{"id":865526,"date":"2025-08-15T21:16:44","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T02:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/15\/see-southern-delta-aquariids-and-alpha-capricornids-meteor-showers-this-summer\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T21:16:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T02:16:44","slug":"see-southern-delta-aquariids-and-alpha-capricornids-meteor-showers-this-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/15\/see-southern-delta-aquariids-and-alpha-capricornids-meteor-showers-this-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"See Southern Delta Aquariids and Alpha Capricornids Meteor Showers This Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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July 27, 2025<\/p>\n

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Summer Meteor Showers, Short Summer Days and Ancient Arthropods<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n

Set your alarm on Wednesday to see some of the summer\u2019s stunning meteor showers.<\/p>\n

By Rachel Feltman<\/a> & Fonda Mwangi<\/a> <\/p>\n

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada\/Scientific American<\/i><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Rachel Feltman:<\/b> Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American<\/i>\u2019s Science Quickly,<\/i> I\u2019m Rachel Feltman. It\u2019s been a while, but we\u2019re finally back with our usual science news roundup. Let\u2019s catch up on some of the science news you might have missed in the last week or so.<\/p>\n

If last Tuesday seemed to fly right by, that\u2019s probably because it was a little shorter than usual. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service says that July 22 was around .8 milliseconds short of the standard 24 hours. That\u2019s slightly less dramatic than the almost 1.4 milliseconds that were missing from July 10, and scientists anticipate another ever-so-slightly truncated day on August 5.<\/p>\n

Now, while there were plenty of headlines about these missing fractions of a milliseconds, it\u2019s not actually news that the Earth\u2019s rotation varies in speed. The length of a single rotation\u2014also known as a day\u2014is impacted by factors such as the movements of our planet\u2019s liquid core, variations in the jet stream and the gravitational pull of the moon. One 2024 study even suggested<\/a> that melting polar ice has decreased Earth\u2019s angular velocity enough to slow rotations down.<\/p>\n

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On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n

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In fact, earth\u2019s days have generally been trending longer if you look back at the last few billion years. Research suggests that at various points in the time before our species evolved, days were minutes and even hours shorter. But we always get our shortest days in the summer, and there have been some especially short ones over the last few years. Scientists aren\u2019t totally sure why that\u2019s been happening, but they expect the spike to flatten back down soon, according to reporting by The Guardian<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the movement of celestial heavenly bodies: two meteor showers are set to peak on the same evening this week. In the overnight from July 29 to 30 both the Southern delta Aquariids and the alpha Capricornids will be reaching the height of their activity. While the alpha Caricornids aren\u2019t known for dropping loads of visible objects, they do sometimes produce bright fireballs\u2014plus they can be seen from anywhere on the planet.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, folks in the Southern Hemisphere will also get a great view of the Southern delta Aquariids, and people farther north could catch some activity if they look southward. There will also be some scattered meteors from the Perseids, which will ramp up in activity next month. With the moon in a waxing crescent phase, conditions should be good for spotting meteors\u2014as long as it\u2019s not too cloudy. So set an alarm for the predawn hours on Wednesday and go outside to take a peek.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s head back down to Earth. Last Monday the Federal Emergency Management Agency\u2019s Urban Search and Rescue chief resigned. Ken Pagurek, who spent more than a decade with the FEMA branch and served as its chief for about a year, reportedly told colleagues that his decision was motivated in part by the delayed response to Texas\u2019s recent catastrophic flooding. The Department of Homeland Security recently implemented a policy that requires Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve any spending over $100,000. CNN reports that Noem<\/a> took more than 72 hours to provide authorization for Urban Search and Rescue teams to deploy in Texas. According to the New York Times<\/i><\/a>, Noem also failed to renew agreements with call center companies whose contractors would have answered calls from disaster survivors. The contracts lapsed in the aftermath of the flood, when many people were still in need of help. The Times <\/i>reported on July 5, FEMA received a bit more than 3,000 calls and answered about 99.7 percent of them. On July 6, with hundreds of the contractors responsible for answering phones suddenly fired, FEMA reportedly received 2,363 calls and answered about 35.8 percent of them. And according to the Times<\/i>, those contracts weren\u2019t renewed until July 10.<\/p>\n

When asked for comment on Pagurek\u2019s resignation by ABC News<\/a>, a DHS spokesperson doubled down on the new spending policy, defending the agency\u2019s decision not to \u201chastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s pivot to some health news. According to a study<\/a> of nearly 1,000 people published last Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications<\/i>, the COVID pandemic may have made our brains age more quickly\u2014regardless of whether we got sick.<\/p>\n

First, the researchers analyzed imaging from more than 15,000 healthy individuals collected pre-pandemic to establish a baseline for normal brain aging. The team used this data to train machine-learning models to predict a person\u2019s brain age based on certain structural changes. The researchers then applied those models to brain scans from 996 other subjects, all of whom had received two brain scans at least a couple of years apart. About half of the participants had received both scans prior to the start of the pandemic, so they served as the control group.<\/p>\n

The scientists were then able to look at scans<\/a> taken before and after the pandemic to assess the rate of brain aging. While only folks who got infected with COVID between their two scans showed a dip in some cognitive abilities, signs of brain aging, such as the shrinkage of gray matter, were accelerated across the board. The effects were most pronounced among men, older individuals and people from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds.<\/p>\n

The study authors pointed to a number of aspects of the pandemic\u2014including increases in stress, alcohol consumption and economic insecurity, along with decreases in physical activity and socialization\u2014that they believe may have made our brains age more quickly. We don\u2019t yet know what the implications of these changes might be or whether they\u2019re reversible.<\/p>\n

Speaking of brains\u2014and to end our show on a fun story because you know I love to do that\u2014let\u2019s talk about ancient sea critters. A recent study focused on the extinct species Mollisonia symmetrica,<\/i> which lived around half a billion years ago, suggests that the ancestors of spiders and other arachnids may have started out in the ocean. In studying fossilized remains of the tiny creature, scientists found that its brain was basically backwards\u2014at least compared to other arthropods. The layout is more similar to the way modern arachnid noggins are arranged, which suggests that spider brains may have first evolved in the sea.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all for this week\u2019s news roundup. We\u2019ll be back on Wednesday to talk about some of this summer\u2019s hottest topics in the world of weather.<\/p>\n

Science Quickly<\/i> is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American<\/i> for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.<\/p>\n

For Scientific American,<\/i> this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Thomas Paris
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 27, 2025 Summer Meteor Showers, Short Summer Days and Ancient Arthropods Set your alarm on Wednesday to see some of the summer\u2019s stunning meteor showers. By Rachel Feltman & Fonda Mwangi Anaissa Ruiz Tejada\/Scientific American Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American\u2019s Science Quickly, I\u2019m Rachel Feltman. It\u2019s been a while, but we\u2019re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":865527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3489,4917],"tags":[8732,5228],"class_list":{"0":"post-865526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-delta","8":"category-southern","9":"tag-delta","10":"tag-southern"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}