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Methane munching microbes crucial role in preventing escape of gas into atmosphere

David Nield
Science Alert
Fri, 18 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
carbonate
© Schmidt Ocean Institute
A carbonate rock chimney.
One of the key steps to mitigating climate change is to better understand the multitude of factors that affect our planet's temperature - and a new study reveals the important role that ocean microbes play in the process.

Microbes are responsible for most of Earth's naturally produced methane, a key greenhouse gas that contributes to the warming of the atmosphere. But as well as producing it, microbes also consume it, keeping it trapped in the ocean.

The new research highlights how microbes in carbonate rocks such as limestone and dolomite play a crucial role in helping to regulate Earth's temperature by consuming methane and stopping it from escaping into the open air - a type of methane sink that has so far not been extensively studied.


Comment: One needs to be cautious regarding these claims of 'regulating' Earth's temperature, because, after all, mainstream science still pushes the debunked theory of 'man-made global warming'. It seems that the temperature of our planet is likely the result of a number of factors, some of which cause Earth to undergo cyclical ice ages, and this article fails to detail how critical to Earth's temperature this activity really is: Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle


Comment: See also:

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Sherlock

Hubble Space Telescope stops working, attempts to restart fail, still down days later - NASA


Phys.org
Sat, 19 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
Hubble Jupiter

This photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 25, 2020 shows Jupiter and its moon Europa, captured when the planet was 653 million kilometers (405 million miles) from Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been peering into the universe for more than 30 years, has been down for the past few days, NASA said Friday.

The problem is a payload computer that stopped working last Sunday, the US space agency said.

It insisted the telescope itself and scientific instruments that accompany it are "in good health."

Comment: Another fail for NASA? NASA's 'Mole' officially fails Mars mission, follows two years of troubleshooting

See also:

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Telescope

Mysterious object blotted out a giant star for 200 days

Nadia Drake
National Geographic
Wed, 16 Jun 2021 20:53 UTC
mystery star blotted out artist impression
© National Geographic
An artist's impression of the star named VVV-WIT-08 being eclipsed
Scientists suggest whatever eclipsed the star was many times larger and had a hard edge.

Something huge and opaque caused a star in our galaxy to dim, and astronomers are struggling to explain the phenomenon.

Stars may twinkle, but they don't just vanish — so when a distant, giant star pulled a disappearing act for about 200 days, it took astronomers by surprise.

Now, roughly a decade later, astronomers have sifted through a variety of possible explanations — and they still have no idea what's responsible for blotting out nearly all of the star's light.
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Butterfly

Half the trees in two new English woodlands planted by jays - study

Patrick Barkham
The Guardian
Thu, 17 Jun 2021 09:09 UTC
jay bird

A jay (Garrulus glandarius), a large colourful bird of the crow or corvid family pictured in the UK. Photograph: Gillian Pullinger/Alamy
More than half the trees in two new woodlands in lowland England have been planted not by landowners, charities or machines but by jays.

Former fields rapidly turned into native forest with no plastic tree-guards, watering or expensive management, according to a new study which boosts the case for using natural regeneration to meet ambitious woodland creation targets.


Comment: Yeah, nature has some experience in this area.


Instead, during "passive rewilding", thrushes spread seeds of bramble, blackthorn and hawthorn, and this scrub then provided natural thorny tree "guards" for oaks that grew from acorns buried in the ground by jays.

Comment: Another study showed the surprising role of ants in distributing wildflower seed. Evidently nature has its own tried and tested methods for rewilding and regeneration. However, there are methods of land management that show humans can facilitate nature's processes so as to reap the maximum benefits, for all, with minimum damage, and in a much shorter period of time; but the complexities and synergies in which nature operates are still very poorly understood by mainstream science:

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Blue Planet

New giant rhino fossil may be one of the largest land mammals ever found

Carly Cassella
Science Alert
Thu, 17 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
rhino
© Yu Chen
Artistic interpretation of P. linxiaense.
A 26.5 million-year-old skull found in northwest China has been identified as another extinct species of giant rhino, one of the largest mammals to ever roam the land.

The fossil is remarkably well-preserved, and after close analysis, scientists have named it Paraceratherium linxiaense, the sixth species of this hornless rhino genus to be uncovered in Eurasia.

It's hard to infer the exact size of the beast from its skull alone, but other Paraceratherium fossils suggest these creatures once stood on four surprisingly skinny legs at a shoulder height of about 4.8 meters (15.7 feet), which is roughly the size of the largest modern giraffes. Today, modern rhinos stand barely two meters tall (10 feet).

Comment: See also:

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Ice Cube

Icebergs drifting from Canada to Southern Florida during last Ice Age left deep scours on ocean floor - new study

Charles Rotter
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Wed, 16 Jun 2021 19:33 UTC
ocean floor iceberg scour grooves
© Jenna Hill, U.S. Geological Survey, Pacific Coastal & Marine Science Center
These 3D perspective views of the seafloor bathymetry from multibeam sonar offshore of South Carolina show numerous grooves carved by drifting icebergs. As iceberg keels plow into the seafloor, they dig deep grooves that push aside boulders and piles of sand and mud along their tracks.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution & United States Geological Survey data shows how icebergs drifted more than 5,000km during the last glaciation

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) climate modeler Dr. Alan Condron and United States Geological Survey (USGS) research geologist Dr. Jenna Hill have found evidence that massive icebergs from roughly 31,000 years ago drifted more than 5000km (> 3,000 miles) along the eastern United States coast from Northeast Canada all the way to southern Florida. These findings were published today in Nature Communications.

Using high resolution seafloor mapping, radiocarbon dating and a new iceberg model, the team analyzed about 700 iceberg scours ("plow marks" on the seafloor left behind by the bottom parts of icebergs dragging through marine sediment ) from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina to the Florida Keys. The discovery of icebergs in this area opens a door to understanding the interactions between icebergs/glaciers and climate.
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Pills

Study shows antidepressants that contaminate aquatic environment increase risky behavior in crayfish

Shivali Best
The Daily Mail
Wed, 16 Jun 2021 17:39 UTC
crayfish risky behavior antidepressants
© Bernd Thissen dpa/AFP/File
A crayfish crosses a pedestrian walkway close to the Kemnader See lake in Bochum, western Germany
The findings highlight unintended impact medicines have in aquatic environments

Crayfish exposed to antidepressants for just two weeks behave more 'boldly,' a new study has revealed. Researchers from the University of Florida found that the crustaceans emerged from hiding quicker and spent longer looking for food when exposed to the medicines in contaminated water.

The research highlights the unintended impacts human medicines can have in aquatic environments, as they alter food web dynamics and ecosystem processes.

Scientists were left shocked when traces of illegal party drugs were found in freshwater shrimp swimming in Britain's countryside rivers. Drugs such as cocaine and ketamine were discovered by a team investigating 15 sites at five rivers around Suffolk to see what chemicals were in the water.

Comment: Pharmaceutical pollution of our environment is a far-reaching problem. We have no idea of the full implications.

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Info

Boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space mapped for the first time


EurekAlert
Thu, 10 Jun 2021 19:24 UTC
Los Alamos, N.M. - For the first time, the boundary of the heliosphere has been mapped, giving scientists a better understanding of how solar and interstellar winds interact.
Heliosphere
© NASA/IBEX/Adler Planetarium
A diagram of our heliosphere. For the first time, scientists have mapped the heliopause, which is the boundary between the heliosphere (brown) and interstellar space (dark blue).
"Physics models have theorized this boundary for years," said Dan Reisenfeld, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on the paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal today. "But this is the first time we've actually been able to measure it and make a three-dimensional map of it."

The heliosphere is a bubble created by the solar wind, a stream of mostly protons, electrons, and alpha particles that extends from the Sun into interstellar space and protects the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation.

Reisenfeld and a team of other scientists used data from NASA's Earth-orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite, which detects particles that come from the heliosheath, the boundary layer between the solar system and interstellar space. The team was able to map the edge of this zone -- a region called the heliopause. Here, the solar wind, which pushes out toward interstellar space, collides with the interstellar wind, which pushes in towards the Sun.
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Info

New form of silicon developed by scientist


Carnegie Institution for Science
Thu, 03 Jun 2021 19:59 UTC
New Silicon
© Thomas Shiell and Timothy Strobel
Visualization of the structure of 4H-Si viewed perpendicular to the hexagonal axis. A transmission electron micrograph showing the stacking sequence is displayed in the background.
Washington, DC — A team led by Carnegie's Thomas Shiell and Timothy Strobel developed a new method for synthesizing a novel crystalline form of silicon with a hexagonal structure that could potentially be used to create next-generation electronic and energy devices with enhanced properties that exceed those of the "normal" cubic form of silicon used today.

Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.

Silicon plays an outsized role in human life. It is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust. When mixed with other elements, it is essential for many construction and infrastructure projects. And in pure elemental form, it is crucial enough to computing that the longstanding technological hub of the U.S. — California's Silicon Valley — was nicknamed in honor of it.

Like all elements, silicon can take different crystalline forms, called allotropes, in the same way that soft graphite and super-hard diamond are both forms of carbon. The form of silicon most commonly used in electronic devices, including computers and solar panels, has the same structure as diamond. Despite its ubiquity, this form of silicon is not actually fully optimized for next-generation applications, including high-performance transistors and some photovoltaic devices.

While many different silicon allotropes with enhanced physical properties are theoretically possible, only a handful exist in practice given the lack of known synthetic pathways that are currently accessible.
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Nuke

BREST Fast Neutron Reactor: Russia offers a new nuclear paradigm for sustainable development

Ekaterina Blinova
Sputnik
Sat, 12 Jun 2021 13:03 UTC
ROSATOM Corporation
© Sputnik/Natalia Seliverstova
ROSATOM Corporation
Rosatom's newly inaugurated nuclear energy complex with a BREST-OD-300 fast neutron reactor may become a breakthrough providing relatively inexpensive, safe, carbon-free, and nearly inexhaustible nuclear power as energy consumption is set to dramatically soar in the coming decades.

On 8 June, the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom inaugurated the construction of a 300 MW nuclear power unit with an innovative lead-cooled BREST-OD-300 fast neutron reactor in Seversk, in Russia's Tomsk region. Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Mariano Grossi tweeted:
"Today we celebrate the pouring of the first concrete of Russia's BREST reactor! This is part of the 'Proryv' ['Breakthrough'] project towards a closed nuclear fuel cycle, which will help to reduce the final waste burden. Milestone for the nuclear industry!"
Rosatom's project "Breakthrough" is aimed at developing a new nuclear technology platform based on a closed nuclear fuel cycle (CNFC) with advanced fast neutron nuclear reactors. Fast reactors are touted for their ability to increase energy yields from natural uranium and utilise nuclear byproducts and spent fuel. This would allow nuclear power programmes to be extended for thousands of years, while at the same time solving the radioactive waste problem. Thus, it is hardly surprising that major nuclear countries, such as China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the US have been developing fast neutron reactors as breeders and high-level waste burners.
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