flowers cannot seed. Heat is sending bees further north, but bees navigate by sun position and if the sun rays are at the wrong angle, they cannot tell their hive where to find food. In addition, “moving north” means the bees are stepping into another animal’s territory which could fight back while at the same time leaving all the familiar plant further south without their primary pollinator. (Biology Insights, Zanco)

Deep Space Astronomy: How on EARTH could climate change impact deep-space astronomy? Well, the wildfires in Spain created evacuation orders for both the ESA Cebreros antenna and NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex. The NASA complex is only one of three sites worldwide to keep continuous contact with missions operating beyond Earth’s orbit. The other two are in California and Australia. With Spain unmanned, a third of the communication was done. Backup sites are needed, but the backup will cost just as much as the original. The world is on fire and so is humanities ability to study the causes. (Cosmosrocket)

Bibliography

Biology Insights. “How Climate Change Affects Bees and Why it Matter.” 2025 July 29. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://biologyinsights.com/how-climate-change-affects-bees-and-why-it-matters/

Cosmosrocket. “Wildfires in Spain Threaten Two Critical Deep-Space Ground Stations.” 2026 July 27. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.cosmosrocket.com/en/journal/wildfires-in-spain-threaten-two-critical-deep-space-ground-stations-40mk-en

Paul, Andrew. “German WWII shipwrecks resurface in Danube River.” Popular Science. 2026 August 3. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.popsci.com/technology/german-ww2-shipwrecks-danube/

Zanco, Brooke. (Ebba Widman, Tahila L. Fulton, Sarah E. Diamond, Carmen RB da Silva, Fleur Ponton). “Bee vulnerability to climate change in a shifting nutritional landscape: why sociality and life-history strategy matters.” Current Opinion in Insect Science Volume 77, October 2026. Appearing on Science Direct. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214574526000726

Cool Blogs: Bias Effect

Erin Penn 1 Comment

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

Another A-to-Z discovery. Some people just have amazing themes. Prakash Hegade is an Assistant Professor at KLE Technological University and for the A-to-Z challenge he choose the theme of “Architecture of Mind”, exploring hidden biases. An amazing series, with each day explaining in wonderful bite-size pieces how the mind biases work. Read them all at your convenience.

Let’s start with on of the easy ones “Framing Effect” – how presenting information can change how it is received and reacted to.

On that I complain about is how house pricing is advertised, “available in the low 600’s”. Soooo, over half a million, close to two-thirds of a million.

And then the numbers we have all been trained for “$3.99” … it is under four dollars.

These articles are top level, but they give you a place to dig deeper.

Framing effect – https://itsphblog.wordpress.com/2026/04/07/framing-effect/

And if you like that, crawl through the rest of his April blog and go from there.

Geeking Science: Chronobiology and the Circadian Clock

Erin Penn Leave a comment

I’ve previously touched base on Circadian Rhythm in Geeking Science: Internal Clocks (Oct 18, 2018). The rhythm of our planet, the heartbeat of our existence, driven by the turn of the planet and how and when sunlight hits us. Will we be able to function on any other planet? And if so, how?

In answer to that, scientists have been looking to the sea, deep into the sea where the sun doesn’t shine. How do creatures without light keep track of time? Can we learn how to use their chemistry and genetics to help us? The biological rhythms of deep-sea mussels seem to be related to tides (Mat), which won’t help us much on planets without a sister planet providing a gravity-driven clock alternative. Other deep-sea beasties seem to react to seasonal water changes between heat and cold, modifying feeding behavior to match availability of food sources. Many water animals combine diurnal (light) and tidal (gravity) cycles.

Humans work on a 24.15 hour clock, with some people having rhythms shorter and some longer, but the average is a little longer than 24 hours and resets with sunlight. (Naked Scientists) The longer-than-24-hours allow humans to adjust to the slow increase of the day during the spring and summer, when we need to function well to gather food, and “more recently” (by evolutional standards) to plant and maintain crops. Though based on circadian studies, fighting the natural lengthening of day our bodies are built for likely increased immunity issues during the winter, but the evolutionary trade-off for better and quicker access to food, providing weight gain in preparation of winter, won the day on average for humanity. The outliers provide bonuses other ways as they always do. Even so, SUNLIGHT resets the clock with precision daily so the slight difference either way from the cycle impact is minimal (but enough to have created a genetic preference over the entire species).

But in space, sunlight won’t be guaranteed, so we need information about how to survive without our special Sol-provided sunlight.  The problem is most of the creatures and plants available for us to study here on Earth evolved from the same single-celled creatures billions of years ago which lived on light flowing into the waters. To answer our questions, scientists must find creatures which didn’t derive from this united genetic line or creatures which have managed somehow to mutate away from it.

Japanese scientists recently found a species of jellyfish which work on what looks like to be a 20-hour cycle. (Starling) They do have a diurnal component related to sunrise, but in the absence of a day-night cycle, the species functions on a 20-hour cycle. (Like when humans don’t have access to a light reset, we slowly move off a perfect 24 hours since we are set up to run slightly longer.) They are studying the hormonal differences between this species and other closely related species which operate much more strongly on the day-night cycle.

The more we learn about other creatures, the more we understand ourselves. The blue light keeping us up at night. How food and gravity interact with hormones to support the normal rhythm, or oppose it, creating health problems.  How it controls our sleep and our body temperature. How time of day impacts the effectiveness of medications and our ability to perform physical activities on the job and during recreation.

Some people do much better with night jobs than others. Others have serious issues with seasonal depression as light fades. Closer to the equator, where day-night cycle varies little (and matches where humans originally evolved), the circadian rhythm functions like…clockwork. Toward the poles where the sun might not rise or set for days, humans function less well, mentally and physically.

The rhythms of day-night, moon gravity position, seasons all impact us making us happy and grumpy, awake and tired, healthy and ill. Our internal clocks change as we age from birth through old age. And we must learn how these cycles work if we are going to recreate them elsewhere without our sun, moon, and Earth spinning through our solar system.

In the meantime, if it is late, whoever is reading this, turn off the lights and give yourself a couple hours off-screen to let your sleeping cycle kick in properly.

 

Bibliography

Cleveland Clinic. “Circadian Rhythm.” 2024 March 14. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/circadian-rhythm – last viewed 5/11/2026.

Louis, Victoria and Patrick Emery. “Biological rhythms: In the sea, two clocks are better than one. 2025 June 23. – last viewed 5/11/2026.

Mat, Audrey M. et al. “Biological rhythms in the deep-sea hydrothermal mussel Bathymodiolus azoricus” nature communications. 2020 July 10. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17284-4 – last viewed 5/11/2026.

Naked Scientists, The. “Why is our circadian rhythm not 24 hours?” 2017 August 8. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-our-circadian-rhythm-not-24-hours – last viewed 5/11/2026.

Starling, Marlowe. “The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way to Keep Time.” Quantamagazine. 2026 March 20. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-jellies-that-evolved-a-different-way-to-keep-time-20260320/ – last viewed 5/11/2026.

GeekingScience: Small Town Universe

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Imagine living in a town where wi-fi and cell phones are illegal; where every person in the town works together to create the smallest electronic footprint possible. Does it sound like a science-fiction horror story where people are hiding from aliens (like in David Weber’s Safehold series) or a governmental overreach restricting information transformation?

It’s neither. Green Bank, West Virginia is the National Radio Quiet Zone for the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. The entire valley is monitored for excess electronic interference. And through everyone’s due diligence, we just might hear aliens sending out signals, their television shows reaching across the galaxy.

A documentary from 2024 is available on the subject. You can find the trailer on YouTube (posted below).

Geeking Science: Humans are Uncanny Lovers

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Peter Burdon on Unsplash

I’ve talked here about a lot of different types of romances: sweet, spicy, closed-door, open, erotica, slow burn. There are additional categories like big-beautiful, omegaverse, and blue alien romance. Popular at the moment is monster erotica, where the female (or male) character falls for a literal monster: sasquatch, Frankenstein’s monster, or a werewolf (not the fuzzy puppy type). Some people go “how deviant!”

So why am I talking about this in my Geeking Science area? Well, because humans have always been like this. They have always been Monster F*ckers.

About 750,000 or so years ago, humans left Africa. These branched off into different species including Neanderthals and Denisovans, with the Neanderthals being more European and Denisovans being more Asian. These likely “interbred with a super archaic population of hominins that had spread out from Africa about 2 million years ago.” (Learn)

Meanwhile, back in Africa, hominins continued to evolve and become the first iteration of homo sapiens. When they left Africa between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago (Wu), they ran into the evolved homo variations of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and, well, interbred with them (fucked them). How do we know? Because their DNA is still in humans. (Choi)

Now, to be clear, it is Europeans who have the highest amount of Neanderthal DNA and Asians/Oceanians who have the highest of Denisovan. One to two percent of all modern humans of European descent have Neanderthal bouncing around in their DNA and about one to six percent of Asians/Oceanians have Denisovan. In addition, since Denisovan were typical of the human family and had interbred with an archaic branch over 2 million years off of everyone else, Asians also have a little bit of that twisted up in the DNA strain. (Choi)

The two areas where the DNA is the strongest are in immune responses and food processing, which makes sense. The more variation a population has to diseases and in food, the better it is able to provide breaks in transmission of diseases and eat when local food production drops. Neanderthal genes also seem to be related to a nap during the day and stay awake late into the night cycle; so if you are a night owl, it may be you are a little more Neanderthal than most. (Lefler)

Science Fiction writers like writing stories about the Uncanny Valley theory, where if something looks ALMOST human, but not exactly, it freaks humans out. The closer the look, while still failing the “is it human” the worse the repulsion.  (Perera) This theory is being tested with modern computer simulations and robots, trying to find the line of making a robot or simulation for a video look human enough to be comfortable but different enough to be comfortable – robotics and other technology creators want the familiarity and trust of being human-like without activating the “it is not human but pretending to be us so kill it with fire” reaction.

Some have asked why do we have this reaction and writers of genre (science fiction, fantasy, horror) use to to speculate at one point there was something very, very bad that looked like us, demons or aliens, and we had to destroy them to survive. Scientists speculate it might simply have been the homo sapiens leaving Africa and running into the other branches of hominids, then destroying them.

But…but…evidence says contrary. It seems like humans fucked the uncanny valley siblings. Humans have always been monster fuckers; humans are Uncanny lovers.

 

Bibliography

Choi, Charles Q. (edited by Kristina Killgrove, Laura Mondragon.) “Scientists discover 2 new ‘ghost’ lineages that contributed DNA to modern humans.” Live Science. 2026 July. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/scientists-discover-2-new-ghost-lineages-that-contributed-dna-to-modern-humans

Learn, Joshua Rappo. “How Do You Tell a Neanderthal from a Denisovan?” Discover magazine. 2021 November 31. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.discovermagazine.com/how-do-you-tell-a-neanderthal-from-a-denisovan-43069

Lefler, Leah. “8 Neanderthal Traits That are Found in Modern Humans.” Owlcation. 2023 December 16. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://owlcation.com/stem/8-neanderthal-traits-in-modern-humans

Perera, Ayesh. “Uncanny Valley: Examples, Effects and Theory.” Simply Psychology. 2026 July 30. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.simplypsychology.org/uncanny-valley.html

Wu, Katerine J. “Modern Humans May Have More Neanderthal DNA Than Previously Though.” Smithsonian magazine. 2020 February 4. Last viewed 8/11/2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-expands-neanderthals-genetic-legacy-modern-humans-180974099/