dv said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Ian said:
23. An invisible boundary that has helped divide the US for centuries is now shifting, thanks to climate change. It’s called the 100th meridian west and it roughly bisects the continental US in half.
shakes head
You must admit it’s pretty astounding to have an artificial man-defined meridian line move due to climate change.
I declare this list subpar. SUBPAR!
Finally getting around to looking at this.
1. These flying firestarters are spread across at least three known species – the Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora). Firehawk raptors congregate in hundreds along burning fire fronts, where they will fly into active fires to pick up smouldering sticks, transporting them up to a kilometre (0.6 miles) away to regions the flames have not yet scorched. This behaviour, documented in interviews with the team and observed first-hand. “I have seen a hawk pick up a smouldering stick in its claws and drop it in a fresh patch of dry grass half a mile away, then wait with its mates for the mad exodus of scorched and frightened rodents and reptiles.” https://bioone.org/journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-37/issue-4/0278-0771-37.4.700/Intentional-Fire-Spreading-by-Firehawk-Raptors-in-Northern-Australia/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700.short
Looks genuine to me. I’d be a bit happier if it had been filmed. There are records of finches (Mexico) and corvids (Britain) of birds using cigarette butts to fumigate their nests. Sometimes the nest catches fire, which is the origin of the mythology that became the phoenix.
2. Mitochondrial DNA can actually be passed down by males. The boy’s results showed a mix – called a heteroplasmy – in his mitochondrial DNA, which was made up of more then just maternal contributions. When the boy’s sisters showed evidence of the same heteroplasmy, Huang and fellow researchers analysed the mtDNA of the children’s mother, which also showed the same mix. This led the team to analyse the mother’s parents’ mtDNA, ultimately finding that the mother’s mtDNA came from a roughly 60/40 split respectively from her mother and father. The central dogma of maternal inheritance of mtDNA remains valid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_mtDNA_transmission Other species are bananas, mussels, sheep, chickens and fruit flies.
Looks genuine to me. It’s normally claimed that the sperm cells are too small to contain mtDNA as well as nuclear DNA. But it makes sense that this isn’t necessarily always the case. It could be a case of the father producing larger than normal sperm. Or it could be a case of the mother having defective mtDNA. “The mitochondria in mammalian sperm are usually destroyed by the egg cell after fertilization. Also, most mitochondria are present at the base of the sperm’s tail, which is used for propelling the sperm cells; sometimes the tail is lost during fertilization. In 1999 it was reported that paternal sperm mitochondria (containing mtDNA) are marked with ubiquitin to select them for later destruction inside the embryo.”
3. Making it rain in the Sahara Desert. Solar and wind farms could actually bring rainfall and greenery back to the desert. Solar panels and wind turbines create rougher and darker land surfaces. Our model results show that large-scale solar and wind farms in the Sahara would more than double the precipitation in the Sahara, and the most substantial increase occurs in the Sahel, where the magnitude of rainfall increase is between ~200 and ~500 mm per year. Wind turbines enhance vertical mixing of heat in the atmosphere, pushing higher, warmer air down to the surface and increasing land surface friction, and ultimately leading to greater likelihood of precipitation.
Looks possible to me. The suggestion of increasing desert rainfall by making mountains is an old one. Enhancing convection by other means would also enhance precipitation. But could such a minor change as this have such as large effect? I’m not sure, It looks to be worth testing. I’ve already written some software myself that looks into how surface vegetation affects upper-level convection. The “green wall” in China may help in a similar way but it’s main influence on reducing desertification would be in stopping windblown sand.
4. Previously, the USDA Forest Service established that over a trillion viruses per square metre rains down every year. That, as it turns out, is a conservative figure. Suttle and his team wanted to know exactly how many viruses were being transported to the altitude of 2,500 to 3,000 kilometres. This quantifies the number of viruses being swept up into the free troposphere above the planetary boundary layer but below the stratosphere. Roughly 20 years ago we began finding genetically similar viruses occurring in very different environments around the globe. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-017-0042-4 These deposition rates were 9 to 461 times greater than the rates for bacteria. The highest relative deposition rates for viruses were associated with atmospheric transport from marine rather than terrestrial sources. “To obtain the atmospheric samples, we used two standard passive MTX ARS 1010 automatic deposition collectors.These collectors can discriminate between dry and wet atmospheric deposition using a humidity sensor that activates an aluminum lid that covers or uncovers the dry or wet collector depending on the meteorological conditions. Each collector has an exposed area of 667 cm2 and is 30 cm in height. Collectors were installed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (Spain) on a concrete platform above the atmospheric boundary layer.
I call BS on this. Not the final results, which may be correct, but the experimental method. The height of the collectors above ground level is not stated even in the technical article. It is not possible to site them “above the planetary boundary layer”, which is very thick over mountains because of mixing generated by the rough terrain. At best, it is measuring the virus concentrations a few metres or a hundred metres above ground level.
…
11. There are fish out there that basically have switchblades under their eyes. Stonefish are already pretty badass – they’re the most venomous type of fish we know of, and have a number of sharp fin spines on their body that can unsheathe and attack you at a moment’s notice. But stonefishes have just gone up a level, with scientists discovering the group also has what is basically a switchblade-like bone located under each eye socket.
Interesting. And new. We already know that some species of surgeonfish (think Nemo) have switchblades on either side of the tail.
I declare this list way above par.