Science & TechnologyS


Attention

Unmasked

Gregory Morin
Porcupine Musings
Sat, 19 Sep 2020 20:29 UTC
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

New England Journal of Medicine, 2020; 382:363
Throw the mask!
© Twitter
These days everyone imagines himself or herself to be a scientist. Scolds, who labor under the delusion that reading the New York Times is equivalent to holding a doctorate, unceasingly inflict on us finger-wagging lectures about how we need to "listen to the science" when it comes to masks. Apparently "masks work" because "The Science™" says so.

Newsflash: these media figures and self-styled authorities aren't (largely) scientists and know not of what they speak. As a scientist myself I feel compelled to set the record straight on what is, and is not, science. For those degreed scientists out there parroting the mask propaganda: for shame, you should know better. Cherry picking, selection bias, anecdotal data, and dubious models have no place in the arsenal of scientific inquiry.
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Info

Study raises questions about sleep's role

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Sat, 19 Sep 2020 18:43 UTC
Role of Sleep
© Donald Iain Smith / Getty Images
Humans (and other animals) need sleep as much as they need water and oxygen, and considering we spend about a third of our lives doing it, it clearly serves an important function. But, despite many theories, much of sleep's purpose remains elusive.

Leading theories - and debates - focus on its role in brain repair and reorganisation. Taking a unique, multi-disciplinary approach, a new study, published in the journal Science Advances, suggests it does both - it just depends on age.

In children around two and a half years old, the study found, synaptic growth and reorganisation, which underpins learning and memory formation, seems to be sleep's main purpose.

After that age, sleep becomes dominated by repair and cleaning, or maintenance - and the transition is not a gradual process, according to senior author Van Savage from Santa Fe Institute, US.

"One most surprising part of this finding is that this switch is very sharp and abrupt," he says, likening it to the transition that happens when water freezes to ice.

Their analysis also reveals that deep rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, associated with vivid dreams, could be the primary driver of brain reorganisation in those early years.
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Blue Planet

Geologists and seismologists are fascinated by 'precariously balanced rocks'

Sabrina Imbler
Atlas Obscura
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:32 UTC
balanced rock colorado springs
© Ahodges7/CC by 3.0Despite appearances, it is safe to drive by Balanced Rock in Colorado Springs.
"They're nature's hilarious accidents."

On April 1, 1994, Paul Butcher, then the director of Colorado Springs parks department, received a chilling phone call from a frantic staff member. She told him that Balanced Rock — a 290-million-year-old red sandstone boulder naturally perched on a sloped ledge in Garden of the Gods Park — had fallen. Butcher panicked, his thoughts roiling with how disappointed and outraged both locals and visitors would be with the loss of the beloved, iconic landmark. He imagined the 700-ton boulder rolling downhill, with nothing to stop its tumble onto the nearby U.S. Highway 24, like a monstrously dense tumbleweed. Then he remembered the calendar, and realized it was a prank. "I never laughed," Butcher, who is now retired, told Out There Colorado. "It's not a great joke."

In a way, the mere existence of Balanced Rock also seems like a prank, either geological or cosmic. The enormous boulder looks like it had been photoshopped onto the landscape, or photographed mid-roll, or carefully placed by aliens. But it's no hoax and there's no sorcery to it. Rather it is a prime example of a whole category of geologic formations called "precariously balanced rocks" — PBRs, for short. They're exactly what you might expect. "It's a rock balanced on top of another rock," says Mark Stirling, who studies PBRs at the University of Otago in New Zealand. And if you think Colorado Springs' landmark ought to have a more imaginative name, see also: Balanced Rock in Grand Junction, Balanced Rock in Rocky Mountain National Park, and Balanced Rock at the Rampart Range. And that's just Colorado.
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Info

Men and women have different circadian rhythms says new study

Ida Kvittingen
Science Norway
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 12:58 UTC
Late Night Worker
© Tore Meek / NTB scanpixNurses are among the workers who have to work at night. Are women affected differently than men by night shifts?
Staying awake at night and being able to sleep during the day goes against our natural circadian rhythm, but some people cope better than others.

Recently, researchers have found evidence that biological differences between the sexes can affect the circadian rhythm of both humans and mice.

There are many indications that women and men have internal clocks that are set a little differently, according to a background article in the journal Science about some of the more recent research in the field.

"It's exciting and quite new that we can say something more about the mechanisms behind the differences in circadian rhythms," says Andrea Rørvik Marti, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Bergen (UiB).

But she's quick to add that while gender can affect circadian rhythms, a lot of other things may do so too. There are many more similarities than differences between the sexes.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Opening One's Mind to the Implications of Intelligent Design

Corey Schink, Harrison Koehli, Elan Martin
Sott.net
Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
worldview
One of the most profoundly enlightening and potentially life-changing areas of study one can pursue today is that of intelligent design: the idea that life, in so many of its forms, is so complex - and on so many levels - that it couldn't possibly have come into being without the information injected into it by some form of 'higher intelligence'. While one cannot say with absolute certainty what that 'higher intelligence' may actually be, or whence it comes (or how it 'designs'), the conclusion that human beings - and much of physical reality itself - is no mere series of accidents is now quite clear. Anyone paying attention to the data, science and logic of ID research can plainly see it.

All of this understanding, however, begs for more questions. For instance: If the 'information system' hypothesis of reality is correct, then what does that say about the nature of the mind and its relationship to information? If information is 'non-material' in the sense that we understand physical reality, what does that suggest about the state of reality itself? And does the dogmatic, materialistic, neo-Darwinist worldview effectively block one's mind from assimilating real knowledge of the world and expanding on our understanding of consciousness itself, and of ourselves, as carriers of information? The implications for these lines of inquiry are as staggering as they are endless. And considering how limiting and damaging the 'accidental worldview' - and all of its offshoots are - perhaps it's time that humanity at large now comes to know what's truly at stake.


Running Time: 01:13:05

Download: MP3 — 66.9 MB

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Fire

Flashback Global warming? Study shows 84% of wildfires caused by humans

Jason Daley
Smithsonian Magazine
Tue, 28 Feb 2017 17:07 UTC
wildfire deer
© Wikimedia CommonsFILE PHOTO: Documents show disingenuous American manipulation in order to maintain hegemony
In the last decade, mega-wildfires have become routine news. In 2015, fires burned a record 10 million acres of U.S. wildlands, and 5.5 million burned in 2016, including major fires in California and a blaze that started in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that damaged 2,400 buildings in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and killed 14 people. While wildfires are a natural phenomenon usually sparked by lighting, it turns out the recent destruction isn't all Mother Nature's fault. A new study shows that 84 percent of wildfires in the United States are started intentionally by humans or by human activity.

According to a press release, researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder's Earth Lab took a deep dive into the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Program Analysis-Fire Occurrence Database, analyzing all wildfires recorded between 1992 and 2012. The researchers found that humans caused more than 1.2 million of the 1.5 million blazes in the database.

Comment: Yes the climate is changing, but humans are not to blame for it. The dramatic shift in weather patterns, including increasing drought in some areas are harbingers of the onset of a solar-driven new Ice Age.

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Info

New mass extinction event discovered


University of Bristol
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 05:02 UTC
Summary of major extinction events
© D. Bonadonna/ MUSE, TrentoSummary of major extinction events through time, highlighting the new, Carnian Pluvial Episode at 233 million years ago.
In a new paper, published today in Science Advances, an international team has identified a major extinction of life 233 million years ago that triggered the dinosaur takeover of the world. The crisis has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode.

The team of 17 researchers, led by Jacopo Dal Corso of the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan and Mike Benton of the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, reviewed all the geological and palaeontological evidence and determined what had happened.

The cause was most likely massive volcanic eruptions in the Wrangellia Province of western Canada, where huge volumes of volcanic basalt was poured out and forms much of the western coast of North America.

"The eruptions peaked in the Carnian," says Jacopo Dal Corso. "I was studying the geochemical signature of the eruptions a few years ago and identified some massive effects on the atmosphere worldwide. The eruptions were so huge, they pumped vast amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and there were spikes of global warming".
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Satellite

Asteroid threat: ESA's ambitious Hera Planetary Defense Mission awards $153 million contract


SciTechDaily
Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
Hera uses infrared to scan impact crater.
© ESA – ScienceOffice.orgHera uses infrared to scan impact crater.
Today ESA awarded a €129.4 million (US $153.4 million) contract covering the detailed design, manufacturing, and testing of Hera, the Agency's first mission for planetary defense. This ambitious mission will be Europe's contribution to an international asteroid deflection effort, set to perform sustained exploration of a double asteroid system.

Hera - named after the Greek goddess of marriage - will be, along with NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids.

The contract was signed today by Franco Ongaro, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, and Marco Fuchs, CEO of Germany space company OHB, prime contractor of the Hera consortium. The signing took place at ESA's ESOC center in Germany, which will serve as mission control for the 2024-launched Hera.

Hera scans DART’s impact crater.
© ESA – Science OfficeHera scans DART’s impact crater.

Comment: More and more scientists and governments are finally waking up to the threat asteroids pose to Earth - however much good it will do.

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Snowman

NASA announces Solar cycle 25 has begun, will be weakest since records began in 1755


SpaceWeather.com
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 10:08 UTC
Solar Cycle 25
Solar Cycle 25
Solar Cycle 25 is officially underway. NASA and NOAA made the announcement during a media teleconference yesterday, Sept. 15th. According to an international panel of experts, the sunspot number hit rock bottom in Dec. 2019, bringing an end to old Solar Cycle 24. Since then, sunspot counts have been slowly increasing, heralding new Solar Cycle 25.

"How quickly solar activity rises is an indicator on how strong the next solar cycle will be," says Doug Biesecker of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, co-chair of the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel. "Although we've seen a steady increase in sunspot activity this year, it is slow."

The panel believes that new Solar Cycle 25 will be a weak one, peaking in 2025 at levels similar to old Solar Cycle 24. If their prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 25 (like Solar Cycle 24 before it) will be one of the weakest since record-keeping began in 1755.

Comment: The above announcement supports the work of Professor Valentina Zharkova, who declared that, back in June, we entered a Grand Solar Minimum which is causing an overall decrease in temperature on our planet.

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Radar

Animal's magnetic 'sixth' sense may come from bacteria

Robert Wells
University of Central Florida
Tue, 15 Sep 2020 21:46 UTC
loggerhead
© Gustavo Stahelin/UCF Marine Turtle Research Group.A female loggerhead sea turtle nests in the sand in Florida.
A University of Central Florida researcher is co-author of a new paper that may help answer why some animals have a magnetic "sixth" sense, such as sea turtles' ability to return to the beach where they were born.

The question is one that has been unresolved despite 50 years of research.

"The search for a mechanism has been proposed as one of the last major frontiers in sensory biology and described as if we are 'searching for a needle in a needle stack,'" says Robert Fitak, an assistant professor in UCF's Department of Biology, part of UCF's College of Sciences.

Comment: See also:

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