It's been a while since I sent around a "science news" report.
Big news -- the "near approach" of a comet! https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/04/now-visible-comet-as-big-as-the-full-moon/
On Dec. 16th, Comet
46P/Wirtanenwill approach Earth less than 11.5 million km away–making it one of
the 10 closest-approaching comets of the Space Age. It’s a small
comet, with a nucleus barely 1 km wide, but such proximity makes even a small
things appear large. The comet’s gaseous atmosphere is now as wide as a full
Moon.
Despite its close approach,
46P/Wirtanen will never become a Great Comet like Comet Hayakutake in
1996 or Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Wirtanen’s relatively small core
of dirty ice cannot produce enough gas and dust to create a really
bright, flamboyant tail. The best case scenario is probably a big diffuse cloud
of magnitude +3 or +4, barely visible to the unaided eye but an easy target for
binoculars and small wide-field telescopes.
Sooner or later, one of these comets or asteroids
won't miss. It's one of those government snafus that is so frustrating.
All the money spent on Global Warming -- a least half of it should be
spent on asteroid protection and CME defense -- a coronal mass ejection
of the right magnitude and timing would create an EMP that would send us
back to the Iron Age and billions would starve in a very, very short
time.
I find this one interesting: https://pjmedia.com/drhelen/can-a-man-be-too-handsome/
An excerpt:
Funny that women's hotness gets them ahead and men's seems to leave them behind. But isn't that the way it is with so many gender stereotypes? Men are often the ones being discriminated against while women are always told it's only them.
Well, that explains a lot in my life.
There's also this:
An excerpt:
It really is all relative. A new study revealed that all humans are descendants of the same man and woman who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Our communal mom and dad got together after a “catastrophic event” almost wiped out the human race, the Daily Mail reported of the study.
What
was interesting was the Commentary: Monkeys throwing their poo!
Creationists and anti-Creationists in full blood-sport. Of course the
point is not that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago -- there are
"Young Earth" Creationists who believe that -- but that humans are
descended from one couple -- that's "worth the price of admission" if
you've been following the century-old argument about human origins,
whether they developed in Africa or in various places, all that.
Space:
This
one here is space-related but so frustrating. We should have had blimps
and dirigibles in Venus' atmosphere for some years now. Grrrr:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6279161/NASAs-brilliant-plan-cloud-city-airships-atmosphere-Venus.html
For other interesting space news, see sciencedaily.com, like this article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181203111612.htm
An excerpt:
Astronomers using a combination of ground and space based telescopes have reported more than 100 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) in only three months. These planets are quite diverse and expected to play a large role in developing the research field of exoplanets and life in the Universe.Then this:
We'll be mining asteroids pretty soon. The Japanese land craft on one a couple of months ago. https://www.space.com/41912-japanese-hopping-rovers-land-on-asteroid.html
Asteroid mining will transform the wealth of the world. It's a great future, if we don't wreck our civilization first.
Archaeology
In archaeology, the big news is Pontius Pilate's ring: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/world/middleeast/pontius-pilate-ring.html
And in the same vein for those into Biblical archaeology, there's this:
(This has to be one of the coolest archaeology stories I've seen
all year. Check it out for the photo of the tiny weight, with its Hebrew
character.)
And if you have the time, my favorite Biblical archaeologist, David Rohl, has a great video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEm-ovpMM5c
I have his book A Test Of Time: Volume One-The Bible-From Myth to History, 2001, and highly, highly recommend it. This video I've linked to has even newer info and wow, absolutely fascinating.
I try, always and ever, to follow Dino news and this science daily site is excellent for that: https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Search for whatever you're interested in.
As per Dinos, there's this: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181031141548.htm
An excerpt:
According to researchers at Yale, the American Museum of Natural History, and the University of Bonn, birds inherited their egg color from non-avian dinosaur ancestors that laid eggs in fully or partially open nests. The researchers' findings appear Oct. 31 in the online edition of the journal Nature.
"This completely changes our understanding of how egg colors evolved," said the study's lead author, Yale paleontologist Jasmina Wiemann. "For two centuries, ornithologists assumed that egg color appeared in modern birds' eggs multiple times, independently."
The egg colors of birds reflect characteristic preferences in nesting environments and brooding behaviors. Modern birds use only two pigments, red and blue, to create all of the various egg colors, spots, and speckles.
Of course, the big questions is, did Tyrannosaurs have lips? This report, from last year, says no: https://www.livescience.com/58474-new-tyrannosaur-had-no-lips.html And this from the year before -- same website -- says yes: https://www.livescience.com/54912-did-t-rex-have-lips.html
The suspense builds.
Someone actually asked this question: https://www.quora.com/Who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-an-elephant-and-a-T-rex
I take it I don't need to go into details.
Here's an interesting one: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181129142423.htm An excerpt:
Rivaling the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs, one of the most extraordinary transformations in the history of life was the evolution of baleen -- rows of flexible hair-like plates that blue whales, humpbacks and other marine mammals use to filter relatively tiny prey from gulps of ocean water. Now, scientists have discovered an important intermediary link in the evolution of this innovative feeding strategy: an ancient whale that had neither teeth nor baleen.
This is, clearly, a massive mystery.
What mammals ever had anything like baleen? How can genetics produce
something it doesn't have code for? How can hair/fingernail materials
grow in the mouth, replacing teeth? In this case, one might ask how'd
these intermediaries could eat? But they weren't intermediaries of
anything. Although the article says they're intermediary links, in
classic "evolution speak", we're actually not talking about of some
"intermediate" "missing link," for such don't exist. What exists are
stable species, doing their thing for a million years or whatever, as in
the Natural History of the equine family, Equidae, one of the best documented natural histories we have.
Each
different version of the equus species was perfectly adapted to its
environment as a species, doing its thing for however long. We can see
they're intermediary between horses as we know them, and Eohippus, the
first of the family. But they couldn't "evolve" anything; they just
were. And quite successful at being. Nature didn't select them -- or
anything else -- because nature has no consciousness. We have minds and
extrapolate reasoning and finding the useful and the good and thus
automatically transfer that to Nature, but Nature cannot think, or plan,
or reflect, or know.
And it is more than just
semantics. Poor Darwin. He rightfully hated the word "evolution" because
it was solely used (back then) for human being evolving whatever
(clothes styles, political systems, art). The word was foisted on him
against his wishes, but then his preferred phrase, "Natural Selection"
is an oxymoron self-contradiction. Nature can't select anything. He was
told that, repeatedly. Also, of course, Darwin didn't understand
ecosystems very well, thought that nothing in Nature was long-term, and
he certainly didn't believe species actually existed. Yep. Wrote a book
about the Origin of Species and didn't believe species was a
thing. (It's sort of an inside joke, this. :) He thought all tigers, for
example, were more or less tiger-like, depending on their place in an
evolutionary arc from pre-tigers to post-tigers, each one a little more
or less advanced at becoming something entirely different. All of them
malleable, changing, shifting, improving according to the environment
situation. It was merely human errata, human misconception, that labeled
them all tigers.
But today we know species
are stable. They resist change and tolerate only so much genetic
mutation. For example, Luther Burbank (1849-1926) came up with Burbank's
law about species: you can only breed "improvements" in individuals of a
species up to a point, then they fall back to where their descendants
fall back to where they were. Valuable info this is in trying to create
new lines of seeds and livestock. If I were teaching high school
science, I'd make 'em learn about Luther Burbank: an amazing scientist
and creator of something like 800 plant varieties and strains. Like your
russet potatoes? I love 'em. Guess where they came from? Burbank
actually developed the strain, or I suppose improved it, to help the
Irish, as it is somewhat blight resistant. What a guy! He'd definitely
be in the forefront on genetic crop development, and an opponent of the
Luddites who are against it.
But I digress. It's fun to tweak evolution and Global Warming, but "life goes on." Here are some more interesting science items.
The rhino, Elasmotherium
sibericum, was thought to have become extinct between 200,000 and 100,000
years ago.
By radiocarbon-dating a total of 23
specimens, researchers found the Ice Age giant in fact survived in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia until at least 39,000 years ago.
They also isolated DNA from the
ancient rhino for the first time, showing it split from the modern group of
rhinos about 40 million years ago.
The extinction of the Siberian
unicorn marks the end point of an entire group of rhinos.
Rinos are certainly related to each other! They have that "family face", you might say.
And DNA seems to be the main road now to discuss Natural History of Species.
300-foot wall of sand engulfs city! Check it out. Wanna move to Mars? You'd have to get used to this.
Sand
engulfs. So does snow. Remember this story about the 5,000-year-old
Bronze Age "Iceman" now named "Otzi" whose body was found in the
Austrian Alps? Here are some great photos and a bit of info:
http://boredomtherapy.com/hikers-snow-discovery/ Lightweight article, but fun. And Otzi left behind a curse, too! Like King Tut. Check it out.
Speaking of snow, we have this concerning climate:
Why
is climate science stagnating? One thing we have seen over the years, in
Climate Science nobody ever loses. As long as your estimated climate
sensitivity is above 1.5C and not too much higher than 4.5C, your estimate will
be accepted by the community as reasonable. If your sensitivity estimate is less than 1.5C, you’re a denier. If you make a truly
ridiculous claim, such as predicting an ice free Arctic in the next couple of
years, you might attract a pithy comment from Gavin Schmidt. But overall
everyone’s career is safe, providing you churn out lots of papers which conform
to the community view of what your results should be. There is no sense of
urgency, no sense of concern, that the field of climate science is not
advancing.
Similarly
in Physics, according to Lee Smolin and now to Sabine Hossenfelder, your career
is fine as long as your research proposal falls within the parameters of what
everyone else thinks it should be.
Everyone knows I'm an unrepentant "climate denier" but t'is no
matter. President Trump treats it as fluff and I see Macron is backing
down in face of the incredible protests in France: http://fortune.com/2018/12/04/macron-fuel-tax-protests/ and https://euobserver.com/tickers/143591
I
had thought Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate change, Weather, etc.) would
go out quietly, with a whimper -- like the 1970s talk of a new Ice Age
went out or the 1980s talk about landfills smothering us all. Maybe,
though, this whole French thing is a sign it'll go out with a bang as
fed-up working people demand an end to it.
Those with more wisdom than I have foreseen this, based on just who is "into" AGW and who isn't:
Global Warming only plays to the
elites: http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/03/liberal-elites-driving-climate-change-hysteria-hurting-democrats-electoral-chances/
The
liberal elites constitute only 13 percent of the electorate; by comparison, the
Democratic-leaning blue-collar voters represent 27 percent. In addition, the
liberal elites are whiter
than the overall population (and much whiter than Democrats as a
whole), more formally educated, and considerably wealthier.
This
profile of the liberal elite is broadly consistent with the recent “Hidden
Tribes” report from the left-of-center group More in Common, which found a
similar but even smaller group of progressive activists were outliers on issues
like political
correctness and affirmative
action in college admissions.
That's the real story of the revolt
against the fuel tax. The burden of saving the Earth will fall most
heavily on those least able to pay for it. European elites,
congratulating themselves on their "courage" in foisting these
burdensome carbon taxes on their people, just don't get it.
People get angry when asked to do
with less for a goal that rich people are saying is for the best for
everyone.
But whatever about AGW, much more seriously, the
discipline of Western empirical "science" overall is in big trouble, and
for a number of reasons, as detailed in this shocking article: https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/the-impending-death-of-science/
And excerpt:
There
were approximately 2.5 million
scientific papers published last year. Think about that. A researcher would
have to read nearly 300 papers an hour, non-stop, just to keep up. And that is
not accounting for the more than 50 million scientific papers that have been
published since the 17th century. If the researcher somehow managed to read 600
papers an hour (that’s 10 scientific papers each minute) in order to
catch up with the established scientific literature, it would still take him 20
years to consume all the papers written. Once again, this is assuming that he
didn’t eat or sleep, and was somehow able to read and absorb 10 technical
papers each minute.
Needless to say, the readership
of any particular paper is abysmally low.
Now imagine taking the time to test and reproduce the results of
each paper. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientific inquiry has suffered
from a “reproducibility crisis” over the past few years. Some surveys have
suggested that more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to
reproduce another scientist’s experiments. In one of the largest
replication studies conducted, 60 percent of psychology studies examined
failed the reproducibility test. A research
project attempting to replicate social science experiments failed eight out
of 21 times to obtain any observed effects consistent with the original
findings. These findings deliver a devastating blow to the credibility of the
current literature in both the natural and social sciences.
In theory, science has
mechanisms in place to safeguard the knowledge it cultivates. But an overly
bureaucratic and esoterically compartmentalized academia with perverse funding
incentives will doom the practice of science no matter the methodological
guardrails. These theoretical guardrails mean very little if they are not
practically enforced. After all, the
Soviet Union’s constitution had some
beautiful, yet ignored, language about freedom of expression and the press.
But even if the guardrails
are consistently enforced, it still takes time for incorrect scientific
knowledge to be refuted. It takes time to review a study’s methodology, to
reproduce the study, and then to test the refutation. This process can take
years.
This article is in the same vein: http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/12/journals-universities-deep-six-study-noticing-men-women-different/
Groupthink is bad enough, but Politically Correct Group Think is a disaster.
Whatever. I'm still trying to recover from the visuals of that poor elephant meeting a hungry T-Rex.
An Préachán
