It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, November 07, 2021
SCIENCE AS TAX WRITE OFF
Mimer Superyacht Explorer Is Perfect for the Adventurous,
Eco-Friendly Millionaire
Explorer yachts are no longer the brutish, unpolished and unwelcoming vessels of yesteryear. As demand for luxurious vessels with longer ranges and ice-class hulls soars, a new hybrid vessel has emerged: the superyacht explorer.
Superyacht explorers were initially introduced as concepts, before the multi-millionaires of the world started to have them built. The trend is clearly here to stay, as this new type of vessel is able to blend the best of both worlds, offering multiple functionality, ruggedness and efficiency in a package just as luxurious as that of “regular” superyachts. Pricing is comparable, as well.
On that note, the latest design from Laurent Giles, in collaboration with Tillberg Design of Sweden (TDoS) is here to prove that a superyacht explorer can still be very stylish. It’s superficial to think of a boat’s functionality in terms of aesthetics, but when you pay $75 million for one, it’d better look good throughout. Mimer does all that, while sacrificing none of the ruggedness or high performance of a true explorer. And it’s got green credentials, to boot.
Mimer was introduced last September and is now being listed for sale through IYC, with an asking price of €65 million – just a hair over $75 million at the current exchange rate. It’s a superyacht and an explorer all rolled into one beautiful, Scandinavian-styled package, with a customizable layout and plenty of gear to suit the needs of the most adventurous explorer out there.
Measuring 60 meters (197 feet) in length and spanning several decks, Mimer offers accommodation for 12 guests in six suites, and 15 crew. Its highest selling point is that it can be anything the owner needs it to be, focusing either on luxurious amenities and gorgeous living spaces, or functioning merely as a (still very lavish) transport ship for all the exploring gear.
To that end, Mimer comes with three possible configurations. You have the World Traveler package, which includes a generously-sized beach club and more space for the guests, including the possibility of a full-size gym and spa area aft, without encroaching on the space dedicated to the two cavernous tender garages. Then, there’s the Adventure Explorer package, which replaces the beach club with a large, open, multi-purpose storage area under the helipad deck. The third configuration is basically a Plus version of the Adventure Explorer, adding a fully enclosed helicopter garage.
In the gear-focused configurations, Mimer becomes a virtual toy carrier, as renders in the gallery above will show. In addition to the two tender garages, it will be able to haul a variety of cars and off-road vehicles, jet skits, submarines, and other types of water toys.
The generous, 1600GT interior is just as impressive as the exterior. Mimer oozes Scandinavian minimalism and pure Zen, with soft, neutral furnishes and floor-to-ceiling glazing that allows in natural light and opens up otherwise cramped spaces. The owner’s suite, located on the main desk, is exactly like what you’d find on a superyacht: it has its own private terrace, a jacuzzi, an office and wardrobe, and ensuite bathroom with full-size bathtub.
Mimer would be eco-friendly in whichever was possible, too. TDoS says that locally-sourced or recycled materials will be used for the interiors, to minimize waste and the carbon footprint during production. Because this would be an ice-class vessel meant to go to remote locations, its own carbon footprint would be reduced by means of a hybrid propulsion system, “potentially combing battery fuel cells.” Onboard support system, such as water treatment and waste handling, are “selected to meet the latest and highest requirements regarding low energy consumption and the best possible sustainability solutions available today,” the design studio notes.
“We challenged ourselves to design an explorer yacht that would meet the most demanding requirements in Antarctica as well as looking beautiful in the port of Miami or Monaco. Function combined with beauty,” TDoS Partner & Yacht Director Daniel Nerhagen says in a statement.
Specifics on propulsion have not been published, but TDoS imagines Mimer would have a range of 6,000 nautical miles.
Editor's note:
This article was not sponsored or supported by a third-party.
Sex and the Symbiont: Can Algae Hookups Help Corals Survive Climate Change?
ByRICE UNIVERSITYNOVEMBER 6, 2021
Rice University’s Lauren Howe-Kerr, left, and Adrienne Correa discovered that symbiont algae found on corals in French Polynesia are able to reproduce via mitosis and sex. That could make it easier to develop algae that better protect coral reefs from the effects of climate change. Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University
Rice biologists’ discovery can be used to help climate-challenged reefs survive for now.
A little more sexy time for symbionts could help coral reefs survive the trials of climate change. And that, in turn, could help us all.
Researchers at Rice University and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography already knew the importance of algae known as dinoflagellates to the health of coral as the oceans warm, and have now confirmed the tiny creatures not only multiply by splitting in half, but can also reproduce through sex.
That, according to Rice marine biologist Adrienne Correa and graduate student Lauren Howe-Kerr, opens a path toward breeding strains of dinoflagellate symbionts that better serve their coral partners.
Dinoflagellates not only contribute to the stunning color schemes of corals, but critically, they also help feed their hosts by converting sunlight into food.
“Most stony corals cannot survive without their symbionts,” Howe-Kerr said, “and these symbionts have the potential to help corals respond to climate change. These dinoflagellates have generation times of a couple months, while corals might only reproduce once a year.
“So if we can get the symbionts to adapt to new environmental conditions more quickly, they might be able to help the corals survive high temperatures as well, while we all tackle climate change.”
In an open-access study in Nature’s Scientific Reports, they wrote the discovery “sets the stage for investigating environmental triggers” of symbiont sexuality “and can accelerate the assisted evolution of a key coral symbiont in order to combat reef degradation.”
A coral of the type studied by scientists at Rice University is protected by dinoflagellates (inset), algae that turn sunlight into food to feed and protect reefs. The study showed the algae are able to reproduce via sex, opening a path toward accelerated evolution of strains that can better protect coral from the effects of climate change. Credit: Inset by Carsten Grupstra/Rice University; coral image by Andrew Thurber/Oregon State University
To better understand the algae, the Rice researchers reached out to Rosa Figueroa, a researcher at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography who studies the life cycles of dinoflagellates and is lead author on the study.
“We taught her about the coral-algae system and she taught us about sex in other dinoflagellates, and we formed a collaboration to see if we could detect symbiont sex on reefs,” Howe-Kerr said.
“In genomic datasets of coral dinoflagellates, researchers would see all the genes coral symbionts should need to reproduce sexually, but no one had been able to see the actual cells in the process,” said Correa, an assistant professor of biosciences. “That’s what we got this time.”
The discovery follows sampling at coral reefs in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, in July 2019 and then observation of the algae through advanced confocal microscopes that allow for better viewing of three-dimensional structures.
A dinoflagellate tetrad cell that will soon split into four separate cells, captured by Rice University scientists through a confocal microscope. The cell’s four nuclei are depicted in red. Researchers at Rice and in Spain determined from experiments that these symbionts, taken from a coral colony in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, are able to reproduce both through mitosis and via sex. Credit: Correa Lab/Rice University
“This is the first proof that these symbionts, when they’re sequestered in coral cells, reproduce sexually, and we’re excited because this opens the door to finding out what conditions might promote sex and how we can induce it,” Howe-Kerr said. “We want to know how we can leverage that knowledge to create more genetic variation.”
“Because the offspring of dividing algae only inherit DNA from their one parent cell, they are, essentially, clones that don’t generally add to the diversity of a colony. But offspring from sex get DNA from two parents, which allows for more rapid genetic adaptation,” Correa said.
Symbiont populations that become more tolerant of environmental stress through evolution would be of direct benefit to coral, which protect coastlines from both storms and their associated runoff.
“These efforts are ongoing to try to breed corals, symbionts and any other partners to make the most stress-resistant colonies possible,” Correa said. “For coral symbionts, that means growing them under stressful conditions like high temperatures and then propagating the ones that manage to survive.
“After successive generations we’ll select out anything that can’t tolerate these temperatures,” she said. “And now that we can see there’s sex, we can do lots of other experiments to learn what combination of conditions will make sex happen more often in cells. That will produce symbionts with new combinations of genes, and some of those combinations will hopefully correspond to thermotolerance or other traits we want. Then we can seed babies of the coral species that host that symbiont diversity and use those colonies to restore reefs.”
Reference: “Direct evidence of sex and a hypothesis about meiosis in Symbiodiniaceae” by R. I. Figueroa, L. I. Howe-Kerr and A. M. S. Correa, 22 September 2021, Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-98148-9
The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Community Project (DIANAS-CTM2017-86066-R), a Lewis and Clark Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship, the National Science Foundation (1635798) and an early-career research fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences (2000009651).
New research highlights environmental benefit to caterpillar droppings
SUDBURY - The summer 'scourge' of the tent caterpillar that Sudbury has endured these last few summers may actually have been working to help the environment.
That's the findings of a new paper from the University of Cambridge where PhD student Sam Woodman found they're actually helping to improve water quality of nearby lakes.
"What we found was sort of after an insect outbreak of typically caterpillars who are feeding on leaves, traditionally you'd think of the effects of it mostly being on the trees themselves, eating the leaves and that's harming the trees in someway but in reality they have effects beyond that," Woodman told CTV News. Woodman, who’s originally from Lethbridge, collaborated with Laurentian University's Living with Lakes Centre to study the effects of caterpillars in the region. "After they eat the leaves that has to be excreted out at some point, pooped out as it were, and that feces is released into the environment and it has its own effects," he explained.
They found it's been working to help improve water quality of nearby lakes on a huge scale. The researcher admits it came as a surprise to see the large increase in nitrogen and decrease in carbon.
According to their findings, the excrement washes into lake water and acts s fertilizer for microbes, which they releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as they metabolize.
The excrement, or frass as it's called, is said to be highly dissolvable so after a heavy rain, it's washed into nearby waterways.
"I was surprised by the magnitude of it, this was the idea I had when I applied for my PhD, and I had this thought that disturbance events can have a massive effect on the landscape but they're not limited to the landscape that they occur in and how can we look at those effects beyond the force they occur in," he said.
But Woodman says it's also a delicate balancing act when it comes to the caterpillars from an ecological point of view. Too much of a good thing could lead to impacts in other ways.
"Knowing about the effects will allow us to manage for it better, so if an entire forest was eaten by caterpillars that might clean up the water clarity that year but then you might get a ton of algae growing and that might promote some harmful algae at some point,” said Woodman.
“And the opposite case, if you got rid of all these caterpillars, well we might be losing some bumps in nitrogen that might be occurring and losing out in the lakes' health over all so it's not necessarily about it being good or bad, it's about keeping it in balance."
The study also warned of northwards range expansion any increased inspection population growth as a result of climate changes. It's putting northern forests at increased risk of defoliator’s outbreaks in the future and could cause greater quantities of CO2 to be released from nearby lakes. The study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications and is believed to be one of the most extensive studies ever undertaken on the topic.
Forest defoliator outbreaks alter nutrient cycling in northern waters | Nature Communications
They looked at invasive Gypsy moths and Forest tent caterpillars.
Laurentian University's Living with Lakes Centre worked as a collaborator on the project. The Centre's director John Gunn believes many in Sudbury will end up finding the results fascinating.
"In Sudbury our soils are really poor and the caterpillars are doing us a favour, they're turning those trees into tea and that tea is flowing into the lakes feeding fish and at the same time rebuilding the soil so when we're dealing with conditions like Sudbury where the soil is so poor, yes the caterpillars are good," he said.
Gunn admits, he like many in the city doesn't like them, but they are doing a good job in fixing up the landscape.
In Sudbury, it's not unusual to see foil or soap at the bottom of a tree as some residents try to protect their property. Gunn says that's fine.
"When you step back and look at the bigger forest, there's really nothing we can do about it, it's very much like the farmers going and plowing down the alfalfa to enrich the soil in the fall. The insects are doing that for us, they're fixing the soil across the landscape," he said.
Glaciers across the globe have lost over nine trillion tons of ice in half a century. How will glaciers look over the coming decades? "It all depends on what humans are doing now in terms of greenhouse gas emissions:" this is the message one scientist delivered during an ESA-led expedition to the Gorner Glacier in Switzerland—one of the biggest ice masses in the Alps.
As world leaders gather for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of Parties, watch the exclusive premiere of the documentary that follows ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, along with a team of glaciologists and climate experts, on their journey across the Alps to learn how rising global temperatures are taking their toll on glaciers.
The documentary features breathtaking scenery of the Gorner Glacier as well as interviews with climate specialists as they explain how we can monitor glaciers using both satellite data and in situ measurements.
Smoke from a 2019 Northern California wildfire could be seen by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Research by scientists from UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land in the western U.S. that has been destroyed by large wildfires over the past two decades.
Rong Fu, a UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and the study's corresponding author, said the trend is likely to worsen in the years ahead. "I am afraid that the record fire seasons in recent years are only the beginning of what will come, due to climate change, and our society is not prepared for the rapid increase of weather contributing to wildfires in the American West."
The dramatic increase in destruction caused by wildfires is borne out by U.S. Geological Survey data. In the 17 years from 1984 to 2000, the average burned area in 11 western states was 1.69 million acres per year. For the next 17 years, through 2018, the average burned area was approximately 3.35 million acres per year. And in 2020, according to a National Interagency Coordination Center report, the amount of land burned by wildfires in the West reached 8.8 million acres—an area larger than the state of Maryland.
But the factors that have caused that massive increase have been the subject of debate: How much of the trend was caused by human-induced climate change and how much could be explained by changing weather patterns, natural climate variation, forest management, earlier springtime snowmelt and reduced summer rain?
For the study, published in the Nov. 9 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers applied artificial intelligence to climate and fire data in order to estimate the roles that climate change and other factors play in determining the key climate variable tied to wildfire risk: vapor pressure deficit.
Vapor pressure deficit measures the amount of moisture the air can hold when it is saturated minus the amount of moisture in the air. When vapor pressure deficit, or VPD, is higher, the air can draw more moisture from soil and plants. Large wildfire-burned areas, especially those not located near urban areas, tend to have high vapor pressure deficits, conditions that are associated with warm, dry air.
The study found that the 68 percent of the increase in vapor pressure deficit across the western U.S. between 1979 and 2020 was likely due to human-caused global warming. The remaining 32 percent change, the authors concluded, was likely caused by naturally occurring changes in weather patterns.
The findings suggest that human-induced climate change is the main cause for increasing fire weather in the western United States.
"And our estimates of the human-induced influence on the increase in fire weather risk are likely to be conservative," said Fu, director of UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, a collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The researchers analyzed the so-called August Complex wildfire of 2020, which burned more than a million acres in Northern California. They concluded that human-induced warming likely explains 50 percent of the unprecedentedly high VPD in the region during the month the fire began.
Fu said she expects wildfires to continue to become more intense and more frequent in the western states overall, even though wetter and cooler conditions could offer brief respites. And areas where vast swaths of plant life have already been lost to fires, drought, heatwaves and the building of roads likely would not see increases in wildfires despite the increase of the vapor pressure deficit.
More information:Yizhou Zhuang et al, Quantifying contributions of natural variability and anthropogenic forcings on increased fire weather risk over the western United States,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2021).DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2111875118
This summer, the Western United States saw a truly devastating wildfire season. Across the country, more than 48,000 wildfires raged, damaging more than six million hectares of land. It would be nice to think that humans weren’t the primary cause of these events and that natural changes in weather patterns contributed to how dry and fire-prone parts of the world have become.
But the reality isn't so nice. Climate change is likely the cause of the wildfires, according to new research that aimed to quantify just how much blame we can lay at the feet of natural causes when it comes to the increasing rates of wildfires in the US’s West. “We want to know how much this increase in fire weather is just changing weather patterns and how much cannot be explained by changing weather patterns,” Rong Fu, one of the paper’s authors and a professor at UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, told Ars.
The research began around a year ago. Fu and some of her colleagues live in California and were all impacted by the wildfires, so they wanted to investigate what is causing them.
How bad is it?
Fu and her team deployed a technique called an "ensemble constructed flow analogue." In short, they looked back in time between 1979 and 2010 in the region and found cases in which the naturally occurring weather looked much as it does now. From there, they looked at a figure called the vapor pressure deficit (VPD)—basically, how dry and “thirsty” the area is—both in the historic and modern cases.Advertisement
VPD is the leading cause of forest fires on the US West Coast and many other places around the world. So if the modern VPD is higher than it was in historic cases with similar weather patterns, it would suggest that there is a non-natural component to how fire-prone things are currently. “Basically, the difference between [the present VPD] and the [VPD] we can get from the same weather patterns in the past is due to climate change,” she said.
Fu noted that these cases won’t have the same weather patterns, however. She also added that the work took into consideration various other factors that might have played a role, such as changes in vegetation.
In all, the research suggests that only around 32 percent of VPD trends can be attributed to natural causes. The remaining 68 percent or so cannot—and it’s likely that climate change is the culprit.
Ruh-roh
To make matters worse, 68 percent is a conservative estimate. The paper notes that the number could be as high as 88 percent. Fu noted that the past weather data her team used was likely also impacted by the fact that humans were emitting carbon and otherwise mucking around with the climate even back then. “The reference period is already being affected by greenhouse gases,” she said.
As a result, their estimates of climate change impacts is not as large as it would be in reality; it’s on the more conservative side of things. “We want to be as conservative as possible. That way, when we say, 'Climate change contributes two-thirds of [the increase to] fire weather,' we know that’s likely to be true and only an underestimate of climate change,” she said.
Trying to suss out exactly how much human activity impacts climate change is a tricky business because the climate changes to some degree on its own. But this research is another step toward understanding just how much humans are responsible. Further, according to Fu, the methods used in this paper could be deployed elsewhere around the world. “I think this approach can be generalized to other areas,” she said.
ROB MACKENZIE AND CHRISTINE FOYER, THE CONVERSATION 5 NOVEMBER 2021
More than 150 years ago Victorian biologist Charles Darwin made a powerful observation: that a mixture of species planted together often grow more strongly than species planted individually.
It has taken a century and a half – ironically about as long as it can take to grow an oak to harvest – and a climate crisis to make policymakers and landowners take Darwin's idea seriously and apply it to trees.
There is no human technology that can compete with forests for take-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its storage. Darwin's idea of growing lots of different plants together to increase the overall yield is now being explored by leading academics, who research forests and climate change.
Scientists and policymakers from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US came together recently to discuss if Darwin's idea provides a way to plant new forests that absorb and store carbon securely.
Why plant more forests
Planting more forests is a potent tool for mitigating the climate crisis, but forests are like complex machines with millions of parts. Tree planting can cause ecological damage when carried out poorly, particularly if there is no commitment to diversity of planting. Following Darwin's thinking, there is growing awareness that the best, healthiest forests are ones with the greatest variety of trees - and trees of various ages.
In mixed forests, each species accesses different sources of nutrients from the others, leading to higher yields overall. And those thicker stems are made mostly of carbon.
Mixed forests are also often more resilient to disease by diluting populations of pests and pathogens, organisms that cause disease.
Darwin's prescient observation is tucked away in chapter four of his 1859 famous book On the Origin of the Species. Studies of this "Darwin effect" have spawned vast ecological literature. Yet it is still so outside of the mainstream thinking on forestry that, until now, little major funding has been available to prompt use of this technique.
Darwin also famously described evolution by natural selection, a process by which genes evolve to be fit for their environment. Unfortunately for the planet, human-induced environmental change outstrips the evolution of genes for larger, slower reproducing, organisms, like trees.
Modern gene-editing techniques – direct DNA surgery – can help speed things up once careful laboratory work identifies the key genes. But only evolution of human practice – that is, changing what we do – is fast and far-reaching enough to rebalance the carbon cycle and bring us back within safe planetary limits. Healthier trees capture more carbon
At our meeting we discussed a study of Norbury Park estate in central England, which describes how – using the Darwin effect and other climate-sensitive measures – the estate now captures over 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, making it quite possibly the most carbon-negative land in the UK. Such impressive statistics don't happen by accident or by sticking some trees in the ground and hoping; care and ecological nous is needed.
Trees of different ages also continuously provide harvestable timber and so steady jobs, in stark contrast to the other methods of forestry, where large areas are felled and cleared at the same time.
The UK government, like other administrations, has laid down requirements for responsible large-scale tree planting. These requirements continue to be revised and improved. There are still vital questions about which trees we should plant, where we should plant them, and what to do with them once they've grown.
It has been said that it is impossible to plant a forest, but it should certainly be possible to design a plantation that will blossom into a forest for future generations. We need forests to be a practical, dependable, and just response to our climate and biodiversity crises, and Darwin has shown us the way.
From space, astronaut sounds the alarm about climate crisis
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet of France, adjusts his glove as he talks to family and friends before a launch attempt at the Kennedy Space Center on April 23, 2021 in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Through the portholes of the International Space Station, Thomas Pesquet has an arresting view of global warming's destructive repercussions that negotiators are seeking to tackle at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Credit: AP Photo/John Raoux, File
Entire regions of Earth in flames. Storms trailing destruction in their wake. And the haunting fragility of humanity's only home floating like a blue—but also tarnished—pearl in the vastness of space.
Through the portholes of the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has an arresting view of global warming's repercussions. He used a video call from space to sound the alarm Thursday, as negotiators, government officials and activists continued meeting at a U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
"We see the pollution of rivers, atmospheric pollution, things like that. What really shocked me on this mission were extreme weather or climate phenomena," Pesquet told French President Emmauel Macron during the call.
"We saw entire regions burning from the space station, in Canada, in California," he said. "We saw all of California covered by a cloud of smoke and flames with the naked eye from 400 kilometers (250 miles) up."
From space, "the fragility of Earth is a shock," Pesquet continued. "It's a sensory experience to see just how isolated we are as an oasis, with limited resources."
This is Pesquet's second mission to the space station. He also spent 197 days in orbit in 2016-2017. The destructive effects of human activity have become increasingly visible, he said.
"Year after year, we also know we are beating records for fires, for storms, for floods. And that is very, very visible. I very clearly saw the difference compared to my mission four or five years ago," the astronaut said.
Macron said the goal for climate negotiators in Scotland must be to speed up humanity's response.
