Deformation and gravity go hand in hand in volcano monitoring like hot apple pie and icecream. They fit together great. as these two techniques tell us so much more together than separately.

This time I reached out to a friend to share her research!

Remember volcanic eruptions are dynamic. The amount of force and material involved in an eruption … Even if the eruption is small the changes can be significant to the overall system.

Volcanologists can see or image magma chambers that are close to the surface through a number of different monitoring techniques. Today we will focus on gravity and deformation. Mass flux and how the earth's surface moves in response to changes at depth!

Using what keeps us all attached to the ground's surface to monitor what is moving up towards us. This episode is full of hot material!

This time it is all about insects and their respiratory systems?! They represent so much of the biomass on earth.

Depending on the study and methods used there is more weight on earth within insects than humans. With over 8 billion humans and each of us weighs a lot more than an insect…… There are a lot of them. They form the backbone of many ecosystems.

Today though we will specifically focus on their respiratory system. How do they breathe? It is not like they have lungs like we do. Or gills like fish. I vaguely remember grade school biology and going over the number of legs and like.

You know what? I have never given it much thought. But now that I have …… I am intrigued!

Stealing the words from todays guest “With over 1 million identified species of insects, they’re a great vehicle for studying evolution There are all kinds of new things coming out of it, probably the most significant of which is flight”

So lets get into it! Time to follow the buzz to see if the Ant-ticipation i am chirping about is going to fly over our heads.

Please welcome Dr Hollister Herhold a Research Associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and Research Scientist in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City!

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There is so much we don’t understand about the early universe. Or any part of the universe not nearby. Part of the reason for this is time and distance. The universe as we understand/see it today started ~13.8 billion years ago.

So how do we test something that we cannot view or experience? The evolution of galaxies takes place over billions of years. We cannot track its changes over the eons because human history is in the thousands of years and observations of the deep cosmos can be measured in decades. Yes we can see many snapshots of different galaxies at different points on their evolution but how to connect them on their journey?

One way is to model physics or physical processes. Put everything in as we understand into a mathematical framework. Run the code or the “model” and see if it matches what we see in our observations. We do this type of exercise with many many different scientific disciplines including my own (geophysics).

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