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Mon, 18 Nov 2019
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Attention

Sixth mass extinction well under way

Frédérik Saltré and Corey J. A. Bradshaw
The Conversation
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 17:25 UTC
Rare Tiger
© Keith Roper/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Humans are probably causing what ice ages and asteroids caused before them.
For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of new species is that species extinctions have also always been part of the evolutionary life cycle.

But these two processes are not always in step. When the loss of species rapidly outpaces the formation of new species, this balance can be tipped enough to elicit what are known as "mass extinction" events.

A mass extinction is usually defined as a loss of about three quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a "short" geological period of time. Given the vast amount of time since life first evolved on the planet, "short" is defined as anything less than 2.8 million years.

Since at least the Cambrian period that began around 540 million years ago when the diversity of life first exploded into a vast array of forms, only five extinction events have definitively met these mass-extinction criteria.

These so-called "Big Five" have become part of the scientific benchmark to determine whether human beings have today created the conditions for a sixth mass extinction.
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SOTT Logo Radio

Objective:Health #37 - Big Tech Censors Natural Health Sites - With Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech Info


Sott.net
Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
O:H header
Any regular readers of Sott.net, Mercola.com, GreenMedInfo and a number of other alternative health news websites are no-doubt familiar with the fact that alternative health information is being censored, deranked or flatly banned by a number of Big Tech platforms. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Pinterest, even MailChimp have all been exposed recently for taking a firm stand against their user's freedom to have access to the health information they may wish to see.

Today we're joined again by Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech.Info to give us the techie take on the nefarious agenda of Big Tech to control the information flow and steer public perception towards official consensus reality. We cover the latest whistleblower releases of Zach Vorhies, Dr. Robert Epstein and more.

It's a scary world, and one that is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate! Join us on this edition of Objective:Health where we cover the latest machinations of the technocracy!


And check us out on Brighteon!


For other health-related news and more, you can find us on:

♥Twitter: https://twitter.com/objecthealth
♥Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/objecthealth/

And you can check out all of our previous shows (pre YouTube) here.

Running Time: 01:17:30

Download: MP3 — 70.3 MB

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Fireball

Asteroid warning: Scientists launch campaign to save Earth from deep space impact

Sebastian Kettley
Express
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 15:28 UTC
asteroid
Asteroid experts all over the globe fear our planet sits in a shooting gallery of so-called Near-Earth Objects or NEOs. Approximately 66 million years ago, one of these asteroids wiped out two-thirds of all life on the planet and ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Today, four new NEOs are discovered every single day but many potential threats remain undetected.

The campaign dubbed Support Hera and initiated by the co-founders of Asteroid Day hopes to influence more research into safeguarding Earth from future impacts.

Hera is the European Space Agency's (ESA's) planetary defence and asteroid deflection mission ran in partnership with the US space agency NASA.

Comment: See also: Video from the event's YouTube page:



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Seismograph

France's earthquake caused unusual crack in Earth's crust, puzzling scientists

Maya Wei-Haas
National Geographic
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 12:00 UTC
Rouviere
© Jeff Pachoud, AFP via Getty Images
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck southeast France on November 11, damaging buildings and injuring four people. The small town of Le Teil suffered some of the worse damage, with hundreds of structures cracked and crumbling, such as the one pictured here in the town's Rouviere quarter.
A smidgen before noon, Clément Bastie and his family were preparing dinner in the small French town of Le Teil when the walls began to tremble. Glasses and plates crashed to the ground. Then a booming sound reverberated through the town.

Fears of explosions at the nearby nuclear energy plant flooded into his mind. Bastie, a high school biology and geology teacher, rushed outside expecting to see the bloom of a mushroom cloud. But as he soon discovered, the shaking came from something less devastating but still surprising for the region: an earthquake that cracked through the ground.

Clocking in at 4.8 magnitude, the temblor damaged numerous buildings and injured four people. It also left scientists buzzing over a number of curious features. For one, while France is no stranger to temblors, they are often quite small, explains seismologist Jean-Paul Ampuero of the Université Côte d'Azur in France. Monday's event was only of moderate intensity by global measures, but it was a "very large one for French standards," he says.

Comment: Just today another quake was recorded, although not in the same region, at M3.7 4 km W of Le Puy-Notre-Dame at 09:04 local time:

earthquake france m3.7
Everything is changing: the composition of the atmosphere; the electric charge differential between atmosphere, ground and sub-surface layers; the core itself is heating up if one theory for 'El Nino' is correct; even the Sun is behaving differently... there's gonna be a whole lotta strange in the next few years!

See also: And check out SOTT radio's: As well as SOTT's monthly documentary tracking these events: SOTT Earth Changes Summary - October 2019: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs



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No Entry

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches Twitter and Facebook rival

Tim Bradshaw
Financial TImes
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
Wikipedia Jimmy Wales
© Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says the business model of social media companies is problematic: 'It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content'
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a rival to Facebook and Twitter that he hopes will combat "clickbait" and misleading headlines.

WT:Social, his new social-networking site, allows users to share links to articles and discuss them in a Facebook-style news feed. Topics range from politics and technology to heavy metal and beekeeping.

While the company is completely separate to Wikipedia, Mr Wales is borrowing the online encyclopedia's business model. WT:Social will rely on donations from a small subset of users to allow the network to operate without the advertising that he blames for encouraging the wrong kind of engagement on social media.

Comment: Sounds like a recipe for the worst social media platform ever. Considering he's launching this platform at our peak 'cancel culture' moment in history, giving people the ability to edit or delete each other's posts will likely lead to the removal of all content (except for, perhaps, the banal content Wales rails against). Everything offends someone, especially if it's something worth saying. This sounds like the opposite of the free-speech platforms people have been asking for.

See also:

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Gift 3

Science confirms dogs can recognize a bad person

Bright Side
brightside.me
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 23:01 UTC
Black and white dog
© Mary Swift/Shutterstock
Summary
  • An experiment led by Dr. Akiko Takaoka from the Department of Psychology at Japan's Kyoto University concluded that dogs refuse to trust a person who lied to it. Dogs did not follow a pointing hand that led them to an empty container.
  • In an experiment, dogs wouldn't take a treat from the people who'd been mean or disrespectful toward their owners. In fact, besides distrusting them, they flat-out ignored these meanies.
  • With enough training and treats for a job well-done, dogs are able to tell the happy faces from the sad ones, even with human faces they didn't come across during their training.

Comment: See also:

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Dollars

NASA Inspector General: Additional $300M payment to Boeing for commercial crew contract 'largely unnecessary'

Jeff Foust
Space News
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:46 UTC
NASA payments Boeing crew funding
© Boeing
NASA provided Boeing with $287.2 million in additional commercial crew funding in order to create more schedule flexibility to address potential gaps in ISS crew access, but NASA's inspector general says most of that additional funding was unnecessary.
NASA paid Boeing nearly $300 million more than originally planned in its commercial crew contract in part because of agency concerns that the company might drop out of the program, a new report claims.

The Nov. 14 report on the commercial crew program by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) highlighted several issues with the commercial crew program that, it warns, could hinder NASA's ability to access and utilize the International Space Station in the near future.

While some of those issues, like ongoing delays with development of commercial crew vehicles and potential loss of access to the station when Soyuz seats run out, are not new, the report highlighted a change to Boeing's contract that the OIG concluded was largely unnecessary.

According to the report, Boeing proposed in September 2016 prices for four "post-certification missions," or PCMs, of its CST-100 Starliner vehicle that NASA originally rejected as too high, based on a table in the original contract that set prices based on the number of missions ordered and the date ordered.
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Attention

New research says Japanese fisheries collapsed due to pesticides

Jordan Davidson
EcoWatch
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 18:31 UTC
pesticides
© Stockbyte / Getty Images
Spraying chemicals on rice crop in Japan.
Scientists announced today that pesticide use on rice fields led to the collapse of a nearby fishery in Lake Shinji, Japan, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

The long-term study seems to have borne out the prophecy of Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, in which the author describes the nefarious trickle down effects of chemical pesticides that could "still the leaping of fish." While it is impossible to say that the use of pesticides caused the collapse of the fishery, the correlation is extremely strong.

Comment: Silent Hives: Colony Collapse Disorder and Pesticides:

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Fireball 5

Meteor outburst from the Alpha Monocerotids could produce meteors at a rate of 400 per hour!

Bob King
Sky and Telescope
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Alpha-Monocerotid meteor
© NASA
The Alpha-Monocerotid meteor outburst in 1995. Meteors are actually pieces of rock that have broken off a comet and continue to orbit the Sun.
What's rarer than seeing a unicorn? How about a unicorn spitting meteors at the rate of 400 per hour? You'll have an opportunity to see it for yourself on Thursday night, November 21-22, when the obscure Alpha Monocerotid shower could produce upwards of 400 meteors per hour from a radiant near the star Procyon, a star near the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn. Even more amazing, the outburst is expected to last only a half-hour.

Peter Jenniskens, a senior research scientist with the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, along with Esko Lyytinen of the Finnish Fireball Network, have been keeping tabs on the shower for years. During outbursts, such as those that occurred in 1925 and 1935, activity reached meteor-storm levels with a zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of more than 1,000. Activity rose to near-storm levels again in 1985 and 1995 with ZHRs around 700 and 400. ZHR is an idealized number based on how many meteors a single observer would see if the radiant were overhead in a dark sky during shower maximum.

The source of the Alpha Monocerotids is unknown, but the stream's orbital characteristics point to a long-period comet with a period of about 500 years. This nameless visitor deposited a dense, narrow ribbon of debris in the distant past with a half-width of only around 55,000 kilometers, equal to the distance from the center of Earth to the geostationary satellite belt.

Comment: Also, the Earth is passing through the Leonids this month, a huge meteor cloud left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Each year sees impressive displays, with certain nights offering particularly spectacular meteor showers. See: 'They thought it was judgment day': The night in 1833 when 'stars fell' on the southern US

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Info

Scientists find mechanism that turns herpes virus on and off

Patricia Waldron
Cornell Chronicle
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 17:46 UTC
Herpes simplex virus
© Shutterstock
The herpes virus causes cold sores and genital sores, as well as life-threatening infections in newborns, encephalitis and corneal blindness.

Treatment of the virus is difficult, because it hides out in nerve cells and emerges months or years later to reactivate the infection. New research from Dr. Luis M. Schang and his group at the Baker Institute for Animal Health has identified a new mechanism that plays a role in controlling how the virus alternates between dormant and active stages of infection.

In Schang's group, Mi Yao Hu and Esteban Flores Cortes discovered that the virus switches between the "latent" stage and the "lytic" stage, in which it is actively replicating, depending on how tightly its DNA is packaged into bundles called chromatin.

Their findings are in a paper, "Chromatin Dynamics and the Transcriptional Competence of HSV-1 Genomes During Lytic Infections," which published Nov. 14 in PLOS Pathogens. Schang's group collaborated with scientists from the University of Alberta, Canada, and University College London (UCL).

"Any problem that herpes causes is because of reactivation from latency," Schang said. "That's the reason why antivirals cannot cure the infection and why so far it's been impossible to develop a vaccine. Latency and reactivation are a major focus for herpes virus research."
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