well... it isn't BAD news, anyway...
Most news these days is pretty depressing... but not all!
Here are some items that are worth reading... that have nothing whatsoever to do with Amy Coney Barrett...
If you don't read any of the others... you MUST read the one about the llama...
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Wow!
Pretty stunning, hmm??
From the European perspective, the USA must look like a super-power run more by ancient belief systems than by critical thinking. The word 'wary' might be an understatement.
Yup
There is something fatally flawed with this map. So much so that I surprised no one has commented on it yet.
The posted image makes it appear that the United States is the only country in the world that widely believes in the existence of God. What the posted image doesnt reveal is that it is only showing half the populated world.
Where is South America, where belief in God is very widespread ? Where is Africa, where there is belief in God? Where is India, the second or third most populous place on earth where belief in God is extremely widespread? Where is Australia ? Where is the Philippines? Where is Indonesia?
Sorry, but as presented this image is a joke.
It compares the US and Europe. How is that a joke?
That was the response I was about to give.
Here is another Pew Research image:
I remember an article, perhaps thirty years ago, that said that in the "transatlantic community", only Ireland came anywhere close to America's religiosity. It doesn't look like that's true any more.
"Religion is important to me" is a different question than belief in God.
I'd guess the correlation is pretty high...
Yes it is. It is a different study. But if one is looking to better understand the importance of religious beliefs (and thus gods) around the world, then one might appreciate what I just offered.
And as well it would make a better comparison - for example Buddhists and Hindus do make up a fairly substantial population of the world.
It would interest me to be able to see that image, but for that, instead of just copying from google and pasting it you would have to save it to your picture library, make sure it is saved as a jpg or png image, and then post it from there. Sorry for the extra trouble.
Here you go:
Thanks, TiG. I didn't expect to see China's percentage quite that low, because Buddhism/Taoism is fairly popular - my wife's family are Buddhists - we even have a small shrine to Boddhasatva GuanYin in our home, and there still are a lot of Muslims throughout China - the biggest mosque I've ever seen is not that far from our home, and notwithstanding their complaints, Christians still pray in churches here.
Buddhism is not theism (more like panentheism) so it might be an issue with semantics.
I always thought it was considered a religion.
.
'Jet fighter' godwit breaks world record for non-stop bird flight
Bar-tailed godwit flies more than 12,000km from Alaska to New Zealand in 11 days
The bar-tailed godwit set off from south-west Alaska on 16 September and arrived in a bay near Auckland 11 days later, having flown at speeds of up to 55mph.
The male bird, known as 4BBRW in reference to the blue, blue, red and white rings fitted on its legs, also had a 5gm satellite tag harnessed on its lower back to allow scientists to track its progress. It was one of four to leave together from the Alaskan mudflats where they had been feeding on clams and worms for two months.
The male bar-tailed godwit, whose standard weight is between 190gm and 400gm, can double in size before a long flight but is able to shrink its internal organs to lighten the load.
After leaving Alaska, the birds headed south over the Aleutian Islands and on to the Pacific Ocean. The journey is thought to have been prolonged by strong easterly winds, which pushed the group towards Australia.
The satellite recorded a point-to-point flight of 12,854km but the scientists believe that once rounding errors are taken into account the journey will have been around 12,200km. It is estimated that the total flight time was 224 hours. The previous longest recorded non-stop flight by a bird, of 11,680km, was recorded in 2007.
Dr Jesse Conklin, from the Global Flyway Network, a consortium of scientists studying epic migratory journeys, said: “They seem to have some capability of knowing where they are on the globe. We can’t really explain it but they seem to have an onboard map.
“They are flying over open ocean for days and days in the mid-Pacific; there is no land at all. Then they get to New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea where there are quite a few islands and, we might be anthropomorphising, but it really looks like they start spotting land and sort of think: ‘Oh, I need to start veering or I will miss New Zealand’.”
It is not certain but it is believed the birds do not sleep on the journey during which they flap their wings most of the time.
“They have an incredibly efficient fuel-to-energy rate,” Conklin said. “They have a lot of things going for them. They are designed like a jet fighter. Long, pointed wings and a really sleek design which gives them a lot of aerodynamic potential.”
The birds were among 20 caught and tagged by the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre, in the Firth of Thames, south-east of Auckland, in late 2019. They are expected to start the return flight in March, flying across Asia where they will feed for a month around the Yellow Sea, before returning to Alaska.
Scientists with the Global Flyway Network believe the route across the Pacific functions as an “ecological corridor” rather than a barrier to the birds; providing a wind-assisted passage relatively free of the risks of disease and predators.
“There are other birds that make similar-scale flights of say 10,000km but there are not a whole load of places in the world where it is necessary,” Conklin said. “So it is not necessarily that this is the only bird capable of it – but it is the only bird that needs to do it.”
That is simply amazing.
Do birds sleep? While flying?
The article says they flap their wings most of the time. Does that mean they glide the rest of the time and remain airborne throughout, or are they capable of floating on water like ducks, and take a little rest on the ocean surface now and then?
No idea...
From a Tiger Hugging a Tree to Pallas’ Cats Frolicking, These Are This Year’s Top Nature Photos
Sergey Gorshkov, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020
There is a super-duper slideshow, of course...
Love ''The Pose''
Goddam tree-huggers!
A superb series of photos. Yesterday I almost posted it on the Creative Arts group.
My wings hurt just thinking about it.
Was that comment meant to be posted on the previous article about the long distance flying bird?
Solar energy reaches historically low costs
Solar is ‘the new king’
Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Sunshine is free, but the technology needed to turn it into usable electricity can be expensive. To encourage more people and companies to switch to solar power, countries can adjust their policies to make purchasing that equipment more affordable. Today, more than 130 countries have policies that lower the cost of building new solar installations. This is the first year that the IEA took such policies into consideration when calculating the cost of solar energy in its annual World Energy Outlook report. After doing so, their estimates of the cost of solar power fell by between 20 to 50 percent per region compared to last year, Carbon Brief first reported .
Solar is on track to become “the new king of electricity supply,” the report says, as prices continue to fall. It’s expected to dominate more and more of the market over the next decade, boosted by global efforts to tackle climate change. The EU, for example, set a goal to source 32 percent of its energy from renewables by 2030.
“It does seem that the policy support is here to stay which is a very good thing,” says Brent Wanner, who leads power generation modeling and analysis for the IEA’s World Energy Outlook. “These policy frameworks are really essential to underpinning those low costs, which then underpin the kind of growth we need to move towards climate ambitions.”
In most countries in the world, it’s consistently cheaper to build solar farms than new coal- or gas-fired power plants, the report says. For utility-scale solar projects completed this year, the average cost of electricity generation over the lifetime of the plant (called the levelized cost of electricity) was between $35 to $55 per megawatt-hour in some of the world’s biggest markets — the US, Europe, China, and India. Just four years ago, the global average levelized cost for solar power was $100 per megawatt-hour, according to the World Economic Forum . About a decade ago, it was $300.
The cost for coal, in comparison, currently ranges between about $55 and $150 per megawatt-hour, according to the new IEA report — about the same as where it’s been for more than a decade. And the coal industry has been in decline despite US efforts from the Trump administration to prop it up. Globally, coal use probably won’t go back to pre-pandemic levels even if the economy recovers next year, the IEA anticipates.
The forecast for solar in the future, on the other hand, is sunny. Electricity demand is down now because of the pandemic, but the IEA expects that people’s appetite for electricity could rebound quickly once the pandemic is under control and the economy recovers. It also anticipates a future where solar power continues to grow at record-setting speeds to meet increasing consumer demands.
“The good news about this is that solar tech continues to improve and innovation continues to drive those costs down,” Wanner says.
Good news.
I read somewhere that solar panels deteriorate over time and require replacement. The cost of that should be taken into consideration.
ALL infrastructure deteriorates over time. I don't know whether solar is more or less susceptible, but certainly fossil-fuel-fired plants also get old...
Replacing a too-old nuclear plant is very expensive.
Oregon state trooper helps fend off mama llama trauma
He kept the llama from running amok by ironically tying her to his car's bullbar
"So, there I was minding my own business when I got a call from OSP Dispatch, telling me that there was a llama, yes a llama, in the road on the I-84 onramp at milepost 304 eastbound. I got there and sure enough a displeased mama llama was laying on the onramp. The owner was taking three llamas from Washington to Utah in the bed of a 1500 Dodge short bed pickup. The truck had a homemade stock rack that didn’t quiet hold the three 🦙 🦙 🦙 (while it took) an uphill corner. Fortunately enough for the llama and myself, the speeds were slow, and traffic was minimal.
"The owner got about a mile down the road before he realized his mama llama was missing out of the back of the truck. But of course, when he stopped his truck, the other two llamas bailed out, running free on the interstate. The owner ran back and gave me the rope to hook to mama llama's harness. Mama llama refused to get up as you could see by her displeased facial expression … so I told (the owner) that I would llama sit, while he wrangled up the others ..."
We should note at this point that he tied the llama to his Charger's bullbar. How ironic. Anyway, he continues ...
"In the end, mama llama was reloaded into the truck and provided some medication to ease her mama llama trauma and also reunited with the rest of her travel companions. The driver was warned for ORS 818.300 operating with a leaking or shifting load.”
I can't say I was expecting a state trooper to provide us with something like "mama llama trauma" today, but there you have it. Apparently, if you're going to be pulled over in the Beaver State, Trooper Macy seems unlikely to be a jerk about it.
Tribes Reintroduce Swift Fox to Northern Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation
After absence of more than 50 years, the pint-sized predator returns to the prairie
A reintroduced swift fox outfitted with
a GPS collar looks out across the
shortgrass prairie of the Fort Belknap
Reservation in northern Montana.
Wes Overvold
For the tribes of Fort Belknap, restoring and maintaining their natural environment has been a priority for decades. The tribes reintroduced buffalo to the reservation’s 675,147 acres of prairie in the 1970s and the herd, centered around a 22,000-acre plot at Snake Butte, is now close to 800 strong. Fort Belknap also brought back black-footed ferrets via reintroductions in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But these reintroductions aren’t just about the environment, says Mike “Gopher” Fox, who is part of the Fort Belknap Tribal Council and a member of the Gros Ventre tribe.
“We don’t look at animals as just four legged or winged, we look at them as family,” says Fox. “For us it was like part of our family was missing all those years. Bringing the buffalo, the black-footed ferret and now the swift fox back, bringing those family members back home, connects us to our history with this land. It gives us a lot of pride as Natives.”
The swift fox weighs just around five pounds and is the smallest wild canine in North America. The animals occupy one main den and several sattelite dens year-round, which they sometimes annex from local prairie dog colonies. The foxes use these burrows and blistering speed—bursts of up to 40 miles-per-hour—to capture prey and escape their main predator, the coyote.
Swift foxes ( Vulpes velox ) once roamed the Great Plains from Canada all the way to Texas. But in the late 1800s, efforts to exterminate coyotes and wolves with poison and traps hammered the swift fox population, reducing its numbers by more than 90 percent. More recently, successful reintroductions in Canada and elsewhere in Montana beginning in the 1980s have helped these house cat-sized foxes reclaim around 40 percent of their traditional range.
A newly released swift fox races across the shortgrass prairie of the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. These tiny foxes are barely a foot tall and weigh between five and seven pounds. They depend on the short grasses of this type of prairie, without it they are unable to spot and escape predators like coyotes.
Wes Overvold
This isolation makes the northern swift fox populations more vulnerable to being snuffed out by disease, drought and other disasters, says Hila Shamon , an ecologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) who collaborated with the tribes of Fort Belknap on the reintroduction project. Bringing swift fox back to Fort Belknap will help fill in the gap between the northern and southern populations, which is essential for species’ genetic diversity and long-term recovery, according to Shamon.
After two years of planning and research, the reservation’s new foxes were captured in late August and early September in Wyoming's Albany and Carbon counties. The effort was a collaboration between Fort Belknap, SCBI, Defenders of Wildlife and the World Wildlife Fund, that sent teams fanning out across the prairie to set metal box traps baited with bacon and sardines.
Jessica Alexander, owner and biologist at Little Dog Wildlife Inc. who trapped foxes for the initiative, says they caught as many as eight foxes in a single night. For the members of the team who went out to check the traps in the pre-dawn hours, success sounded like the diminutive canine's throaty growl emanating from inside one of the metal traps. After giving the foxes a health check and a GPS collar, Alexander and the other team members moved them to Fort Belknap. When the foxes arrived on the reservation, wildlife professionals put the wily critters inside carefully selected patches of fenced-in habitat that featured abandoned prairie dog burrows—a swift fox's favorite refuge—and simply opened up a gap in the fence after three to five days. This release technique, called a soft release, is meant to help the animals acclimate to their new environs and reduce the stress of relocation.
“A number of the foxes tunneled out of the enclosures, but for the ones that stuck around we would just open up the pen,” says Tim Vosburgh, Fort Belknap’s tribal wildlife biologist. “Nearly all the foxes I released didn’t sprint off the way you might expect. They mostly stayed put—they felt comfort in having a burrow nearby.”
The releases occurred between September 12 and 20 as part of a five-year recovery plan. In the second and third years of the project, foxes will come from Colorado and Kansas, respectively, before the cycle starts over again with Wyoming in year four. The goal of the project is to release between 40 and 50 foxes each year. More releases were planned for the fall of 2020 to reach the 40-animal threshold, but a recent surge in cases of COVID-19 on the reservation caused the plan to be postponed until next fall.
There's lots more in the Original Article.
I read recently that many endangered species were dying out, leaving no survivors. I believe that for our own survival and ecological survival generally the "Circle of Life" must be maintained. The loss of species leaves holes in that circle. What the tribe has been doing is predictable, because their respect for that "circle", far outpaces that of the political governments.
How Venus flytraps store short-term ‘memories’ of prey
Calcium concentrations in leaf cells signal when the carnivorous plants should snap shut
causing the trap to close.
DAVE-CARROLL/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS
A Venus flytrap’s short-term “memory” can last about 30 seconds. If an insect taps the plant’s sensitive hairs only once, the trap remains still. But if the insect taps again within about half a minute, the carnivorous plant’s leaves snap shut, ensnaring its prey.
How Venus flytraps ( Dionaea muscipula ) remember that initial touch has been a mystery. A new study reveals that the plants do so using calcium , researchers report online October 5 in Nature Plants .
Scientists know that some plants have a type of long-term memory, says study coauthor Mitsuyasu Hasebe, a biologist at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan. One example is vernalization, whereby plants remember long periods of winter cold as a signal to flower in the spring. But short-term memory is more enigmatic, and “this is the first direct evidence of the involvement of calcium,” Hasebe says.
Even though the carnivorous plant, famous for its jawlike leaves, has no brain or nervous system, it can apparently count to five and distinguish between live prey and things like rain, which could inadvertently trigger its leaves to snap shut, wasting energy ( SN: 1/24/16 ). Previous research suggested that calcium plays a role in this process, but with the help of genetic engineering, Hasebe and colleagues were able to actually see calcium in action.
After a hair inside a Venus flytrap is tapped once, calcium floods the leaves’ cells,
which researchers could observe after genetically engineering plants to glow when calcium was present.
A second tap, a few seconds after the first, brings more calcium into the cells,
brightening the glow and causing the trap to snap shut.
The researchers added genes to the Venus flytraps that produce a protein, which glows green when exposed to calcium. When the team tapped one of the trap’s sensory hairs, the base of that hair began glowing, and then the glow spread through the leaf before beginning to fade. When the researchers touched the hair a second time — or touched a different hair on the leaf — within about 30 seconds, the trap’s leaves lit up even brighter than before, and the plant quickly snapped shut.
The results show that the flytrap’s short-term memory is a waxing and waning of calcium within leaves’ cells, the researchers say. Each time a sensory hair is triggered, it signals the release of calcium. When the calcium concentration reaches a certain level, achieved by that second, faster surge of calcium, the trap closes.
Still, the research doesn’t reveal all of the plant’s secrets. To sense prey, “the flytrap operates a fast electrical network” that can convert a fly or other insect’s movement into small voltage changes that ripple across the plant’s cells, says coauthor Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Scientists are still unsure how the calcium memory system works in tandem with that electrical network to activate the plant’s snap.
“The close association of calcium and electrical signal is known in ordinary plants, so it was also expected in the Venus flytrap,” says Andrej Pavlovič, a plant physiologist at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic who wasn’t involved in the study. But the most interesting part of the research was getting the trap to glow, he says. Such genetic transformations are common in frequently studied plants, but more difficult to do in less well-studied predatory plants, so successfully engineering the flytrap’s genes to make the plant glow “is a great leap forward in studies on carnivorous plants.”
In my opinion there was logic in combining Botany and Zoology into Biology, because having studied both I learned that there is plant life that is more advanced than some animal life - where does one draw the line?
Good question.
I'm not sure that "more advanced" makes any sense, when talking about life. Unless we someday arrive at a "purpose" for life, we cannot say who does it "best".
Bacteria do a pretty good job...
Maybe I should have used the word "developed".
I think you'd need to define your terms in any case.
Humans are very anthropocentric... hardly surprising... But hard to get away from. We automatically consider everything from our own point of view.
An ant might believe, with some reason, that its species is the most advanced...
LOL. Okay, if we discount the possibility of aliens that are more developed/advanced than we humans are, can you name a species on our planet that is more developed;/advanced than we are?
If the objective is to snack on treetops, giraffes are much more advanced.
For life in the ocean, fish...
And so on...
Humans do several things very well. They may survive their talents' accomplishments. But if they destroy themselves, we won't consider them "advanced", at all.
I suppose if I were to ask if any other species was capable of ddoing calculus, you would ask me how do I know an alligator can't do calculus, so that's enough for tonight - I'm going to bed.
(... for tomorrow morning...)
Of course an alligator can't do calculus.
And a human cannot float still and silent, with just eyes and nostrils above the surface, awaiting a snack.
LOL. Okay. Actually, I can't do calculus either, and although I can float still and silent, I can't keep only my eyes and nostrils above the surface, nor can I stretch my neck to eat leaves off the top of a tree.
To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
And a reason for all beings to have their special skills.
The Byrds...
Better than Bob.
Turn, turn, turn, to Ecclesiastes.