Science & TechnologyS


Snowflake Cold

The real-life 'Day After Tomorrow': The Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025 - plunging Europe into a deep freeze, scientists warn

clocksteeple
© Twentieth Century FoxScene from 'The Day After Tomorrow'
In the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, humanity is plunged into a nightmarish international storm that sends the planet into a new ice age. And although the blockbuster was consigned to the realms of sci-fi, the science behind the frightening scenario is true.

In a matter of years, melting glaciers could shut down the Gulf Stream - the system of currents that brings warmth to the northern hemisphere, experts say.

Without this additional heat source, average temperatures could drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see 'severe and cascading consequences around the world'.

Scientists warn that an abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents is looking more likely than ever, as computer simulations find a 'cliff-like' tipping point looming in the near future.
Europemap
In some parts of Europe, collapse of a large system of ocean currents called the AMOC could lead to a temperature decrease of more than 5.4°F (3°C) per 10 years.
The study authors, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, don't know exactly when the collapse will happen, although a previous study put it as soon as next year.

'We are moving closer to the collapse, but we're not sure how much closer,' said lead author Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University. 'We are heading towards a tipping point.'

Comment: Melting glaciers? Arctic warming is part of Earth's normal 'ice age' cycle.

See also:


Seismograph

Audio cloning can take over a phone call in real time without the speakers knowing

man on cellphone
Generative AI could be listening to your phone calls and hijacking them with fake biometric audio for fraud or manipulation purposes, according to new research published by Security Intelligence. In the wake of a Hong Kong fraud case that saw an employee transfer US$25 million in funds to five bank accounts after a virtual meeting with what turned out to be audio-video deepfakes of senior management, the biometrics and digital identity world is on high alert, and the threats are growing more sophisticated by the day.

A blog post by Chenta Lee, chief architect of threat intelligence at IBM Security, breaks down how researchers from IBM X-Force successfully intercepted and covertly hijacked a live conversation by using LLM to understand the conversation and manipulate it for malicious purposes - without the speakers knowing it was happening.

"Alarmingly," writes Lee, "it was fairly easy to construct this highly intrusive capability, creating a significant concern about its use by an attacker driven by monetary incentives and limited to no lawful boundary."

Blue Planet

'We are approaching the tipping point': Marker for the collapse of key Atlantic current discovered

The tipping point for the collapse of a key Atlantic Ocean current
© HadelProductions/Getty Images
Scientists have discovered a key warning sign before a crucial Atlantic current collapses and plunges the Northern Hemisphere into climate chaos.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) carries warm water north from the Southern Hemisphere, where it releases heat and freezes. The freezing process concentrates salt in the non-frozen portion of the ocean water; this extra-saline water sinks, travels back south and picks up heat again, restarting the conveyor belt. (The Gulf Stream is part of this belt.)

This release of heat helps keep Europe, and to some extent North America, balmier than it otherwise would be. But sediment records over the past 100,000 years suggest that, at times, the AMOC has shut down abruptly, leading to major climate shifts over mere decades.

Comment: Comments:
1) The study mentioned in the article tested perhaps an earlier hypothesis expressed in:
Salty oceans provide early warning for climate change (June 2007)
Monitoring the saltiness of the ocean water could provide an early indicator of climate change. Significant increases or decreases in salt in key areas could forewarn of climate change in 10 to 20 years time. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) conference, scientists predicted that the waters of the southern hemisphere oceans around South Africa and New Zealand are the places to watch.
2) The meaning of climate change, as the article uses it can be gathered from looking at what else the same publication has published, see this search result. Exploring one of the results, two days before the above mentioned study was published on February 9, 2024, there was a study published on February 7:
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries, they write in their abstract:
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior — several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.
If "Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change" then human activity is considered responsible, and the climate can be "fixed" by changing the behaviour of people. The politics of climate change work in favour or arguing for more control.

3) In the article, they write potentially as early as 2025
Scientists believe we could be veering towards this scenario once again — potentially as early as 2025 — as a result of climate change.
The link refers to an earlier news article in Live Science published July 25, 2023: Gulf Stream current could collapse in 2025, plunging Earth into climate chaos: 'We were actually bewildered'
The headline speaks of the Gulf Stream, but the paper mentions the AMOC:
Researchers have predicted the collapse of the AMOC could happen any time between 2025 and 2095 — far sooner than previous predictions, although not all scientists are convinced.
According the the current article: "The team found that about 25 years before the AMOC collapses, this flow reaches a minimum)." This could be interpreted to mean that If they come out next year and say the minimum was reached in 2024, then something drastic would happen in 25 years, or around 2050. However what the study actually says is "The FovS minimum occurs 25 years (9 to 41, 10 and 90% percentiles) before the AMOC tipping event." That is there is an interval of probability, with a 10 % chance it is less than 9 years and a 10 chance it is more than 41 years.

The abstract from the article in Nature Communications from July 2023 reads:
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.
In other words the whole stick is that changes to the climate are pinned on human activity. What could be wrong with that?

4) The Earth exists in a cosmic environment that also undergoes changes:
For some links to this topic:
Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made? (2014 there is a transcript) see also:
Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Interview with Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Pierre Lescaudron (2018)
Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Interview with Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Pierre Lescaudron (Part 2) (2018)

In short, 2025 is not likely when one looks into what the different models and statistical results actually say. However, those who argue for no climate change could be more off than those that hype it, if one considers the climate change agenda as a possible screen for earth changes, though most who promote the carbon footprint nonsense would be as blind to that possibility as those who claim all is normal.

5) Other articles on SOTT that mention and discuss Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) (Wiki) and the thermohaline circulation (Wiki) are: 6) Regarding other influences on weather and the climate:
Solar physicist's research discovers second solar cycle - sees global cooling ahead
But there is also:
Ocean Warming, Not Global Warming: Hydrothermal "Megaplume" Found in Indian Ocean
The deep sea is slowly warming

7) The politics that trails "climate change" research
It can hard to separate politics from global warming science. According to the president of the European Central Bank be prepared to renounce banknotes, and accept changes to the way your bank is controlled, all for the sake of countering climate change:.


One way or the other, changes are likely, be they earth changes, climate changes, or changes to the political and financial systems. The official excuse for many political measures is global warming caused by human activity, as promoted by a stream of papers and panic stirring headlines, videos and news reports, but is there more to it than that? Looking around, there have been substantial disclosures and admissions about the human-alien interaction, to the point that in spite of efforts to suppress and some beating around the bush, there may in fact be something that could be of greater importance than whether or not human activity affects the climate over which. along with various wars, economic woes and "pandemics", societies are being distracted.


Saturn

Saturn's Death Star-looking moon may have vast underground ocean

Mimas saturn moon death star
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via APThis Feb. 13, 2010 image provided by NASA shows Saturn’s moon Mimas and it’s large Herschel Crater, captured by the Cassini spacecraft.
"The major finding is to discover habitability conditions on a solar system object which we would never, never expect to have liquid water. It's really astonishing."

Astronomers have discovered that a tiny moon of Saturn, named Mimas, may harbor a hidden liquid ocean beneath its thick icy shell and may thus have the conditions for habitability.

This shocking finding radically changes the definition of what an ocean moon can be, and could ultimately redefine our search for alien life on moons in the solar system. That's because, at first appearance, Mimas — nicknamed the 'Death Star' because a large crater means it resembles the Empire's space station in Star Wars — doesn't look like the kind of body scientists would expect to support an ocean. In fact, it doesn't even look capable of supporting such a vast body of liquid at all.

Cloud Grey

Clouds disappear quickly during a solar eclipse, study shows

Disappearing Clouds
© Delft University of TechnologyThe removal of sunlight can lead to cooling of the ground. The rising air, responsible for forming cumulus clouds, is slowed down so that cumulus clouds disappear. When the solar eclipse is over, the ground warms up again and new cumulus clouds often form.
Stack clouds over land begin to disappear almost immediately during a partial solar eclipse. This shows new research from KNMI and TU Delft. Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map. Thanks to a new method, the measurements could be restored. The results may have consequences for climate engineering. Disappearing clouds could partly nullify the cooling effect of an artificial solar eclipse. The results were published today in Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Although the effects of solar eclipses have been studied for centuries, it was never known exactly how strongly clouds react. " From Earth you can count the clouds and see them disappear, but that only gives anecdotal evidence ", explains PhD student Victor Trees. " Clouds change constantly even without solar eclipse. "

Measure solar eclipses from space

Satellites in a geostationary orbit around the Earth can continuously measure many clouds at the same time, in large areas including impassable terrain. In the case of a solar eclipse, the measurements were previously not reliable. The algorithms of the satellites did not take into account the decrease in sunlight during solar eclipses. This resulted in large dark spots in the cloud maps of the earth.

We have now managed to restore the satellite measurements during solar eclipses by accurately calculating the percentage of the sun darkened for each location and time on Earth. " By far the majority of the solar eclipse consists of a partial eclipse, in which it is usually still full of light outside ", says Trees. The satellites still receive enough reflected sunlight there to reliably measure the clouds after the correction for the eclipse.

Shamrock

Irish student wins BT Young Scientist Prize 2018 for powerful Blackberry antibiotic

blackerry brambles
© N/AFor centuries, herbalists have used the juice of the fruit as an iron tonic and the leaves for dysentery and other bacterial infections of the stomach and elimination pathways.
A 15-year-old student from Co Cork who discovered a natural antibiotic in a blackberry bramble plant in his back garden has won the top prize at the 54th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition.

Simon Meehan of Coláiste Choilm, Ballincollig, who was declared BT Young Scientist and Technologist of the Year at an awards ceremony in Dublin's RDS on Friday night, found the "non toxic, organic, original antibiotic" after analysing 10 plants widely available in his locality.

"People are going deep into the Amazon rainforest looking for new antibiotics. But I'm a 15-year-old boy who found this down his own back garden. That has got to be amazing," he told The Irish Times.

Comment: The research is ongoing, but a quick glance on the studies done so far displays an array of potential health benefits of the widespread and common Blackberry plant. One example:
Health-promoting effects and immunity-boosting properties have been attributed to blackberry leaves since long ago. Hippocrates recommended blackberry stems and leaves soaked in white wine for facilitating childbirth [16]. Zia-UI-Haq et al. [25], in their review of the traditional uses of Rubus fruticosus leaves, reported that the decoction of the leaves has been used as tonic and a mouthwash; gargles help treating thrush, gum inflammation, sore throat, and mouth ulcers. The leaves are also chewed in order to strengthen the gums and to cure thrush. A poultice of the leaves is applied to abscesses and skin ulcers as an astringent. In addition, blackberry leaves and roots are a long-standing home remedy for anemia and menses, diarrhea, dysentery, cystitis, and hemorrhoids. Finally, they have traditionally been used against several respiratory problems [19].

Indeed, it has been demonstrated that the leaves of blackberry possess significant antimicrobial activity, higher than the fruit, against several bacterial strains, such as Salmonella typhi, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Micrococcus luteus, Proteus mirabilis, Bacillus subtilis, Citrobacteri sp., and Pseudomonas aeruginosa [25].



Rose

What plants 'hear'

flower headphones graphic plant hearing
© Eroshka / Shutterstock
They sense the buzzing sounds of pollinators, the vibrations of the wind.

It is not the trees ... that make a wood," the author J.A. Baker once suggested, "but the shape and disposition of the remaining light, of the sky that descends between the trees." Something similar may be true in relation to sound, because the forest also becomes apparent to many sentient creatures through the resonances in the spaces between the trees. The tap of raindrops on leaves, the clack of branches, and the rustle of vegetation shape our sense of what surrounds us. According to the botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, the xylem and phloem that transport vital fluids inside trees may be especially long in old-growth forests, and resonate in ways that birds find attractive, encouraging them to nest.

Plants reverberate both literally and figuratively. Literally, there is a vine in the Cuban rainforest that has evolved bowl-shaped leaves that act as sound reflectors. The leaves help echolocating bats home in on the vine's flowers twice as fast as they do those of other plants, and in return for a drink of nectar the bats pollinate the vine. Figuratively, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō imagines that he hears the sound of temple bells continuing in the flowers after the bells themselves have stopped.

Brain

What your brain is doing when you're not doing anything

brain at rest graphic
© Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine
Whenever you're actively performing a task — say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam — the parts of your brain required to carry it out become "active" when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you're zoning out on the couch?

The answer, researchers have found, is yes. Over the past two decades they've defined what's known as the default mode network, a collection of seemingly unrelated areas of the brain that activate when you're not doing much at all. Its discovery has offered insights into how the brain functions outside of well-defined tasks and has also prompted research into the role of brain networks — not just brain regions — in managing our internal experience.

In the late 20th century, neuroscientists began using new techniques to take images of people's brains as they performed tasks in scanning machines. As expected, activity in certain brain areas increased during tasks — and to the researchers' surprise, activity in other brain areas declined simultaneously. The neuroscientists were intrigued that during a wide variety of tasks, the very same brain areas consistently dialed back their activity.

Die

China betting on next-generation chip production despite US curbs - FT

CPU, electronics, chips
© Getty Images
Chinese chipmakers expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year despite US attempts to hinder the Asian nation's technological advancement, the Financial Times reported this week.

According to the report, citing people familiar with the matter, China's top chipmaker SMIC has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai to mass produce chips designed by Huawei. SMIC plans to use its existing stock of US and Dutch-made equipment to produce five-nanometer chips, the sources said.

"With the new 5nm node, Huawei is well on track to upgrade its new flagship handset and data center chips," one of the sources told FT. In September 2023, the sanctions-hit Chinese tech giant started successfully selling its Mate 60 Pro smartphone that uses high-end seven-nanometer chips.

Faced with mounting restrictions, the Chinese government has been investing heavily to develop a self-reliant semiconductor supply chain. The administration of US President Joe Biden introduced a sweeping set of export controls in 2022 aimed at slowing China's technological advance, claiming national security concerns. Among the measures was a ban on sales to China of certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment, and a block on shipments of chips for supercomputing systems and artificial intelligence.

China has repeatedly criticized the export curbs, claiming that they run counter to globally recognized market rules. Last month, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Washington's restrictions go beyond the concept of national security and destroy supply chains.

Comment: See also: China aims to boost chip production despite US restrictions - FT


Info

Colossal underwater canyon discovered near seamount deep in the Mediterranean Sea

Researchers have discovered a 33,000-foot-wide (10 kilometers) underwater canyon that was carved out of the Mediterranean seabed shortly before the sea dried up around 6 million years ago.
Underwater Canyon
© Jason Edwards via Getty ImagesA newly discovered underwater canyon was carved out of the seabed by extremely salty currents.
Scientists have discovered a giant underwater canyon in the eastern Mediterranean Sea that likely formed just before the sea transformed to a mile-high salt field.

The canyon formed around 6 million years ago, at the onset of the Messinian salinity crisis (MSC), when the Gibraltar gateway between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea narrowed and eventually pinched shut due to shifts in tectonic plates. The Mediterranean Sea became isolated from the world's oceans and dried up for roughly 700,000 years, leaving behind a vast expanse of salt up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick in some places.

As sea levels dropped, increasingly salty currents eroded the seabed and incised gullies several hundred feet deep along the steepest edges of the Mediterranean Sea. In a study published in the January issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers now describe a giant U-shaped canyon located 75 miles (120 km) south of Cyprus, in the depths of the Mediterranean's Levant Basin.

The 1,640-foot-deep (500 meters) and 33,000-foot-wide (10 km) canyon, which the researchers named after the nearby Eratosthenes seamount, likely formed underwater shortly before salt piled onto the seabed. Unlike the more coastal gullies, the canyon had no older "pre-salt" roots, according to the study.