Oldest mobility: microscopic creature moved around 2 billion years ago

BY MIHAI ANDREI

Life on Earth has sure come a long way in the past billion years, but one particular ability may have developed much earlier than we thought: mobility.

Unicellular life is clearly successful — it’s been around for more than 3 billion years and it’s still going as strong as ever. But that’s not to say that pluricellular life doesn’t have anything going for it. For starters, it’s immensely more complex and diversified, capable of filling more niches and developing entire ecosystems which would be impossible in the single-celled world.

Another advantage is mobility — or rather, potential mobility. Not all multicellular life is mobile (take plants for example), but much of it is. Now, researchers have found the earliest evidence of mobility, and it dates from a whopping 2.1 billion years ago.

Up until recently, paleontologists thought that the earliest multicellular life emerged some 600 million years ago. But geologist Abderrazak El Albani and his team at the Institut de chimie des milieux et matériaux de Poitiers found a geological deposit in Gabon with evidence of multicellular life, dating from 2.1 billion years ago. Now, analyzing fossils from the same deposit, El Albani and colleagues have found traces of mobility, showing that this ancient life was probably much more sophisticated than we gave it credit.

Micro-tomography is used to display the 3D morphology of tubes reflecting the paths of movement through the sediment. The tubes are filled with pyrite crystals (generated by the transformation by bacteria of biological tissue) found in layers of clay minerals. Parallel horizontal layers are fossilized microbial mats.

Image credits: A. El Albani.

More than 2 billion years ago, the world was a much different place than it is today, and one of the most striking differences was the lack of oxygen. Oxygen was only starting to accumulate in the atmosphere only around 2.2 billion years ago. Although it was produced by microorganisms for a long time, it couldn’t build up to any significant degree because of the vast deposits of unoxidized sulfur and iron — only after these sinks had been filled up and all the iron and sulfur oxidized, could the oxygen finally start to build up. The creatures that El Albani found traces of lived at the same time this transition was happening.

The evidence is a set of sinuous and tubular structures. Their diameter is about a few millimeters, running through what is now fine layers of sedimentary rock. During their lifetime, these creatures inhabited a simple, shallow marine environment. Chemical analysis revealed the biological origin of these structures and that they appeared at the same time the sediment was deposited.

The traces lie next to fossilized microbial biofilms, which formed thin layers in the sediments. It seems quite likely that the organisms behind this phenomenon moved around for nutritive elements and oxygen — both of which were produced by cyanobacteria.

So what exactly were these creatures? It’s hard to say. However, researchers suggest they may have been somewhat similar to colonial amoebae. Amoebae are generally single-celled animals, though some multicellular creatures have amoeboid cells. These cells can sometimes live individually, or, when resources are scarce, clump up together, forming a slug-like colony which moves in search of a favorable environment and more resources. This is what researchers believe they have come across — or at least a primitive manifestation of this phenomenon.

This study also casts an important question about the evolution of this mobility feature: why do we have this big gap, between most findings which date from 0.6 billion years ago, and this one, which dates to 2.1 billion years? Did mobility evolve back then and continuously develop but we just haven’t found traces of it, or was this experiment cut short by an unforgiving environment?

For now, the jury is still out.

The study “Organism motility in an oxygenated shallow-marine environment 2.1 billion years ago ” by Abderrazak El Albani et al has been published in PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1815721116

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

12-02-2019 om 23:07 geschreven door peter  

The world is running out of insects — because of us — and it will lead to a “catastrophic collapse”

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU 

Almost half of all the world’s insect species are in decline, and a third are already endangered, a new metastudy found. These trends point to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, it adds.

Image via Pixabay.

With the sixth mass extinction looming over the planet, it’s not the best of times to be an insect. The extinction rate among their species is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, or reptiles. They’re struggling so much to make ends meet that some 2.5% of all insects (by weight) die year after year. Currently, over one-third of all insect species are endangered, and 40% of them are declining. If things don’t change, we could be looking at the end of insects (or at least, of insects as meaningful ecological actors) within a century.

These conclusions come from a massive meta-study looking at the state of insect species around the world.

Findings that should bug us

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, corresponding author of the meta-study.

Sánchez-Bayo worked together with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The research was spurred by recent reports of insect population collapses in Germany and Puerto Rico, which paint a dire picture. Insects are essential for the healthy functioning of ecosystems, the team writes — serving as food, pollinators, and nutrient recyclers. Their value in nature can be seen in the sheer diversity and quantity that insect species have reached. They are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by an estimated 17 times.

Given these reported collapses and the rapid rate of extinction seen in larger animals (which are easier to study), the team wanted to find out how insects fare on a global level. To that end, they analyzed 73 studies on insect decline performed all over the world. Most of these were performed in western Europe and the US. A few looked at areas ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few treated other areas.

The findings, in short, are that it’s bad. It’s bad everywhere (we looked), and it’s bad because of us.

“The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet,” the team writes. “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.”

“The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

Orders Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Coleoptera, are the worst hit groups. One of the studies included in the analysis shows that the number of widespread butterfly species on farmed land in the UK fell by 58% between 2000 and 2009. Bees are also struggling: Oklahoma lost half of its bumblebee species between 1949 and 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since. Beetle species are also declining, especially dung beetles.

In stark contrast to most humans, dung beetles actually love other people’s bullshit.

Image credits Baynham Goredema.

While there are large gaps in our data — especially pertaining to species of flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs, and crickets — there is virtually no data that would suggest they’re faring better than the other insects included in this study. Some species, however, aremaking the best of it and increasing in number, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. In the US, for example, the common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) is increasing in numbers due to its tolerance of pesticides (and its newfound lack of competitors). These increases are far too modest to make up for the overall decline, the team cautions.

The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect declines overall, although the team notes that the country was the most intensely-studied area in its analysis. That doesn’t mean other areas are faring well, just that they’re faring better. In Puerto Rico, for example, a recent study revealed a 98% decrease in ground insects over the last 35 years.

Intensive agriculture — particularly due to heavy use of pesticides — is the main culprit. Urbanization and climate change, which are destroying these species’ habitats and food security, are also significant factors. Overall, the annual rate of insect species loss over the past 25 to 30 years averages 2.5%, a figure that Sánchez-Bayo told The Guardian is “shocking”.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”

“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” he adds. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.”

The team notes that more organic farms had healthy levels of insect inhabitants despite the occasional use of pesticides. The scale that insecticides are used on in industrialized farms, coupled with novel insecticide compounds such as neonicotinoids and fipronil, simply “sterilize[s] the soil”, Sánchez-Bayo explains. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he adds. This is deadly to insects living on the farms themselves, but also to neighboring ecosystems. One of the most worrying implications is that when insects die off, they take whole trophic trees along. Many species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish rely heavily on insects for food.

In the tropics, where industrial agriculture isn’t yet well established, the decline is primarily driven by climate change.

Given the results, the strong language used in the review isn’t alarmist, the team feels. Their reviewers and editor agreed.

“We wanted to really wake people up,” says Sánchez-Bayo. “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”

The paper “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers” has been published in the journal Biological Conservation.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

11-02-2019 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

This could be the plot of a new movie … or the start of a sci-fi-becoming-reality revolution. A gang of chimpanzees at the Belfast Zoo took advantage of some fallen branches to build a ladder and scale the wall around their living quarters. Is this an accident, a lesson … or a warning?

“I was petrified, obviously, having the kids, and I tried not to show fear but inside I was a bit like: what happens if it attacks us or tries to take the kids or runs over?”

What happens if it begins speaking, demands that the rest of the animals be released and calls for an end to meat-eating or the big kid gets peeled like a banana … which they don’t like anyway despite what you filthy humans think? A better movie, but fortunately (maybe) not what happened this past weekend after four chimps found trees knocked down by a storm, leaned them up against a wall and climbed them to freedom. Cue the triumphant John Williams score.

Well done!

“Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla.”

That’s not exactly an expression of terror, Mister Screenwriter, but it’s what a little girl commented in the video of the escape (see the video and photos here) which was posted on social media, much to the chagrin of Belfast Zoo officials who experienced their second escape in just two weeks. A red panda bolted when an electrical fence was disabled during a power failure. That creature was captured after roaming the streets of Belfast – possibly trying to convince stupid humans that it was not related to pandas at all but in fact is a rare and endangered species. Perhaps this is the escape that should be made into a movie, since it follows another red panda escape in 2017 from a zoo in Norfolk, Virginia. Should the defiant Ailurus fulgens (“don’t call us pandas”) and angry chimps (“don’t call us monkeys”) join forces next time?

Do I look like a bear?

“They’re intelligent primates and know they’re not supposed to be out of their enclosure, so got back in themselves.”

That’s what Belfast zookeeper Alyn Cairns hopes local residents believe – that the chimps knew they did something wrong and returned to their prison rather than realizing they did something right and upped their demands. It’s not that farfetched – in 2018, researchers discovered white-faced capuchins in Panama using stone tools as hammers to open nuts and shellfish, and another group in Japan taught chimpanzees how to play the human game rock-paper-scissors. Have primates entered their own Stone Age? Are we accelerating their evolution? Isn’t that a violation of the Prime Directive? Should we be mixing movie metaphors?

“But we just had to stay calm. It may have been a different story if it had been aggressive but it absolutely wasn’t. It made us feel at ease. We just walked past it and it was absolutely grand.”

Cue the sinister music as the humans dance and sing about how superior they are while the chimps tap messages to each other in their dark cages and plot their next move.

Are these escapes, coupled with the new evidence of primate intelligence, a sign that maybe it’s time we put an end to zoos and instead returned some of the land we’ve taken back to our fellow Earth creatures?

Or are they a warning of something worse?

Next time we take hostages.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

11-02-2019 om 20:10 geschreven door peter  

The site of one of America’s most legendary and mysterious encounters with the unknown has recently changed hands and is now under new private ownership. A 78-acre ranching property located in Lincoln County, New Mexico 75 miles northwest of Roswell has been sold to Dinwiddie Cattle Co. LLC for an undisclosed amount. The parcel of land is only part of a larger land transaction, but it’s what happened on this particular parcel that makes this real estate transaction so noteworthy – and potentially depressing for those of us who need to know the truth about what happened in Roswell.

The property sold in this transaction contains the lands that were once the J.B. Foster ranch, home to the 1947 crash of an object recovered by the U.S. Army Air Forces. The crash and ensuing investigation would become one of the most disputed and researched UFO incidents of all time and in many ways contributed the modern fascination with UFOs.

The site has changed hands several times in the decades since the infamous 1947 Roswell Incident but has remained exclusively privately owned, making investigations of the alleged crash site difficult. The previous owners, Bogle Ltd. Co. of Dexter, eventually allowed tours of the site last year in what was the first public access to the site in nearly 70 years. The new owners, however, so far seem nonplussed with the whole UFO crash thing.

“I just don’t know a whole lot about it,” new owner Tommy Dinwiddie told the Roswell Daily Record. “The guy who is running the ranch over there for me knows quite a bit about it, and after we kind of get our feet on the ground running it, we will do some more talking about it and figuring out what we want to do.” 

Other countries have made public monuments or parks out of the sites of famous UFO incidents. Is the Roswell property remaining in public hands in order to discourage study of the site, or is all of this merely much ado about a wayward weather balloon and an empty stretch of desert?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

11-02-2019 om 19:33 geschreven door peter  

Members of the Armed Forces get to witness or participate in all sorts of secret activities and events that the public is never told of. There’s a good reason a lot of the military’s activities stay under wraps, though. Now that the world’s superpowers have the ability to wipe out all life on Earth several times over, it’s far better to let people sleep at night by keeping things on a need-to-know basis.

But I need to know. I really need to know. Like a lot of us who read this site, I need to know what’s in the secret bunkers and hangars. I need to know what those strange lights and triangles in the sky are, and I need to know what types of secret apocalyptic weapons are being tested in remote missile ranges in the desert. Or do I? Maybe ignorance is bliss, particularly for those of us who have children.

Maybe those ostriches are on to something.

At any rate, we were given a small glance behind the curtain of terrifying military secrecy this week when a retired US Air Force spy plane pilot recounted his now-declassified experience witnessing a secret and long-rumored Russian technology known as the “dome of light.” Robert Hopkins shared his chilling experiences with Tyler Rogoway at The Warzone, and I’m once again genuinely creeped out about what this story may suggest about what the Russian military may possess that we don’t yet know about.

Hopkins witnessed the event while flying a US spy plane originating from the remote Shemya Air Force Base on the Aleutian Island chain near Alaska. At the time, the Soviets were conducting tests of intermediate-range ballistic missiles nearby, and US spy planes were there to keep an eye on their adversary’s missile capabilities. That’s when things got super weird.

Shemya Air Force Base was a key part of America’s missile defenses and intelligence operations during the Cold War .

According to Hopkins, both he and his copilot witnessed what can only be described as a “dome of light” moving through the air. At nearly the exact moment a Soviet missile launched, the pair saw a “translucent, milky white wall” moving outward from the launch site towards the Northern Pacific Ocean. The wall of light spanned from the ground to as far as Hopkins and his copilot could see and crossed directly over their aircraft, leaving only the night sky in its wake. The pair were mystified by the event but nonetheless continued their mission as planned.

Afterwards, both Hopkins and his copilot confirmed that they witnessed the same phenomenon, but neither one could explain what the saw. The two eventually reasoned that it was likely some type of atmospheric event like an aurora – until the pair witnessed the exact same phenomenon again prior to another Soviet missile launch.

The two pilots’ sightings would eventually spark the interest of US intelligence agencies and government officials. The Warzone provides a comprehensive breakdown of all that is publicly known about the “dome of light” phenomenon including several mentions by US Senators and intelligence review publications. I highly encourage readers to head over to The Warzone and read the full article -that is, readers who weren’t planning on sleeping tonight.

Was this some type of superweapon like Nikita Khrushchev alleged the Soviet Union possessed, a surveillance countermeasure, or something far weirder? Some of Nikola Tesla’s stranger research even touched upon or hinted at technologies which sound eerily similar to what US spy pilots witnessed during these “dome of light” events. To this day the rumored “dome of light” technology remains a mystery.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

11-02-2019 om 19:17 geschreven door peter  

Numerous eyewitnesses in Flintshire county, Wales reported seeing a strange blue flash on the morning of Thursday, February 7. Welsh social media channels were inundated with posts and pictures of the event taken from dash cameras and cellphones along with a wide range of speculation about what could have caused the event. While industrial causes are suspected, some Flintshire residents aren’t so sure.

The flash occurred around 6:30 am and momentarily lit up a large portion of the early morning sky with a mysterious blue glow. A police officer based in Hawarden, Flintshire caught the glow on his cash cam, posting it to Twitter. As speculation began to veer into the “ALIENS!” direction, a spokesperson for the Hawarden Police helicopter team suggested the anomalous flash could have been the result of ball lightning.

Ball lightning is one of the most mysterious natural phenomena reported throughout history.

WHAT CAUSES BALL LIGHTNING? 

Researchers from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, have proposed that the bright glow of lightning balls is created when microwaves become trapped inside a plasma bubble.

'At the tip of a lightning stroke reaching the ground, a relativistic electron bunch can be produced, which in turn excites intense microwave radiation,' the scientists said in a research paper published in Scientific Reports.

'The latter ionizes the local air and the radiation pressure evacuates the resulting plasma, forming a spherical plasma bubble that stably traps the radiation.'

Microwaves trapped inside the continue to generate plasma for a moments to maintain the bright flashes seen during ball lightning, they added.

The fireball eventually fades away as the radiation held within the bubble starts to dissipate - and when microwaves leak out, the lightning balls can dramatically explode.

Ball lightning is a little understood atmospheric electrical phenomenon often cited as an explanation for UFO or ghost sightings. There have been hundreds of eyewitness accounts and anecdotal reports over the centuries of fast-moving, luminous balls of electricity travelling along electrical conduits, down the sails of ships, running along the ground, in submarines or airplane cockpits, or even flying straight through people’s houses with no explanation. Ball lightning has even been reported to explode and leave behind a sulfur smell. Ball lightning is suspected to be behind the reports of “foo fighters” pilots witnessed during World War II.

“Sacré bleu! Un globe de feu!”

While the blue flash in Wales very well could have been caused by ball lightning, it would have had to have been a very large occurrence in order to light up such a large area of the early morning sky. According to local news reports, a high-voltage power line was severed by a fallen tree not far from where most of the reports of the blue flash came in. There are many accounts of ball lightning occurring in the vicinity of electrical infrastructure, so it may be that the two events are related. Unfortunately, most instances of ball lightning only last for a few seconds and rarely leave behind any physical evidence. Was this blue flash merely an electrical explosion due to a fallen line, or could it have indeed been one of the rarest natural phenomena on Earth? This one will likely remain a mystery.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

10-02-2019 om 18:04 geschreven door peter  

Two geologists who were on a field trip to study volcanic rocks in Namibia came upon another huge discovery – Africa once had ice streams. Graham Andrews and Sarah Brown, who are geologists at West Virginia University, were exploring the South African desert country when they noticed an odd land formation.

The land consisted of flat desert along with hundreds of steep, long hills. The landscape was shaped by drumlins which are hills that are commonly found in areas that once had glaciers. Needless to say, glaciers – even ancient ones – are not what one would expect in the desert.

Andrews explained that they knew exactly what they were looking at, “We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois.”

Once Andrews returned home from the trip, he did some research on the drumlins in Namibia but found out that nobody had ever studied them. He said, “The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” adding, “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.”

That’s when he partnered up with Andy McGrady, who is a geology senior at West Virginia University, and they used morphometrics to measure the shapes of the drumlins to see if they could find any regular patterns from when they were carved by the ice.

Normal glaciers don’t move a lot, but they discovered that there are big grooves in the drumlins that indicate that the ice must have been fast-moving in order to create the grooves. Those large grooves indicate that there was in fact an ice stream in the southern part of Africa around 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Age.

“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews explained, “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.”

What they discovered shows that the southern part of Africa was over the South Pole during that time period. “These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews confirmed.

They published their paper in the Public Library of Science’s PLOS One journal which can be read by clicking on the link.

{https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

09-02-2019 om 19:05 geschreven door peter  

‘The Blair Witch Project’ Creator Returns With ‘Skyman’ – A Found Footage UFO “Docu-Drama”

By Vince Hoover

It’s been 20 years since the release of the groundbreaking “found footage” movie, The Blair Witch Project, scared audiences everywhere, and changed the horror genre forever. Now, one of the men behind the phenomenon, co-writer and director, Daniel Myrick, returns to this unique horror style with a new “documentary” horror film revolving around UFO’s. Called Skyman, the “documentary” follows Carl Merryweather, who swears he was visited by a “Skyman” while camping when he was ten.

Now, thirty years later, something is calling him back to the same spot, for some kind of reunion, and he intends to document the whole thing. Needless to say, things may not go smoothly for Carl.

The first trailer for the film was debuted at the Slamdance Festival (kind of like the more ‘out there’ little brother to Sundance) in Park City, Utah, on January 28^th. A fuller trailer will be coming later this year. The film itself is set to be released towards the end of 2019.

Myrick co-created The Blair Witch Project with Eduardo Sanchez, but even after the incredible success of the film, the two haven’t worked together on a project since, going their separate ways on various projects (none of which came within a fraction of the success of their first project). Now, going back to his roots, Myrick hopes to catch fire once again with this Aline based docu-drama.

The realistic feel of these “found footage” style movies have garnered success after Blair Witch, like Paranormal Activity and the alien based The 4^th Kind, which was critically panned but it actually rather terrifying. As the Father of this style, hopefully Myrick can catch lightning in a bottle a second time and give us a scary alien film that feels all to real.

{ https://www.screengeek.net/ }

08-02-2019 om 16:35 geschreven door peter  

Syfy Takes Robert Zemeckis UFO Show ‘Project Blue Book’ for U.K.

By ROBERT MITCHELL

Syfy has acquired A+E Networks’ sci-fi historical drama “Project Blue Book” for the U.K., it was announced Thursday by Syfy’s parent company, NBC Universal International Networks.

Executive produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, “Project Blue Book” is based on a real-life U.S. government operation of the same name and centers on the investigation by the U.S. Air Force into UFO sightings in the 1950s and ’60s. It was created by writer David O’Leary, who also serves as an executive producer.

Aiden Gillen stars as a brilliant yet underappreciated college astrophysics professor who is recruited to head the clandestine operation. Along with his Air Force captain partner (Michael Malarkey), who is assigned to debunk the stories, he is summoned to investigate UFO sightings around the country and uses science to discover what really happened. However, when some encounters cannot be explained and cases remain open, he begins to suspect that he has been duped by the government into a larger conspiracy to cover up the truth.

“This acquisition is uniquely suited for Syfy U.K. and, with top talent both in front [of] and behind the camera, we know viewers will be instantly hooked by these compelling, mysterious case files,” said Lee Raftery, managing director U.K. & emerging markets and chief marketing & content officer, NBC Universal International.

Neal McDonough, Michael Harney, Laura Mennell, and Ksenia Solo co-star. Brad Van Arragon serves as producer with series executive producers also including Sean Jablonski, Jacqueline Levine, Jack Rapke, Arturo Interian, and Barry Josen.

The 10-part series will premiere on Syfy in March. It debuted in the U.S. on the History Channel on Jan. 9.

{ https://variety.com/ }

08-02-2019 om 16:19 geschreven door peter  

Sea level rise might not be as bad as predicted, despite accelerating ice sheet melting

 BY MIHAI ANDREI

The melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets have long been known to be caused by climate change. Now, two new papers conclude that the effects of this melting have been overestimated: they may cause much less sea rise and climate shifts than we thought. However, ice will continue to melt at an accelerated rate, causing even more global warming.

Very young sea ice and sea smoke in from of the Stange ice shelf in the Ronne Entrance, Southern Bellingshausen Sea.
Image credits: Mark Brandon.

While some media and politicians are still debating whether climate change is happening and what its causes are, the science is very clear on this: climate change is happening, and we are causing it. Moderate estimates find that temperatures will rise by 3-4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and we are already feeling the effects.

However, the details of this warming are still being analyzed. For instance, we know that melting ice sheets will accelerate global warming largely due to the albedo effect: ice and snow are white and they reflect much of the Sun’s energy. When they melt, they leave behind something darker, which will absorb more solar energy and exacerbate the warming.

However, it’s still not clear just how much this accelerated melting will contribute to sea level rise. Two papers shed some new light on this phenomenon, concluding that things are (surprisingly) a bit better than we anticipated.

In the first paper, Nicholas Golledge and colleagues use satellite measurements of recent ice-mass changes to refine simulations of the melting Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and their potential impacts. Their models suggest that the melted ice will form a freshwater lens on the surface, allowing rising water to spread out, causing further melting of ice underwater and furthering overall melting. However, even with this effect, we might not see the sea level rise all that much worldwide — contradicting some predictions from 2016, which claimed that this type of cliff collapse could add more than a meter to rising seas by 2100.

The reason for this contradiction is connected to ice collapse. Most previous studies analyzing sea level rise used ice-cliff collapses to explain the observed measurements. However, when Golledge and colleagues looked at ice-losses 3 million years ago, 125,000 years ago, and over the last 25 years in more detail, they found that the results can be explained without the need for such collapses. So it’s not clear if or how such collapses should be included in future predictions. Dr. Tamsin Edwards, Lecturer in Physical Geography at King’s College London who led the work, says:

‘We’ve shown that ice-cliff instability doesn’t appear to be an essential mechanism in reproducing past sea level changes and so this suggests ‘the jury’s still out’ when it comes to including it in future predictions. Even if we do include ice-cliff instability, our more thorough assessment shows that the most likely contribution to sea level rise would be less than half a metre by 2100.’

In the second paper, Associate Professor Nick Golledge from Victoria University of Wellington and colleagues including Dr. Edwards report that current climate models do not consider the full effect of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Essentially, melting will slow the Atlantic ocean circulation, trapping warm water below the surface in the southern hemisphere and hereby causing more Antarctic loss. This also increases temperatures variability, resulting in more frequent extreme weather events. Golledge comments:

“Melt from these ice sheets is going to significantly disrupt the global climate making temperatures in some areas vary much more from one year to the next. This unpredictability is going to prove extremely disruptive for all of us, and will make adaptation and planning much more difficult.”

So while both papers suggest that sea level rise won’t be as dramatic as some models predicted, it’s quite likely that ice will melt at an accelerated rate, with severe consequences worldwide. It’s yet another reminder that climate change has diverse and often unpredictable effects.

Journal References:

1. “Global environmental consequences of twenty-first-century ice-sheet melt,” by Golledge et al. DOI
   10.1038/s41586-019-0889-9.
2. “Revisiting Antarctic ice loss due to marine ice-cliff instability,” by Edwards et al. DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-0901-4

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

07-02-2019 om 17:59 geschreven door peter  

WVU researcher unearths an ice age in the African desert

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A field trip to Namibia to study volcanic rocks led to an unexpected discovery by West Virginia University geologists Graham Andrews and Sarah Brown.

While exploring the desert country in southern Africa, they stumbled upon a peculiar land formation—flat desert scattered with hundreds of long, steep hills. They quickly realized the bumpy landscape was shaped by drumlins, a type of hill often found in places once covered in glaciers, an abnormal characteristic for desert landscapes. 

Drumlins, hills formed in places once covered by glaciers, were discovered in Namibia by WVU's Graham Andrews.

Credit: WVU

“We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois,” said Andrews, an assistant professor of geology. “It’s not like anything we see in West Virginia where we’re used to flat areas and then gorges and steep-sided valleys down into hollows.”

After returning home from the trip, Andrews began researching the origins of the Namibian drumlins, only to learn they had never been studied. 

“The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” Andrews said. “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.” 

Andrews teamed up with WVU geology senior Andy McGrady to use morphometrics, or measurements of shapes, to determine if the drumlins showed any patterns that would reflect regular behaviors as the ice carved them. 

While normal glaciers have sequential patterns of growing and melting, they do not move much, Andrews explained. However, they determined that the drumlins featured large grooves, which showed that the ice had to be moving at a fast pace to carve the grooves. 

These grooves demonstrated the first evidence of an ice stream in southern Africa in the late Paleozoic Age, which occurred about 300 million years ago. 

Andrew McGrady.

Credit: WVU

“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews said. “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.” 

McGrady used freely available information from Google Earth and Google Maps to measure their length, width and height.

“This work is very important because not much has been published on these glacial features in Namibia,” said McGrady, a senior geology student from Hamlin. “It’s interesting to think that this was pioneer work in a sense, that this is one of the first papers to cover the characteristics of these features and gives some insight into how they were formed.”

Their findings also confirm that southern Africa was located over the South Pole during this period. 

“These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews said. 

The study, “First description of subglacial megalineations from the late Paleozoic ice age in southern Africa” is published in the Public Library of Science’s PLOS One journal.  

“This is a great example of a fundamental discovery and new insights into the climatic history of our world that remain to be discovered,” said Tim Carr, chair of the Department of Geology and Geography. 

-WVU-

ks/01/30/19

CONTACT: Katlin Swisher, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
304.293.9264; Katlin.Swisher@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter

{ https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/home }

07-02-2019 om 16:58 geschreven door peter  

Experts baffled by mysterious creature discovered in Kiwi's kitchen

An Auckland man and experts have been left baffled after his mother discovered alien-like looking creatures on her kitchen floor.

On Facebook Tim Clerke shared a video on Facebook of the bizarre creatures on his mum's hands, asking if people knew what they were.

"My mother found these on the kitchen floor this morning," he wrote.

"One is still alive. Anyone know what they are? Nikki is horrified and will have nightmares for weeks!"

Many of Facebook speculated what the creatures could be, while others were freaked out by the video.

"Those are miniature bats. Duh," one person wrote.

"I was thinking more alien," Clerke replied.

Another guessed: "Ew gross mutant mice??"

"Arghh, they're horrible!! Kind of stingray-like," another suggested.

"What the ...!!!! That is like a horror movie!", one person said in disbelief.

Despite the video having over 3000 views, Facebook users could not identify what the animals were, even experts couldn't come to a conclusive decision.

Experts contacted by Yahoo7 News at University of Sydney and the Australian Museum could not identify the creature, however experts in New Zealand had differing opinions.

The Biosecurity New Zealand entomology team suggested the video showed the detached legs of a moth.

"They suggest that something [possibly a cat] had just recently eaten the body of the moth, which may explain why a few of the legs were still twitching," a spokesperson told Yahoo!7.

However, the Department of Conservation has other ideas.

Eric Edwards who is an insect expert, said it was possible the unknown specimens could be a rat-tailed maggots but he wasn't entirely sure.

The true identity of the animals is yet to be confirmed.

The creatures were found crawling on a kitchen floor in Auckland, New Zealand 

(Image: Facebook)

{ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/ }

07-02-2019 om 14:47 geschreven door peter  

Groene elektriciteit kampt met grondstoffencrisis

{ https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/ }

06-02-2019 om 22:18 geschreven door peter  

06-02-2019 om 18:08 geschreven door peter  

06-02-2019 om 16:54 geschreven door peter  

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

If only we knew what was the true mission of the “USS Enterprise” spotted above California this week. One of the most mysterious aircraft in the world, a U-2 Dragon Lady, was seen flying above California last week broadcasting the call sign NCC-1701A – the same registry as the legendary USS Enterprisefrom the Star Trek franchise. The U-2 spy plane took off from Beale Air Force Base in Northern California on January 30th then flew a trapezoidal pattern above Northern California for four hours, crossing into Nevada at one point before circling back. Beale Air Force Base is home to the USAF’s 9th Reconnaissance Wing which conducts high-altitude surveillance and intelligence missions in support of combat forces.

A U-2 Dragon Lady. Not exactly a Constitution-class starship but still very impressive.

What was the plane doing up there, and why was it broadcasting such an iconic, conspicuous call sign? In all likelihood it was merely a test flight or basic exercise and the call sign was someone’s way of making their work day slightly more interesting. However, it could very well be that the plane was conducting reconnaissance ahead of a mysterious and slightly unnerving special operations exercise which took place in California this week.

The U.S. Armed Forces are currently conducting urban operations drills in Los Angeles and Long Beach known as Emerald Warrior/Emerald Trident. The operations have seen military helicopters conducting mock raids in densely populated urban environments and all manners of spy planes circling overhead conducting electronic and visual surveillance of the ground below. Videos posted to social media show MH-6 Little Bird helicopters landing on L.A. rooftops to pick up and drop off special operators. Curiously, the public and LAPD were not notified of the operation until moments before the first helicopters started landing.

As aviation watchdog blogs have noted, those exercises have seen some of the American military’s most advanced and secretive spy planes fly curious circular routes above California. Again, it’s highly likely these are all just part of the Emerald Warrior/Emerald Trident drills, but I’m left to wonder why the military would risk conducting drills in such densely populated areas where the risk of harming civilians is so high. Is there something to these secretive operations the military isn’t telling us? Probably not, although how can we know for sure?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-02-2019 om 12:55 geschreven door peter  

NASA probes ANTARCTICA ANOMALY sparking shock ancient FROZEN CITY claim

NASA investigated a strange anomaly below the ice of Antarctica, which could also reveal an ancient civilisation, a bombshell documentary claimed.

05-02-2019 om 18:17 geschreven door peter  

Ten Earthquakes Strike the Coast of Northern California in Less Than 24 Hours | Is the “Big One” Coming?

Ten earthquakes of preliminary magnitudes between 3.0 and 4.5 struck off the coast of Northern California between Saturday and Sunday, the United States Geological Survey reports.

The series of earthquakes rumbled beneath the Pacific Ocean, between 3 miles and 27 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County.

The first earthquake struck early Saturday morning at a magnitude of 4.3, while a second earthquake, of 3.2 magnitude, rumbled about 30 minutes later. Three additional earthquakes hit between 4:30 p.m. and 5:38 p.m. Saturday in the same area, registering magnitudes between 2.9 and 3.6, USGS reported. A 3.0-magnitude earthquake struck that night, at 11:37 p.m.

The geological activity continued into Sunday. USGS reported four earthquakes near Petrolia between 2:18 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. The earthquakes ranged in magnitude from 3.4 to 4.5.

More than 240 people, from Mendocino to McKinleyville, said they felt the 4.5-magnitude earthquake that struck Sunday at 2:18 p.m., according to the USGS’s online “Felt Report” page.

There was no initial word on damage or injury resulting from the quakes. The National Weather Service office in Eureka said Sunday afternoon there was no tsunami danger.

If you live in California, you’ll know the Big One is coming: 

a powerful earthquake of up to magnitude eight is headed for the state. Energy has been building up along the San Andreas Fault for more than a century. No-one knows exactly when or where, but that one day that energy will be unleashed.

It might strike at the heart of San Francisco, last devastated by a Big One in 1906. Or maybe it will tear through southern California like the magnitude 7.9 quake that hit in 1857 and ruptured some 225 miles of the San Andreas Fault.

More than 100 years on, it’s hard to predict exactly how hard the next Big One will hit. John Vidale, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, told Newsweek it won’t look like in the movies—cities won’t collapse into rubble and tsunamis probably won’t sweep through California. But without adequate preparations, the Big One could “cripple” the finances of a state that just became the fifth largest economy in the world.

What exactly is a “Big One,” and where could such an earthquake hit?

A tectonic boundary between the North American and the Pacific plates cuts through California. It’s a big fault where the two sides are moving three or four centimeters a year sideways. Strain builds up for one or two hundred years along that boundary, and then finally that strain becomes so great that the fault can’t take it anymore. It breaks and moves 15 ft or so all at once, causing an earthquake.

There’s three, four, five sections, to this fault—and many other faults running in parallel—but we worry about a Big One striking in the north or in the south of the San Andreas. There’s a part between north and south in central California that seems act like a buffer. There’s some chance a rupture could go end-to-end, but we think it’s either unlikely or that it just doesn’t happen.

How often do these massive earthquakes hit?

It’s every few hundred years. The earthquakes that have happened in the meantime are still devastating to a local area, but instead of magnitude eight, they’re more like magnitude seven. It’s a logarithmic scale, so an eight has about 30 times more energy than a magnitude seven.

Don’t smaller quakes help to dissipate some of the energy that’s building up deep underground?

Those little earthquakes let out only a tiny amount of energy compared to the big ones. It would take 10 magnitude seven earthquakes to let out the strain of a magnitude eight. We don’t have that many, so those little earthquakes hardly slow the big ones at all.

Does that mean the next big one is inevitable?

That’s right. When we look at the history of the fault, we can see these big earthquakes have happened many times over the last few thousand years, so yeah, it’s an inevitability. We just don’t know if it’s going to be now or two hundred years from now.

What kind of impact would a northern or southern California Big One have?

The impact of the northern big one would be tremendous—I mean the San Andreas runs right through San Francisco. It’s quite a lot closer to San Francisco than it is to Los Angeles.

Downtown San Francisco is vulnerable—some of the oldest buildings survived the shaking back in 1906, but that doesn’t mean they’d be safe in the next earthquake by any means. Many of the buildings are built close to the fault and on kind of soft ground that might liquify.

A southern Big One would likely strike a little further away from the heart of Los Angeles, so the impact might be smaller. On the other hand LA has a lot more stuff to break than San Francisco—a lot of it is pretty old. So I think the net expectation is similar north and south. The fault is further away in the South, but it’s also riper, more ready, to go than the one in the north.

More generally, there’s a lot of disasters that come from the strong shaking of an earthquake. It would certainly cause landslides, and conceivably chemical spills. We’re also concerned about fires.

What about tsunamis?

Tsunamis aren’t a big worry here. For an earthquake to make a tsunami it would have to be offshore—not be on the main part of the San Andreas. The ground would move sideways, not so much vertically as in other places, and it’s hard to make a big wave moving sideways. But a lot of other things could happen.

When the Tōhoku earthquake hit Japan in 2011, it caused a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Are there are any nuclear reactors at risk from a Big One in California?

Not around here—there’s one up by San Onofre but it’s been turned off. There’s been a lot of debate about nuclear reactors. Engineers argue they can make reactors safe, but there have been enough accidents over the years that for safety’s sake they are tending not to build them in most places anymore.

If infrastructure doesn’t rebound, what effects will this have on California?

It’s certainly in the realm of possibility that the earthquake causes something that cripples the economy for a long time. Nobody expected the Fukushima reactor to be a dominant problem in Japan’s 2011 earthquake, for example. There’s always a small chance of some very serious unexpected problems.

It’s also possible that a big earthquake might have less effect than we expect. It’s just very hard to predict.

The Big One is worrisome for the government because it disrupts a large area. But for individuals, the moderate-size earthquakes that are right under our feet are often the worst threat.

Los Angeles, for example is filled with faults, and many of them could have a magnitude seven earthquake. A magnitude seven on a smaller fault might well do more damage than the Big One on the San Andreas. The Big One is only part of the danger here.

• https://amg-news.com/breaking-ten-earthquakes-strike-the-coast-of-northern-california-in-less-than-24-hours-is-the-big-one-coming/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

05-02-2019 om 16:07 geschreven door peter  

Waarom het magnetische noorden zich almaar sneller (richting Rusland) verplaatst

Bron: THE GUARDIAN

Het magnetische noorden is de voorbije decennia zo snel verplaatst dat vroegere schattingen volgens wetenschappers niet meer volstaan voor een precieze navigatie. Daarom hebben ze, een jaar vroeger dan gepland, een update gegeven over de exacte locatie. Wat blijkt: het magnetische noorden schuift almaar meer op richting Rusland. Voor de complotdenkers: ene Vladimir Poetin heeft hier niets mee te maken.

Volgens de wetenschappers verplaatst het magnetische noorden zich ongeveer 55 kilometer per jaar en werd de internationale datumgrens in 2017 overschreden. “Het noorden schuift op van het Canadese Noordpoolgebied naar het Russische Siberië.

Maar waarom is die verplaatsing zo belangrijk voor ons? “Het kan problemen veroorzaken met de kompassen in onze smartphones en andere consumentenelektronica. Ook vliegtuigen en schepen vertrouwen deels op het magnetische noorden als navigatiemiddel”, aldus geofysicus en hoofdonderzoeker Arnaud Chulliat van de universiteit van Colorado. Gps-systemen worden niet beïnvloed omdat zijn werken op basis van satellietgegevens.

Het Amerikaanse leger gebruikt het magnetische noorden voor navigatie en de namen van start- en landingsbanen voor vliegtuigen zijn gebaseerd op hun verhouding ten opzichte van het magnetische noorden. Als dat verandert, moeten ook de namen aangepast worden.

Turbulentie

Normaal gezien wordt de locatie van het magnetische noorden eens om de vijf jaar geüpdatet, maar door de snelle verschuiving zagen de wetenschappers zich genoodzaakt de aanpassing al een jaar vroeger dan gepland te doen.

Sinds de eerste meting in 1831 is het magnetische noorden al ruim 2.300 kilometer opgeschoven richting Rusland. Sinds 2000 is de snelheid gestegen van ongeveer 15 kilometer naar ongeveer 55 kilometer per jaar. De oorzaak daarvoor is turbulentie in de buitenste kern van onze aarde. Daar bevindt zich een hete, vloeibare “oceaan” van ijzer en nikkel waarvan de beweging een elektrisch veld tot stand brengt. “Dat kunnen we magnetisch weer noemen”, aldus geofysicus Daniel Lathrop.

Noord wordt zuid en andersom

Opmerkelijk: het magnetische zuiden beweegt trager dan het noorden. Over het algemeen bekeken wordt het magnetische veld van de Aarde zwakker. Volgens experts zou het na verloop van tijd uiteindelijk zelfs omkeren en zal het magnetische noorden het zuiden worden en andersom. In de geschiedenis van de Aarde is dat al meermaals gebeurd, al was de laatste keer wel meer dan 780.000 jaar geleden. Wanneer de volgende “flip” staat te gebeuren, kunnen de experts niet exact zeggen. “Binnen een 1.000-tal jaar?”

{ https://www.nieuwsblad.be/ }

05-02-2019 om 15:09 geschreven door peter  

Why Is Nikola Tesla Literally Erased From History Books?

Did Nikola Tesla’s Strange Obsession With UFOs, Antigravity and Aliens get him banned from History books? Did these crazy ideas get him banned from history? It seems that whenever someone talks about Nikola Tesla they wonder how did he go unnoticed in history books? Why was his legacy pushed out of society? And why is literally erased from history?

WHY IS HIS LEGACY PUSHED OUT OF SOCIETY?

Tesla was a man far ahead of his time, and his countless inventions are evidence that this man was, in fact, the most incredible inventor to ever live on Earth. If it weren’t for this man, things like smart phones, radio, remote controlled devices, etc… would be something completely unknown to us.

But a part of these ‘conventional’ intentions, Tesla had quite a few that seem to have come straight out of a science fiction movie script. UFO’s, Antigravity and Alien beings were anything but unfamiliar for Tesla who even claimed to have contacted beings not from Earth while working on one of his projects.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe, there is a core from which “We” obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know it exists. – Nikola Tesla

This also explains the principles of the Faraday cage, which is used in high voltage research laboratories to protect humans and the electro-sensitive equipment from damage.

According to UFO reports, the inside of these “vehicles” is composed of circular channels or columns which go through the center of the craft. These serve, as a superstructure for the rest of the disk-shaped object and carry a high voltage and a high-frequency coil. It is believed to be a resonant transformer which gives electrostatic and electromagnetic load to the craft and its polarity. The coil inside the craft is what we know today as a Tesla Coil invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891.

Nikola Tesla said: “There is a difference between progress and technology, progress benefits mankind. Technology does not necessarily do that.”

ALIENS, TESLA, AND THE FIRST MAN-MADE FLYING SAUCER

One night, when he was alone in the laboratory, Tesla observed what he cautiously referred to as electrical actions which definitely appeared to be intelligent signals. The changes were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they could not be traced to any cause then known to him.

This incident was the first of many in which Tesla intercepted what he felt were intelligent signals from space. At the time, it was surmised by prominent scientists that Mars would be a likely haven for intelligent life in our solar system, and Tesla at first thought these signals may be originating from the red planet.

While in Colorado Springs, Tesla intercepted strange radio signals that spread through the media incredibly fast. Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver; Tesla concluded that these signals might actually be signals that have originated somewhere in space. He mentioned these signals in a letter to reporter Julian Hawthorne at the Philadelphia North American on 8 December 1899 and in a December 1900 letter about possible discoveries in the new century to the Red Cross Society where he referred to messages “from another world” that read “1… 2… 3…”.

But Tesla was not the only one who was able to intercept these mysterious signals. Guglielmo Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi, was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi’s law and a radio telegraph system. Guglielmo Marconi also intercepted signals originating from space a few years after Tesla; researchers have since claimed that Tesla and Marconi intercepted the same signals.

THE PERFECT UFO: MADE BY TESLA

The methods used in the design of the flying saucer matched the descriptions of those who claimed to have seen a from the UFO inside: with a discoidal capacitor with sufficient size to provide enough thrust to fly, while other small capacitors allowed to control the direction of the flying saucer, to which he added a gyroscopic stabilization system and an electric “drive” control. And if all of that isn’t enough, Tesla had more; the interior of the ship was equipped with flat screens and external video cameras for the pilot’s blind spots.

Tesla’s UFO has eyes, and these were made of electro-optical lenses, arranged in quadrants, allowing the pilot to see everything. Screens and monitors are placed on a console where the browser can observe all areas around the vehicle, and Tesla’s incredible invention included magnifying lenses, which could have been used without changing positions. Basically, it is an incredibly well-designed aircraft, one that we could actually manage to build today. Or have we already built it? What happened to this invention? Why are we not flying into space with Tesla’s incredible invention?

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

04-02-2019 om 23:48 geschreven door peter