A universal driver

 

Cassini's Grand Finale never ceases to amaze, this time with Titan and precursors to life totally unexpected in a place as cold and remote as Saturn's largest moon.

The international Cassini-Huygens mission has made a surprising detection of a molecule that is instrumental in the production of complex organics within the hazy atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Titan boasts a thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere with some of the most complex chemistry seen in the Solar System. It is even thought to mimic the atmosphere of early Earth, before the build-up of oxygen. As such, Titan can be seen as a planet-scale laboratory that can be studied to understand the chemical reactions that may have led to life on Earth, and that could be occurring on planets around other stars.

These large molecules drift down towards the lower atmosphere, forming a thick haze of organic aerosols, and are thought to eventually reach the surface. But the process by which simple molecules in the upper atmosphere are transformed into the complex organic haze at lower altitudes is complicated and difficult to determine.

One surprising outcome of the Cassini mission was the discovery of a particular type of negatively charged molecule at Titan. Negatively charged species – or ‘anions’ – were not something scientists expected to find, because they are highly reactive and should not last long in Titan’s atmosphere before combining with other materials. Their detection is completely reshaping current understanding of the hazy moon’s atmosphere.

In a new study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists identified some of the negatively charged species as what are known as ‘carbon chain anions’. These linear molecules are understood to be building blocks towards more complex molecules, and may have acted as the basis for the earliest forms of life on Earth. 

Chemistry in Titan's atmosphere

Nature finds a way, always.

An Existential Crisis

An existential crisis looms ever nearer as we move further into the Anthropocene.

It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island near the North Pole. A storm was dumping rain at a time of year when the temperature was usually well below freezing; because the water had short-circuited the electrical system, the electric pumps on site were useless. This subterranean safe house holds more than 5,000 species of essential food crops, including hundreds of thousands of varieties of wheat and rice. It was supposed to be an impenetrable, modern-day Noah’s ark for plants, a life raft against climate change and catastrophe. Local firefighters helped pump out the tunnel until the temperature dropped and the water froze. Townspeople from the village at the mountain’s base then brought their own shovels and axes and broke apart the ice sheet by hand.

A few Norwegian radio stations and newspapers reported the incident at the time, but it received little international attention until May, when it was becoming clear that President Trump was likely to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Suddenly the tidings from Svalbard were everywhere, in multiple languages, with headlines like “World’s ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Has Been Breached by Climate Change.” It didn’t matter that the flood happened seven months earlier, or that the seeds remained safe and dry. We had just lived through the third consecutive year of the highest global temperatures on record and the lowest levels of Arctic ice; vast swaths of permafrost were melting; scientists had recently announced that some 60 percent of primate species were threatened with extinction. All these facts felt like signposts to an increasingly hopeless future for the planet. And now, here was a minifable suggesting that our attempts to preserve even mere traces of the bounty around us might fall apart, too.

Sadness comes to mind on our sorry stewardship of the planet we call home.

Trinity site, New Mexico, on July 16th 1945, 05:29:21 MDT,
16 milliseconds after the proposed start of the Anthropocene.

Self sustaining but for how long?

How little we know about nature's inner workings, particularly with systems as complex as that of the Amazonian Rainforest and it's unique approach to manufacturing it's own rainy season as needs warrant.

A new study gives the first observational evidence that the southern Amazon rainforest triggers its own rainy season using water vapor from plant leaves. The finding helps explain why deforestation in this region is linked with reduced rainfall.

The finding highlights how closely connected the rainforest ecosystem is with climate, Fu said. "The fate of the southern Amazon rainforest depends on the length of the dry season, but the length of the dry season also depends on the rainforest."

The finding raises another question: Why do plants start to grow and transpire more during the dry season, before there's an increase in rain? That's still a subject of research, Fu said. "This may be the way the forests optimize their growth. In the late dry season, plants still get sunshine, and they could anticipate the coming rainy season because they are adapted to the seasonality of the rain."

That seasonality has been changing in recent decades, however. The rainy season in the southern Amazon now starts almost a month later than it did in the 1970s. There's evidence that if the Amazon dry season becomes longer than five to seven months, the forest will no longer receive enough rain each year to keep trees alive, and the region will transition from forest to grassy plains. Over a large fraction of the southern Amazon, the dry season is now only a few weeks shorter on average than this transitional threshold. There has already been some irreversible damage to the forest. The loss of a major Amazonian forest ecosystem could increase Brazilian droughts and potentially disrupt rainfall patterns as far away as Texas.

The Anthropocene Epoch aka the 6th Great Dying continues unabated due to greed, stupidity and disregard for the long term consequences of destroying irreplaceable treasures like the rain forests of South America.

Seen below is the time span of humans on earth vs life on earth. Astounding says it all.

Any questions?

You know ...

This is like the senate's take on healthcare, right?

For the love of coffee :)

Yours truly loves crank, aka java, aka coffee, aka the caffeine fix that never disappoints as long as it's fresh and unadulterated with sugar and recently, thanks to my son's encouragement, cream as coffee is like tea, a distilled beverage filled with goodies that actually keeps one healthy in more ways than one can count.

People who drink around three cups of coffee a day may live longer than non-coffee drinkers, a landmark study has found.

“We found that higher coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death from any cause, and specifically for circulatory diseases, and digestive diseases,” said lead author Marc Gunter of the IARC and formerly at Imperial’s School of Public Health. “Importantly, these results were similar across all of the 10 European countries, with variable coffee drinking habits and customs. Our study also offers important insights into the possible mechanisms for the beneficial health effects of coffee.”

Healthier livers, better glucose control

Using data from the EPIC study (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition), the group analysed data from 521,330 people from over the age of 35 from 10 EU countries, including the UK, France, Denmark and Italy. People’s diets were assessed using questionnaires and interviews, with the highest level of coffee consumption (by volume) reported in Denmark (900 mL per day) and lowest in Italy (approximately 92 mL per day). Those who drank more coffee were also more likely to be younger, to be smokers, drinkers, eat more meat and less fruit and vegetables.

After 16 years of follow up, almost 42,000 people in the study had died from a range of conditions including cancer, circulatory diseases, heart failure and stroke. Following careful statistical adjustments for lifestyle factors such as diet and smoking, the researchers found that the group with the highest consumption of coffee had a lower risk for all causes of death, compared to those who did not drink coffee.

They found that decaffeinated coffee had a similar effect.

My wife will like the last line without question.

Predators 1 & All

Blue Hunter

Damsel 101

The Dark Knight

Unemployment 101

A good friend of mine sent me this gem. Any questions? :)

The Nexus of Power - China style

A wonderful diagram detailing the hierarchy of power in China is most illuminating, especially when a rising star gets purged Soviet style. To whit.

The fall from grace of a rising star in China’s Communist Party sheds light on how a reshuffle of the country’s top officials may play out under the leadership of President Xi Jinping later this year.

Sun Zhengcai, 53, the youngest member of the ruling Politburo, was replaced Saturday as party chief of the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing. He is under investigation for violating party regulations, according to four officials with knowledge of the matter.

The officials said they attended a municipal meeting in Chongqing on Sunday, where they were told by a senior local party member that Sun severely damaged the party’s interests. The officials, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private, said they were urged to eliminate Sun’s influence and were told that senior local officials committed serious mistakes under Sun’s guidance. The officials said they were also exhorted to follow the instructions of the central leadership and President Xi’s teachings.

Love the party's interest bit.

4C & counting

In the future, with a 2 meter rise in water and a temperature increase of 4 degrees centigrade, the world will look like this. 

Polynesia is gone – sunk beneath the waves. Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert. This is the world, 4°C warmer than it is now. 

But there is also good news: Western Antarctica is no longer icy and uninhabitable. Smart cities thrive in newly green and pleasant lands. And Northern Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia produce bountiful harvests to feed the hundreds of millions of climate refugees who now call those regions home.

I would rather not see this scenario unfold and chances are, given this rube's age, will not unless immortality or an expanded lifespan comes to pass before yours truly goes to the great beyond as we all do as everyone knows, at least in the year of our lord 2017. :)

20 Trillion & Counting

BRT did a study on how many boxcars would $15 billion and $12.8 trillion dollars fill and how much said money would weigh in a blurb titled Just a Follow Up. Now comes Visual Capitalist showing, in 3D, how much space $1 trillion (seen above) and $20 trillion (see below), the size of the US debt, would occupy. Interesting to say the least but ... because dollars are now bits and not paper, weight and size drops to nothing, something akin to the fact money is created from nothing and is backed by nothing, an irony that makes one laugh and cry at the same time while our once great nation slowly goes into the poor house. BRT

MILLIONS, BILLIONS, TRILLIONS

This is where things start to get dodgy. Once numbers get beyond the millions, we don’t really have any intuition, tactile familiarity, or comprehension of what they mean.

For example:

One million seconds = 12 days
One billion seconds = 32 years
One trillion seconds = 32,000 years
Going back in time a trillion seconds would place you well before written history, the building of the pyramids, and 10,000 years before the first cave wall paintings in France.

Our monkey brains don’t really know what to do with these giant abstractions, and so it helps to think about them in different ways, especially visually.

Interesting is it not?