The streets are all lined with the stench of ginkgo

Hello, friends!

This week we’re checking out living fossils and searching for UFOs* in between the fireworks and a newcomer in this newsletter: philosophy. Let’s go!

*not UFOs

🍿 online talks and events 🐧

All times are GMT.

Tuesday 5 November

Signals from the beginning of the Universe, hybrid event by the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, 17.00, free: Professor Jo Dunkley of Princeton looks back at our quest to understand the history of the Universe, and describes a conundrum facing today’s astronomers – if the two methods we use to measure a) the space’s rate of expansion and b) the age of the Universe, have we got something wrong?

Thursday 7 November

The magnetosphere: our planet’s invisible shield, online event by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, 18.00, free: Chiara Lazzeri of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory describes the magnetosphere (Earth’s magnetic field), the effects of its interaction with the Sun’s magnetic field (hello, aurora), and how future space missions will help us better understand it, this layer that protects us from solar radiation.

The puzzle of free will, hybrid event by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 18.00, free: Philosophy professor (and consultant on The Good Place) Pamela Hieronymi unpacks the free will debate, by separating ‘problems in life’, which can be avoided, from ‘problems in theory’, which raise questions that must be addressed philosophically. (This is all brand new information to me and I’m dying to know what it all means, so I’ll definitely be tuning into this one.)

From mulberry to rare diseases: a scientific journey, online lecture by the Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum, 19.00, free: Professor Frances Platt of the University of Oxford’s pharmacology department discusses her work on a drug, originally derived from mulberry, that she found could in principle could be made into a treatment for a group of severe inherited rare diseases.

🔭 in a sky near you… 🛸

At your desire: This week, if you’ve got a view of the horizon, look out for Venus just above it in the southeast a bit after sunset (about 5pm).

According to Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell, before the age of dash cams and mobile phones, Venus was responsible for about half of UFO reports.

“When very faint, high clouds move at night, this foreground motion can trick human perception,” Jon Kelvey writes in an article for Popular Science. “The result is the sense that a bright light – in this case, the planet – is travelling across the sky, when in fact it’s only the clouds.”

👀 closer to Earth 🍂

Admire a living fossil: The ginkgo trees that line many of the streets in your correspondent’s neck of the woods, their leaves currently turning a glorious shade of yellow, may only have been on these shores for the last two and a half centuries or so, but as a species, they’ve been around for much, much longer. Like, predate-the-dinosaurs longer.

Ginkgo biloba is one of the oldest living tree species on the planet, and has barely changed during its tenure – 200-million-year-old fossils of its leaves have been found to be almost identical to those littering our city streets today, which is why we call it a living fossil. They’re an incredibly hardy species – six ginkgo trees are known to have survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

What’s with that smell, though? Am I on the back of a nightbus in Hoxton at 3am on Sunday morning? The fleshy coats of ginkgo seeds, produced by the female trees, contain butyric acid, a chemical also found in rancid butter and vomit.

And before you go – you might want to put your dinner down for this one – male ginkgo trees produce motile sperm. Yep, these trees make sperm that can swim.

🤔 until next week…

Which scientist, whose words have been carried in the pockets of millions in the UK (and were famously mangled in the name of an Oasis album), wrote the following about his friend Edmond Halley’s journey in a diving vessel in 1718?

Answer comes next week. See you then! Leonie x