Completely forgot (well, not completely, just when I was sitting in front of the computer): Yesterday was the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. Here's a video taken at Stonehenge:
Relive the summer solstice, as we welcome in the longest day of the year at Stonehenge with sunset on 20 June and sunrise on 21 June, 2017.
And then something like this pops up. From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:
In addition to the House ethics fiasco and Iowa Republican Rep. Steve. King's attempt to encroach on the Supreme Court's turf, on Tuesday a House Republican introduced a rule to make it easier for the United States to rid itself of public lands We the People own. Think Progress reported:
A new rule, written by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT), establishes as fact that any legislation to dispose of public lands and natural resources would cost taxpayers exactly $0. This paves the way for the new Congress to get rid of vast swaths of public lands — all at the expense of the American taxpayer.
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a rules change this past week by a vote of 234 to 193, that would allow Congress the ability to essentially give away federal lands and buildings for free. The new rule, authored by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop of Utah, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, codifies that any legislation to dispose of federal land and natural resources would have a net sum zero cost to taxpayers. As the rule applies only to the House legislative rules, it is not subject to approval by the Senate or a presidential signature and is effective immediately. . . .
Since the House is required to account for any cost associated with any legislation it considers under Congressional Budget Office accounting rules and guidelines, legislation put forward now shall skip several steps in the normal legislative process, coming up for a vote without any discussion of the costs and benefits. This means that the House does not need to render an assessment or cost analysis of estimated financial losses resulting in legislation giving away public lands or buildings.
They're not wasting any time. The Bundys must be wetting their paints in glee. Wait until they find out that it's not for them:
The Wilderness Society said "this move paves the way for a wholesale giveaway of our American hunting, fishing and camping lands that belong to us all. Make no mistake, the giveaway is for the benefit of the drilling and mining interests that have a lock-grip on Congress and the rest of Washington."
(And just in case there's any doubt in your mind as to who the intended beneficiaries are:
According to the advocacy and activist group Oil Change International which tracks campaign contribution monies from fossil fuel corporations and the coal industry via the group's Dirty Energy Money web project, since 1999 Congressman Bishop has accepted campaign funds and contributions of more than $452,610 dollars from oil, gas and coal interests. Figures collected by Oil Change International show that greater than ten percent of that figure has come from the coal-friendly National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which has led the fight against the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. Oil giants Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Tesoro are also listed among Bishop's top campaign contributors.
When I was a kid, every summer we'd load up the car with our tent and camping gear and head west. One year, when my dad and mom were both between jobs, we did a grand tour: through the Badlands on our way west, then down to visit my uncle in Colorado, then up through Rocky Mountain National Park on our way to Yellowstone (you get no sense of how huge bison are from pictures -- you have to be standing a dozen yards away to really feel the kind of presence they have), then up to Glacier (looking across a mile-wide gorge and just being able to spot a little dot of white -- a Rocky Mountain goat picking its way across a mountainside), with a dip into Canada (just like Kansas, only flatter -- miles of wheat), then across the Idaho panhandle to Olympic National Park -- both
parts (I've never experienced such profound silence as in the mountain section, and the coast, foggy and all grays, was pure mystery). Down through Oregon to Nevada, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon (a mile deep, and sort of a reverse Glacier: distances were down and across, instead of up and across, and equally vast). There were also times spent camping in the Everglades (which is mostly walkways -- there's not that much dry land -- and a boat ride through the mangroves, being paced by dolphins), and Smoky Mountains National Park (beautiful, old, worn-down mountains, not so far from my ancestral home, covered in forest, comfortable and reassuring).
The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.
The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame.
The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and salamanders.
The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which humans dominate the planet. “We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” said Prof Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the report.
The Field Museum of Natural History, at the end of its "Evolving Planet" exhibition, marks the present as the Sixth Mass Extinction. I had thought they were being just a bit alarmist, but apparently not.
It all boils down to something I've been saying for years: There are just too many people. Human beings are, with the exception of some termites and ants, the single most populous species on earth, and we put a tremendous strain on resources.
The biggest cause of tumbling animal numbers is the destruction of wild areas for farming and logging: the majority of the Earth’s land area has now been impacted by humans, with just 15% protected for nature. Poaching and exploitation for food is another major factor, due to unsustainable fishing and hunting: more than 300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction, according to recent research.
Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants. Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug. Amphibians have suffered one of the greatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts.
There are some small rays of hope, but there's a big "but":
However, some species are starting to recover, suggesting swift action could tackle the crisis. Tiger numbers are thought to be increasing and the giant panda has recently been removed from the list of endangered species.
In Europe, protection of the habitat of the Eurasian lynx and controls on hunting have seen its population rise fivefold since the 1960s. A recent global wildlife summit also introduced new protection for pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammals, and rosewoods, the most trafficked wild product of all.
But stemming the overall losses of animals and habitats requires systemic change in how society consumes resources, said Barrett. People can choose to eat less meat, which is often fed on grain grown on deforested land, and businesses should ensure their supply chains, such as for timber, are sustainable, he said.
The big question, as always, is "Is there the will to do what's necessary?" I'm not convinced.
This is a series that I've been thinking about for a while. I'm not sure why. It's really meant to be a survey of life on earth, how it originated and how it developed, but I felt like I should start at the beginning.
The most widely accepted theory of the origins of the universe at this point is the Big Bang Theory: there was a point of very high density and very high temperature which developed an instability and exploded, creating the universe, about 13.8 billion years ago. It wasn't really the universe as we know it at that point, because it was very, very hot, but eventually it cooled enough to allow the formation of things like subatomic particles. Then gravity and the other major forces took over, and we have, first, atoms, then stars. Our sun was one of those stars. Here's what seems to be a pretty accurate exposition of the theory, at Wikipedia. And as you can see from this video, it wasn't really all that straightforward.
In Einstein's formulation, the laws of physics actually break before the singularity is reached. But scientists extrapolate backward as if the physics equations still hold, said Robert Brandenberger, a theoretical cosmologist at McGill University in Montreal, who was not involved in the study.
"So when we say that the universe begins with a big bang, we really have no right to say that," Brandenberger told Live Science.
There are other problems brewing in physics — namely, that the two most dominant theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, can't be reconciled.
Quantum mechanics says that the behavior of tiny subatomic particles is fundamentally uncertain. This is at odds with Einstein's general relativity, which is deterministic, meaning that once all the natural laws are known, the future is completely predetermined by the past, Das said.
And neither theory explains what dark matter, an invisible form of matter that exerts a gravitational pull on ordinary matter but cannot be detected by most telescopes, is made of.
I sort of like this idea -- considering that most of the world's religious traditions assume that the earth and the universe are cyclic, with no beginning and no end . . . well, food for thought, at the very least.
At any rate, starting about 13.5 billion years ago, we have stars. The sun was one of those stars, formed about 4.5-5 billion years ago in a cloud of molecules -- mostly hydrogen, with a little helium and some heavier elements thrown in for fun. Some of those molecules began to attract each other -- gravity again -- and as the group got bigger, the pull became stronger, pulling in more molecules until, finally, we had ignition. At the core of the sun the pressure and temperature are so intense that we have, in effect, a really, really big fusion reactor.
Now, there was still a lot of dust and gas around the sun, mostly forming a big disc, which contained not only hydrogen and helium, but also heavier elements -- remember, other fusion reactors -- stars -- had been burning merrily along for 8 or 9 billion years, and some had exploded after converting the lighter elements into heavier elements -- carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel, all the way up to uranium: the building blocks of planets.
The creation of the earth was undoubtedly a lot more spectacular than the creation of the sun -- lots of crashing and explosions as actual rocks collided and stuck together.
Here's Neil deGrasse Tyson with a description of the process:
Pretty neat, huh?
So, now we have a sun and a planet -- a whole solar system, actually (well, OK, a whole universe, but for this we're keeping it local) -- so where do we go from here? Well, life, of course. After all, that's what we're most interested in. But we need to wait about a billion years, for things to calm down a little bit, so that's for next time.
22 million years. I had no idea hummingbirds had been around that long. And they've been very successful at being hummingbirds.
The new, time-calibrated evolutionary tree shows that ancestral hummingbirds split from the swifts and treeswifts about 42 million years ago, probably in Eurasia. By about 22 million years ago, the ancestral species of all modern hummingbirds had made its way to South America, and that's when things really took off.
The Andes Mountains are a particular hotspot for hummingbird evolution, because diversification occurred along with the uplift of those peaks over the past 10 million years. About 140 hummingbird species live in the Andes today.
Hummingbirds are the major, if not only, pollinators for certain species of orchids, which, funny thing, also show remarkable diversity and adaptation in the Andes. Hummingbirds are, however, a New World phenomenon. Their niche as orchid pollinators in the Old World seems to be largely the province of certain species of moths. Well, where there' a niche, there's an organism, I always say.
(Not that hummingbirds pollinate only orchids, or that orchids are only pollinated by hummingbirds. But there's a strong relationship among certain species, and a lot of evidence for co-evolution.)
And a little bit of a romantic vision, courtesy of Martin Johnson Heade (who did a lot of paintings of orchids and hummingbirds, if I remember correctly):
One of the commenters there came up with the information that it's Hymenopus coronatus, from Malaysia and Indonesia. It does sort of look like an orchid, although I was thinking more Encyclia than something like Dendrobium.
Mimicry as a strategy in support of both predation and mating is fairly widespread, and some of the most intriguing practitioners are orchids. (It's worth noting that some species mimic not only appearance, but scents.)
It's not exactly Saturday Science, but it sort of fits the mood of the day. Via AmericaBlog, this:
Under the heading what to do with a snowy roof and a jar lid. It's some kind of corvid -- one of the commenters at AmericaBlog identified it has a jackdaw, another thought hooded crow, common in Europe.
What I found interesting is that it tried a couple of different slopes, and then took off with the lid.
The news is the usual mix of non-scandals, made-up scandals, idiotic commentaries, and dodging and weaving by the movers and shakers. Just to give you a good take on how important it all is, consider this:
The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 250 million to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. As a kid, this brought to mind one endless summer when dinosaurs flourished. And many of the books I read picked one environment from three different periods within the era to represent dinosaur life. Little Coelophysis was the canonical Triassic dinosaur; the huge sauropods and theropods of the Morrison Formation represented the Jurassic, and a Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus versus Triceratops face-off ultimately capped off the succession. With the periods juxtaposed this way, millions of years didn’t seem so very long.
But let’s unpack some of that scenery. Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and their neighbors roamed western North America about 150 million years ago. This slice of time falls in the latter portion of the Jurassic. The traditional representatives of the latest Cretaceous scene—Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops—did not evolve until about 67 million years ago. By themselves, these dates are just labels, but think of them falling along evolution’s timeline. About 83 million years separated Apatosaurus from Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus from Triceratops. The so-called Age of Mammals—which began when the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out—has been going on for about 66 million years. Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus.
(Emphasis in original.)
And just to give you an idea of what the world looked in the time of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus:
There's a really neat site called "The Paleomap Project" with maps of the earth through time. It's fascinating, particularly when you think about how they can identify various landmasses -- do you know where Alaska was during the Cambrian era?
I may just spend the next hour browsing through that.
Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.
The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle."
Here's the part that stopped me:
"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving several thousand scientists.
"What kind of Higgs boson it is." Now there's some fine-tuning.
This is sort of mind-blowing, in a good sort of way -- as I always say, the more we learn about the universe, the more fascinating it becomes.
Strangely enough, I can't seem to find a picture of it.
One of the largest ancient asteroid impact zones on Earth has been discovered in north-eastern South Australia.
The impact zone, which centres on the East Warburton Basin near the Queensland border, was caused by an asteroid up to 20 kilometres-wide that slammed into the planet between 298 and 360 million years ago, report scientists from the Australian National University and University of Queensland.
Terrain around the impact site shows evidence of changes caused by shock-wave related deformation and heating of the ground by an impact event, says study co-author, Dr Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University.
"This shock metamorphic terrain covers an area of over 30,000 square kilometres making it the third-largest site of its kind ever discovered on Earth," says Glikson.
Yeah, so, 300 million years ago and in the middle of nowhere. So what?
"The 280 to 360 million years old impact window places this in the same epoch as the late Devonian mass extinction event".
The late Devonian mass extinction was one of five major extinction events in Earth's history, wiping out large groups of marine species.
"There are indications of mass extinction at this time caused by an impact winter, with the huge flash of the asteroid, major fires and seismic events with magnitudes of 10, 11 and 12, which would have disrupted habitats," says Glikson.
A Richter 12 earthquake? You want to try one of those?
Scientists analysing Australian rocks have discovered traces of bacteria that lived a record-breaking 3.49 billion years ago, a mere billion years after Earth formed.
If the find withstands the scrutiny that inevitably faces claims of fossils this old, it could move scientists one step closer to understanding the first chapters of life on Earth. The discovery could also spur the search for ancient life on other planets.
These traces of bacteria "are the oldest fossils ever described. Those are our oldest ancestors," said Nora Noffke, a biogeochemist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk who was part of the group that made the find and presented it last month at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
One thing that I find fascinating about this is that the cyanobacteria they're discussing are responsible for the first mass extinction: they're the ones that started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere and killed off all their anaerobic brethren.
But still -- "a mere billion years"? I guess it all depends on your point of view.
And they're orchids, which makes it even better. I love orchids, and the weirder they are, the more I love them. Here's a report on two new species from Cuba. And here are the flowers:
That's Tetramicra riparia, a tiny one -- flowers smaller than a dime. (There are smaller ones -- you need a magnifying glass to make out any details on most of the Dendrochilums -- but this is a little cutie.) And here's Encyclia navarroi:
I realize it's sideways, but that's the way they arrange themselves on the flower stalk. I'm especially fond of Encyclias -- I have an Encyclia tampensis, which is native to Florida, which I have managed to bloom exactly once in the last ten years, but it's a great one. It's darker than this -- real mahogany in color:
Maybe once I get into a decent apartment, I'll start growing orchids again -- miniatures, on the windowsill. There are Oncidiums that grow smaller than the palm of your hand, and have these long flower stalks with tons of flowers. Something to think about.
In the fall sometimes you can see feathers lying on the ground that birds have shed when they start their winter molt. They're really pretty remarkable -- intricate, strong, and beautiful. I think the most interesting ones are the small covert feathers, the kind with a bit of down at the base of the shaft, and then flat above that. The idea that they evolved from reptile scales -- as did our hair -- is pretty amazing.
There's a new article I just discovered about how the evolution of feathers played a key role in birds being able to fly.
Dr Jakob Vinther, from the University of Bristol's Schools of Biological and Earth Sciences, said: "We are starting to get an intricate picture of how feathers and birds evolved from within the dinosaurs. We now seem to see that feathers evolved initially for insulation. Later in evolution, more complex vaned or pinnate feathers evolved for display.
"These display feathers turned out to be excellent membranes that could have been utilised for aerial locomotion, which only very late in bird evolution became what we consider flapping flight. This new research is shedding light not just on how birds came to fly, but more specifically on how feathers came to be the way they are today -- one of the most amazing and highly specialised structures in nature."
If you look closely, you can see that the individual barbs interlock, which makes a nice, tight surface that's helpful for insulation and for flying. Here's a good post on the anatomy of a feather.
And not only are they useful, they're beautiful -- and contribute to some spectacular birds:
Well, not so little -- it's about the size of Jupiter, but much heavier:
Montreal astronomers have found a lonely planet drifting through space without a solar system to call home.
It is 130 light-years from Earth, four light-years from the nearest star, in a region so dark it's invisible to ordinary telescopes.
But the new "rogue" planet, called CFBDSIR2149, gave away its position because it is warm - about 400 C - and heat shows up on infrared telescopes. . . .
The new planet is about the size of Jupiter, but it's believed to weigh between four and seven times more than Jupiter. The astronomers think it has a rocky centre surrounded by dense gas, which is the source of its heat.
Dinosaurs, that it. Here's a somewhat belated announcement of another new species, this one about the size of a cat.
Not every dinosaur grew up to be a mighty predator like Tyrannosaurus rex or a hulking vegan like Apatosaurus. A few stayed small, and some of the smallest dinosaurs that ever lived — tiny enough to nip at your heels — were among the first to spread across the planet more than 200 million years ago.
Fossils of these miniature, fanged plant-eaters known as heterodontosaurs, or “different toothed reptiles,” have turned up as far apart as England and China. Now, in a discovery that has been at least 50 years in the making, a new and especially bizarre species of these dwarf herbivores has been identified in a slab of red rock that was collected in the early 1960s by scientists working in South Africa.
Actually, I think it's kind of cute.
Skin, scales and quills were added to a cast of the skull of Heterodontosaurus, the best-known heterodontosaurid from South Africa.
Cougars, it says here, are recolonizing the midwestern U.S.
Cougars are recolonising the mid-western United States, according to scientists, reversing 100 years of decline. The population of big cats, also known as American mountain lions, has rocketed in these states, from less than a hundred in 1990 to about 30,000 today.
Michelle LaRue from the University of Minnesota said that the midwest population of cougars had been "effectively zero" two decades ago. "That's why this is so exciting," she said. "We have hard evidence that the western population has spread."
The cougars are one of my must-sees everytime I visit the Zoo, simply because they are so beautiful.
Polar bears, long thought to have branched off relatively recently from brown bears, developing their white coats, webbed paws and other adaptations over the last 150,000 years or so to cope with life on Arctic Sea ice, are not descended from brown bears, scientists report.
Instead, according to a research team that looked at DNA samples from the two species and from black bears, the brown bear and polar bear ancestral lines have a common ancestor and split about 600,000 years ago.
It gets even more complicated than that.
The findings challenge the idea that the bears adapted very quickly, but confirm that they have made it through warming periods and loss of sea ice before. It may have been touch and go for the bears, however, because the authors find evidence of evolutionary bottlenecks, probably during warm periods, when only small populations survived, even though warming was occurring much more slowly than it is now.
Nope, not about politics -- that's pretty much lows these days. It's about mountains and deep sea trenches, in the news because director James Cameron just dove to 35,756 feet below sea level. That's in the Marianas Trench, which is fairly close to Japan.
There are a number of trenches in the oceans, places where one plate of the crust is being forced under another, also known as "subduction zones." The Mariana Islands, which are right there at the edge, are the result of volcanism from the activity of the two plates. But the Marianas Trench is the deepest.
That got me to thinking: what's the highest point above sea level? Well, yes, it's still Mt. Everest, at 29,029 feet. It's probably safest to stick with "above sea level" because if you start looking at "highest mountains," you have to take into account sea mounts. Mauna Kea, for example, is only 13,802 feet above sea level. From its base, however, it measures 33,474 feet. That's over six miles -- normal cruising altitude for a commercial jet liner.
And yet, all these mountains and trenches are just bumps and wrinkles on the surface of the earth. Just to put things in perspective.
Footnote: Think about cranes. They summer in Siberia, and then migrate to India and Southeast Asia in the winter. Over the Himalayas. That's pretty amazing.
