Science & TechnologyS


Life Preserver

Chlamydia is killing off Australia's koala marsupials

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Wed, 09 May 2018 16:39 UTC
Koala bear in Australia
© Shutterstock
One of the leading killers of Australia's endearing koalas is a debilitating bacterial infection: chlamydia.

The idea of koalas with chlamydia - a common sexually transmitted infection in people - recently drew chuckles on HBO's "Last Week Tonight," but the disease, which is affecting koalas in epidemic proportions, is hardly a laughing matter.

Chlamydia-infected koalas made the news on Sunday (May 6) when the show's host, John Oliver, mentioned the dedication of a new koala ward at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, called the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward, to treat the sick marsupials.

But chlamydia is no joke to koalas. Surveys have shown that some wild populations demonstrate a 100 percent rate of infection, which frequently leads to blindness, severe bladder inflammation, infertility and death. And treatment with antibiotics could create further problems for the marsupials, upsetting their gut microbes and making it difficult for them to digest the eucalyptus leaves that are a staple of their diet, researchers recently discovered.
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Nebula

Bioluminescence takes hold causing San Diego's night-time surf to glow

Gary Robbins
The Sand Diego Union-Tribune
Tue, 08 May 2018 13:35 UTC
bioluminescence
© Erik Jepsen/UC San DiegoErik Jepsen of UC San Diego took this image of bioluminescence along the San Diego County coastline on Tuesday night.
A red tide that developed off San Diego over the past few days is producing one of nature's small but grand spectacles: bioluminescent light in the ocean.

The algae bloom is filled with bioluminescent phytoplankton that lights up when the micro-organisms tumble down the face of waves at and near shore.

At times, the light appears when a surfer paddles his or her board through the surf, or simply walks on the beach.

The phenomenon was first forecast on Monday by Michael Latz, an internationally known bioluminescence expert at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

surfing red tide
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Attention

Google's massive carbon footprint revealed by new online tool

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Tue, 08 May 2018 15:43 UTC
google carbon footprint
© Joana Moll“DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST”: Screenshot captured on May 1, 2018 after 20 seconds.
Internet search giant emits 500 kg of CO2 emissions per second.

Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world's most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet's carbon footprint.

Despite the notion that the internet is a "cloud," it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.
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Black Cat 2

Overpopulation of free-roaming cats driving hunt for better contraceptive


Phys.org
Thu, 10 May 2018 10:57 UTC
cat kitten
© CC0 Public Domain
While the true number of free-roaming cats in the United States is unknown, experts believe the population may rival that of pet cats, with estimates ranging from 70 million to 90 million. This staggering number contributes substantially to cat overpopulation and the estimated 1.4 million cats euthanized each year in this country alone.

"Uncontrolled reproduction in free-roaming cats is a major problem in the United States and abroad," said Dr. Kelly Diehl, Senior Scientific and Communications Adviser at Morris Animal Foundation. "While there are excellent trap and neuter programs, many communities just don't have the intensive resources needed for this type of long-term surgical intervention. There needs to be a faster, easier and less expensive method than surgery to address this health and welfare in free-roaming cats on a global scale."

Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs embarked on a project to determine if GonaCon, a nonsurgical contraceptive used in some wildlife species, might provide a solution. The results, unfortunately, were not as promising for fertility control of free-roaming cats as previously indicated.
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Pills

Baldness cure could come from side-effect of osteoporosis drug

Sarah Knapton
The Telegraph
Wed, 09 May 2018 08:47 UTC
thinning hair balding men
Around four in 10 men suffer male pattern baldness by the age of 45 and two thirds by the age of 60.
A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

Around four in 10 men suffer male pattern baldness by the age of 45 and two thirds by the age of 60.

At the moment only two drugs, minoxidil and finasteride, are available for the treatment of male pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) - the classic type of receding hair loss in men.
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Sun

Research uncovers 405 thousand year climate cycle discovered related to variations in Earth's orbit around the sun

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Wed, 09 May 2018 14:58 UTC
petrified forest arizona
© Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth ObservatoryWithin ancient rocks in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park, scientists have identified signs of a regular variation in Earth's orbit that influences climate. Here, one of the authors near the research site.
In ancient rocks, scientists see a climate cycle working across deep time. A repeating shift in Earth's orbit spans hundreds of millions of years

Scientists drilling deep into ancient rocks in the Arizona desert say they have documented a gradual shift in Earth's orbit that repeats regularly every 405,000 years, playing a role in natural climate swings. Astrophysicists have long hypothesized that the cycle exists based on calculations of celestial mechanics, but the authors of the new research have found the first verifiable physical evidence. They showed that the cycle has been stable for hundreds of millions of years, from before the rise of dinosaurs, and is still active today. The research may have implications not only for climate studies, but our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth, and the evolution of the Solar System. It appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Bizarro Earth

Hypothesis: Emergent plate tectonics caused "snowball Earth"

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with that
Tue, 08 May 2018 00:00 UTC
From the "but wait, I thought only CO2 had the power to change the climate" department comes this revelation.
Enceladus, a moon of Saturn
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteDuring its ‘snowball’ phase, the Earth may have resembled Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that is covered in snow and ice.
New research suggests that dawn of plate tectonics could have turned Earth into snowball

A research duo from The University of Texas at Austin and UT Dallas have put forward a hypothesis that links the dawn of plate tectonics with "snowball Earth"-a period of climate change that sent the planet into a deep freeze that lasted millions of years.

They expect their hypothesis to generate controversy. Geologists usually place the start of plate tectonics at about 3 billion years ago, while the new hypothesis puts the process in a much younger era known as the Neoproterozoic, which occurred about 542 million to 1 billion years ago.
"If you look at the preserved record, diagnostic evidence for modern plate tectonics involving deep subduction is mainly Neoproterozoic and younger," said co-author Nathaniel Miller, a research scientist in the Department of Geological Sciences at the UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences. "But most people think we had this much earlier in Earth history."
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Info

Earth's orbit has been influenced by the gravity of Jupiter and Venus - study


Science Daily
Mon, 07 May 2018 23:21 UTC
Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Dennis Kent
© Nick Romanenko/Rutgers University-New BrunswickRutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Dennis Kent with part of a 1,700-foot-long rock core through the Chinle Formation in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. The background includes boxed archives of cores from the Newark basin that were compared with the Arizona core.
Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth's orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet's climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The findings are published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's an astonishing result because this long cycle, which had been predicted from planetary motions through about 50 million years ago, has been confirmed through at least 215 million years ago," said lead author Dennis V. Kent, a Board of Governors professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "Scientists can now link changes in the climate, environment, dinosaurs, mammals and fossils around the world to this 405,000-year cycle in a very precise way."

The scientists linked reversals in the Earth's magnetic field -- when compasses point south instead of north and vice versa -- to sediments with and without zircons (minerals with uranium that allow radioactive dating) as well as to climate cycles.
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Boat

New Russian aircraft carrier to challenge US naval supremacy

Marija Katic
FRN
Tue, 08 May 2018 19:45 UTC
Project 23000E Shtorm carrier concept art
© Photo via USNI NewsProject 23000E Shtorm (Storm) carrier concept art
The Russian nuclear aircraft carrier "Storm" could change the power relationship on the seas at the same time in three regions, according to the US-based online magazine "Military Watch".

According to experts, this cruiser would be useful for guaranteeing the security of Damascus, the most important ally of Moscow in that area, and in the Mediterranean Sea generally, in which Russia has already significantly increased its presence.

Beyond its technical capacities and strategic utility, "Storm" will serve as a symbol of support to the countries of the Persian Gulf, Iran in particular, with which Russia also has established strong military-political ties.
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Galaxy

Atheist Stephen Hawking's final paper actually strengthened the case for God

Philip Goff
Guardian
Mon, 07 May 2018 17:37 UTC
hawking
© Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images'In A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?, Hawking and his co-writer, Thomas Hertog, formulate strict limits to the kind of universes that populate the multiverse.'
Scientists have discovered a surprising fact about our universe in the past 40 years: against incredible odds, the numbers in basic physics are exactly as they need to be to accommodate the possibility of life. If gravity had been slightly weaker, stars would not have exploded into supernovae, a crucial source of many of the heavier elements involved in life. Conversely, if gravity had been slightly stronger, stars would have lived for thousands rather than billions of years, not leaving enough time for biological evolution to take place. This is just one example - there are many others - of the "fine-tuning" of the laws of physics for life.

Some philosophers think the fine-tuning is powerful evidence for the existence of God. However, in his 2010 book The Grand Design (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow), Stephen Hawking defended a naturalistic explanation of fine-tuning in terms of the multiverse hypothesis. According to the multiverse hypothesis, the universe we live in is just one of an enormous, perhaps infinite, number of universes. If there are enough universes then it becomes not so improbable that at least one will chance upon the right laws for life.

Comment: For more on the discussion, see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
What is troubling is the way the materialist evolutionists have been provoked into their untenable stance which manifests equal determination to hold the line against any single acknowledgment of any process that is not totally random, accidental, and material. Their story is that the Big Bang was the explosion of a primal atom and all matter in the Universe was in this incredibly dense atom. Everything that has happened since is just the result of random jostling of particles that, over billions of years, may form affinities by accident, and different forms of matter arise. Eventually, some of this matter jostles against some other bit of matter, some sort of electrical (or other) interaction takes place, and that is 'life'.

The Big Bang theory is Creationism. Materialists believe that matter sprang suddenly into existence with nothing prior. That primal atom was there, and they make no attempt to explain it. That's as crazy as saying 'God was just there' and decided to create the universe.
Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Information theory, or why your brain is not your mind

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