Raspberry Sugar Found in Space
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It's Thursday, July 23, 2026, 08:04, and this Web page is finished. I've added Pickles of the North's comments about Donnie "Bonespur" Trump's statements regarding climate change and global warming. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ The discovery of a simple sugar in space clears up a small mystery that had puzzled scientists for years. On this program we also talked about Trump's cease fire
that has both sides shooting at each other, and more. I hope to update this Web page pretty soon.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday August 12, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had one this past week and the LSB is going to try an experiment with breaking up the Public Comment session and putting one part earlier than usual in order to give the public more of a voice. I don't see this new way of doing it as really working out.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Scientists have found a form of sugar floating in interstellar space. The sugar is called erythrulose. It's a monosaccharide like glucose and fructose. On Earth it's found in some fruits including melons and red raspberries. In outer space scientists have found a cloud containing that particular sugar floating around near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. They used two radio telescopes to look for sugar molecules in space. They looked for a while and eventually they found erythrulose in a nebula near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Japanese scientists had discovered sugars on the asteroid Bennu a few years ago. But there was still some controversy about where sugars might have developed before they came to Earth. Now that they have been discovered outside of the Solar System, way outside, it's now certain that sugars are floating around in interstellar space.
Amino acids, which make up the important parts of may proteins and which are necessary components of DNA and RNA, were shown to be created by various chemicals that we know were presents on the very early Earth billions of years ago. In what's known as the Miller Experiment in 1952, these simple chemicals were put in a closed, glass vessel and an electric spark was made in the vessel to simulate lightning, which we also know would have been present in the atmosphere of the early Earth. The result was that after a while organic molecules and amino acids formed. Amino acids have been known to be in space for decades. But sugars were much more difficult to find freely floating around in space. Now they've founds some.
This puts to rest some arguments about the start of life on Earth. The sugars are necessary for life, as a source of energy and also as the chemicals that form framework of the double helix of DNA and RNA. So now we have absolute proof that more of the building blocks of life were around on the early Earth.
This also bolsters the theory that life could be ubiquitous in the universe.
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Pickles here, with a word about the ongoing wildfires. Time was when fires were burning in the Canadian hinterlands, the Polar jet stream would prevent the smoke from these fires from descending across the border into the United States. But we are living with the ever changing effects of global warming, and the current climate change of massive droughts, heat domes and more frequent and stronger storms which can produce lightning but no rain they're taking a gigantic toll on all the forests of the world. Fifty percent of Canada is forest covered; it is the second largest country land wise and most of its population lives along the U.S./Canada border. The U.S. has a population that is nine times larger than Canada's. So when the remote forests catch fire, it has been the policy in the past to let them burn themselves out, lightning strike fires being part of the forest's ecosystem. But pervasive drought plus more lightning strikes means more and more fires burning all at once world wide. And the behavior of the jet streams are affected by climate change. As well as the smoke plumes affecting major cities and towns in Canada, now they are carried down into the U.S.
This is a global problem, and having some U.S. politicians and the president blame Canada as if its federal government is doing this deliberately is just plain stupid. Canadian wildfire fighters work to put the accessible fires out and move First Nation communities out of harm's way. Mostly these forests are dense, unpopulated and remote. Right now there are also many wildfires burning across the US, including in Minnesota, which also has forests remote from populated areas.
Fire season is now all year round. Our governments need to work together to deal with the source of this problem, which is climate change. Wildfire fighters from both nations have traditionally helped one another to fight these fires. When acid rain was falling on Canada in the 1970s, from factories spewing out pollution in the U.S., policies like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act helped end acid rain, a boon for both nations. For now the biggest obstacle to working on this problem together is the administration's official policy that human driven climate change is a hoax.
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We're having a heat wave again. The pervasive smoke in the air is making it much worse. This is probably another artifact of global warming and climate change. Such fires have been in the news about California for years. Canada has had them before too. These days we see European countries having huge forest fires. Weather conditions like droughts make the forest more susceptible to fires, which can be caused by lightning strikes.
Apropos of the above, on this program we talked about a new report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says that, yeah, global warming is happening and that human activities like the burning of fossil fuels is causing it.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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