tingilinde

bird flu

One might think people would be doing something about it, but...

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It may already be too late to rid America’s cattle herds of the bird flu virus. If it continues to circulate, it could become stable in the population. This is what has happened with flu in pigs around the world. That could also spell disaster—not only would the virus represent a constant risk to humans and other animals that come into contact with the cows, but it could also evolve over time. We can’t predict how this evolution might take shape, but there’s a chance the result could be a form of the virus that is better at spreading in people or causing fatal infections.

So far, it is clear that the virus has mutated but hasn’t yet acquired any of these more dangerous mutations, says Michael Tisza, a bioinformatics scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. That being said, Tisza and his colleagues have been looking for the virus in wastewater from 10 cities in Texas—and they have found H5N1 in all of them.

Tisza and his colleagues don’t know where this virus is coming from—whether it’s coming from birds, milk, or infected people, for example. But the team didn’t find any signal of the virus in wastewater during 2022 or 2023, when there were outbreaks in migratory birds and poultry. “In 2024, it’s been a different story,” says Tisza. “We’ve seen it a lot.”

Together, the evidence that the virus is evolving and spreading among mammals, and specifically cattle, has put virologists on high alert. “This virus is not causing a human pandemic right now, which is great,” says Tisza. “But it is a virus of pandemic potential.

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a tip of the hat to Roland

looking deeply into the starry night

van Gough had a good eye.

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To reveal hidden turbulence, the authors used brushstrokes in the painting like leaves swirling in a funnel of wind to examine the shape, energy, and scaling of atmospheric characteristics of the otherwise invisible atmosphere. They used the relative brightness, or luminance, of the varying paint colors as a stand-in for the kinetic energy of physical movement.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” Huang said. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

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cats are liquid

But only in one dimension

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Cats are liquids—at least according to a running joke on the internet, where videos abound of supposedly solid pet felines oozing under doors, spilling into vases, and pouring through impossibly small holes. Even Google’s artificial intelligence overview says kitties can be classified as fluids. (Take that one for what it’s worth.)

But do cats think of themselves as liquidlike entities that can slip through nearly any opening? Do they know how tall and wide they are, for example—a mental ability scientists call “body size awareness”?

Péter Pongrácz recently visited several homes around Budapest, Hungary, to find out. An ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University, he’s spent years researching the feline mind. He’s shown, for example, that like dogs, cats understand what we mean when we point—or even gaze—at something, a complex reading of our body language that eludes many species. But how much do cats know about their own bodies?

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musk is damaging astronmy

The current generation of satellites is much worse than the first.

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"Turning LOFAR back up and seeing these booming signals from these new generation of V2 Mini SpaceX satellites was a bit shocking," says Prof Dempsey.

"This is actually threatening the entirety of ground based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways. If it continues, without the sort of mitigation to make these satellites quiet, then it does become an existential threat for the kinds of astronomy we do," Prof Dempsey added.

The researchers stress that more regulation of space and how satellites operate is needed to avoid scientific work being compromised.

They said that as the largest provider of satellites, SpaceX could set a standard for limiting pollution.

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a link to a technical paper at the end of the piece.

Another good piece.

 

 

 

 

fleshing out 'the earth had a ring system' conjecture

Looking for evidence of meteor strikes and some climate change to turn the conjecture into a hyptothesis.  It's a technical paper, but not too technical. Jump in if the abstract makes sense.

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All large planets in our Solar System have rings, and it has been suggested that Mars may have had a ring in the past. This raises the question of whether Earth also had a ring in the past. Here, we examine the paleolatitudes of 21 asteroid impact craters from an anomalous ∼40 m.y. period of enhanced meteor impact cratering known as the Ordovician impact spike, and find that all craters fall in an equatorial band at ≤30°, despite ∼70 % of exposed, potentially crater-preserving crust lying outside this band. The beginning of this period is marked by a large increase in L chondrite material accumulated in sedimentary rocks at 465.76 ± 0.30 Ma, which, together with the impact spike, has long been suggested to result from break-up of the L chondrite parent body in the asteroid belt. Our binomial probability calculation indicates that it is highly unlikely that the observed crater distribution was produced by bolides on orbits directly from the asteroid belt (P = 4 × 10–8). We therefore propose that instead, a large fragment of the L chondrite parent body broke up due to tidal forces during a near-miss encounter with the Earth at ∼466 Ma. Given the longevity of the impact spike and sediment-hosted L chondrite debris accumulation, we suggest that a debris ring formed after this break up event, from which material deorbited to produce the observed crater distribution. We further speculate that shading of Earth by this ring may have triggered cooling into the Hirnantian global icehouse period.

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on the megatsunami

There are several general pieces on last year's megatsunami.  Greg points to what I think is the best.

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Their analysis of an initial high-energy seismic signal, combined with satellite images of a missing rock patch along a cliff along Dickson Fjord, allowed them to trace the direction of the landslide as it picked up glacier ice and became a mixed rock-ice avalanche before it reached the water. The resulting megatsunami run-up was more than 200 meters (650 feet) near the water entry point and an average of 60 meters (200 feet) along a 10-kilometer (6 miles) stretch of the fjord.

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The paper in Science is paywalled, but worth the read if you have access.

 

 

 

this year's Ig Nobels

This one is better than the last few

 

on changing people's minds on climate change

Facts and information doesn't work .. the best paths are through personal conversion.

 

 

in near darkness

Arctic microalgae can do photosynthesis in very low light conditions.

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Unexpectedly, the measurements showed that just a few days after the end of the month-long polar night, plant biomass was built up again, for which photosynthesis is absolutely essential. Extremely sensitive light sensors in the ice and water made it possible to measure the amount of light available.

The results were particularly surprising because photosynthesis in the Arctic Ocean took place under snow-covered sea ice, which only allows a few photons of incident sunlight to pass through: The microalgae only had about one hundred thousandth of the amount of light of a sunny day on the Earth's surface available for their growth.

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when you go battles

In some ares like New England white nose syndrome decimated bat populations.  Bats are an important part of the ecosystem and something unexpected was noticed.  The evidence isn't perfect, but you don't want to increase neurotoxins in the environment.

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Frank also looked at infant mortality in all the counties. In places where the bat populations had crashed, deaths due to accident or homicides stayed the same. But other deaths, such as those caused by disease or birth defects, rose 8%. In counties with healthy bat populations, the numbers didn’t shift one way or another. “My jaw dropped,” Frick says.

Several lines of evidence connect pesticides and other agrochemicals to human health risks. Although government regulators assess the potential dangers of these compounds before approving them—and set safety guidelines for their use—farm workers and bystanders can still get exposed when these compounds drift away from a farm or end up in groundwater. Epidemiological studies have linked certain compounds to developmental problems in infants and children, for example. Insecticides, which are often neurotoxic, are often of particular concern.

The increase in deaths is “huge,” says Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Francisco. The connection is plausible and concerning, she says. In an earlier study, she found an increase in infant mortality of similar magnitude due to worsening air pollution. But a puzzling fact about the new study is that other aspects of infant health, such as birth weight, did not correlate with the bat declines.

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