Mergers of a different kind

Ligo mergers

All that hard work paid off with the discovery of GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823, referencing the dates on which the black holes were detected. "Having a collection of events is how we learn things about the Universe that can't be learned from just a few observations," Larson wrote. Among the things scientists have learned so far: all stellar black holes were formed from stars 45 times less than the mass of our Sun. That can tell scientists something about how black holes form and grow together, which can in turn yield insights into the evolution of stars.

The National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the European-based VIRGO gravitational-wave detector have published new results from the first two Observing runs. Four new black hole mergers are newly announced, The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have now confidently detected gravitational waves from a total of 10 stellar-mass binary black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars, which are the dense, spherical remains of stellar explosions.

Mergers indeed. :)

Killing me slowly ...

For the past couple of months, yours truly has tried to focus on the essential terrestrial organisms that, if eliminated from the environment, would cause environmental collapse. With this in mind, insects are prime candidates as they inhabit every continent (including Antarctica's Belgica antarctica, the Antarctic midge) and are intimately involved with all aspects of life on this planet as we know it. Note: We haven't even talked about the sea and land-based microfauna and flora, the baseline lifeforms on which all life on this planet depends. Note II: The oceans are not part of this blurb although it too is under the same amount of manmade stress as well.

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night — familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren’t seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren’t sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Let's think about this while reading Bill McKibben's  in-depth New Yorker article stating the fact earth, in terms of arable use, is shrinking every day due to GW, environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

The Anthropocene is gathering speed as we speak.

Killing me slowly indeed.

Late Fall | 2018

A short clip showing the end of fall starting from strong winds on a crisp fall day to quietude to the max on a full moon night in the environs of Fairfield, CT. Enjoy.

The Road to Hell ...

BRT has waxed poetic about Global Warming and the ramifications of same beginning with James Lovelock's dire warning regarding GW in 2007 to 2018 with this latest piece from Aeon describing the anthropogenic version of a new Cretaceous with horrifying consequences that will end civilization as we know it by 2100 if nothing is done.

Last November, the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn reported that warming by 3°C by 2100 is now the realistic expectation. With no check on emissions, we are on course to see preindustrial levels of CO2 double (from 280 to 560 ppm, or parts per million) by 2050 – and then double again by 2100. In short, we’ll be generating climate conditions last experienced during the Cretaceous period (145-65.95 million years ago) when CO2 levels reached over 1,000 ppm. What might that mean, given that we already achieve such levels of CO2 in bedrooms at night and in poorly ventilated crowded places, and when we know that, under sustained conditions of such high carbon-dioxide concentration, people suffer severe cognitive problems?

It gets "better".

We have recently become aware of a red line that humans are going to hit long before we approach Cretaceous conditions. In 2010, researchers showed that our species cannot survive for more than six hours at what’s called a ‘wet bulb’ temperature of 35°C (95°F). Wet bulb here means 100 per cent humidity, so it’s not 35°C as we know it. But in the great Indian agricultural belts of the Indus and Ganges, high-40s temperatures combined with 50 per cent humidity (which equates to that wet-bulb temperature of 35°C ) are going to prevail within decades.

While this is happening in hot agricultural regions, the urban world will face a perhaps even greater catastrophe. The UN’s most-likely temperature-rise prediction of 3°C would see forests growing in the Arctic, and entail the loss of most coastal cities through irreversible sea-level rise by the end of the century.

30 years ago we could have stopped this slow motion disaster but did not. To whit ...

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology. From the M.I.T. Museum

The Road to Hell ... indeed.

Thanks John for turning me onto this.

The Russians did it :)

ESA does it again, this time with a Russian rocket launch seen from space. Stellar without question.

Look out, International Space Station, this spacecraft is hot on your tail! An astronaut captured a stunning time lapse video of the Russian Progress MS-10 cargo spacecraft, also known as Progress 71, on its way to the orbiting complex.

About 15 minutes of the Progress launch on Nov. 16 show up in the time lapse video posted on the European Space Agency website. The video clearly shows the flare of rocket launch, the spacecraft making its way up into space, and the re-entry of the first stage of the rocket. As the spacecraft becomes a bright light in the sky, the Earth spins below.

Tech done right yet again.

Blowback ...

Blowback, the law of unforeseen consequences, a term coined by the CIA regarding all things regarding our ill advised military adventures, is more than just apt when talking about palm oil and the impact it's having on the environment and global warming, the two 900 lb gorillas residing in places near and dear to us rubes as we move further into the 21st century.

Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.

Members of the Wehea Dayak tribe walking past a palm-oil tanker during
an initiation ceremony in East Kalimantan.

Blowback indeed ...

Earth, up close & personal :)

According to ESA, the video is the longest continual time-lapse video captured from space. The view includes two orbits of the Earth, each of which would take 90 minutes in real time, with the station's orbital path covering Tunisia, Beijing and Australia.

We should be taking better care of her without question.

Rain of a different kind ...

An artist's depiction of the Cassini spacecraft's view as it completed the "Grand Finale" of its mission in 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Cassini never disappoints, this time regarding the intricate connect of Saturn with its rings.

They had expected those results to be measurements of the masses of "ring rain," which scientists knew as a trickle of tiny particles falling from Saturn's innermost ring down toward the planet's upper atmosphere — some hydrogen and helium mostly — nothing fancy.

But what they seem to have found was far more material than they had expected, coming from far more exotic compounds. The instrument spotted not just hydrogen and helium but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen and the unidentifiable remains of organic molecules.

Other instruments suggested that this downpour also included water ice and silicate particles and showed that the downpour is triggered by the interaction of these particles with the highest levels of Saturn's atmosphere. Around the whole ring structure, it all adds up to somewhere around 10 tons (9,000 kilograms) per second.

Science never disappoints, ever. :)

Total Recall

Total Recall anyone?

The University of California, David (UC Davis) has released the first-ever human images from its medical imaging scanner EXPLORER, the world's first scanner capable of capturing a 3-D picture of the whole human body at once. And the result is not just images but rather videos!

Arnold must be proud. :)

We're Covered ...

We're covered without a doubt. :)