Australia gardener's tree grows five different species of fruit


Hussam Saraf of Shepparton, Australia, was awarded a Guinness World Record for grafting five different species of fruit onto a single tree. Photo courtesy of Guinness World Records

Nov. 11 (UPI) -- An Australia gardener earned a Guinness World Record when he successfully grafted five different types of fruit onto a single tree.

Hussam Saraf of Shepparton, Victoria, said he actually grafted 10 different fruits onto the tree in his back yard, but Guinness World Records told him not all of them counted as different types.

Saraf's tree bears white and yellow nectarines, white and yellow peaches, blood and yellow plums, peachcots, apricots, almonds and cherries.

"They told me my application was rejected, because they needed five different species, not varieties," Saraf told Guardian Australia.

Guinness initially told Saraf he had merely tied the record of five fruits, which was set by Luis H. Carrasco of Chile, but a further review found two of Carrasco's fruits -- peaches and nectarines -- only counted as a single species, reducing his number to four and giving the new record to Saraf.

"Sometimes you just need to have a conversation," Saraf said.

Saraf told Guinness his tree is meant to symbolize "peaceful coexistence" and serve as an example of how to live together with respect and acceptance in a diverse society.

Worshippers descend on India's Yamuna River despite toxic foam

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Worshippers observing the Hindu festival of Chhath Puja waded into the Yamuna River in India despite the presence of toxic foam resulting from sewage runoff. Photo by Abhishek/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Thousands of worshippers plunged into India's Yamuna River and waded through toxic foam as government leaders quarreled over how to clean the waterway.

Devotees made their way into the water as part of the four-day Hindu festival of Chhath Puja that ended Thursday, celebrating the sun deity Surya by fasting and making offerings while standing in water.

Worshipers in northern India traditionally take to the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges that runs through the capital city of New Delhi, however this year the river was coated with thick foam resembling snow.

"It's a sewer," worshipper Ravi Shankar Gupta told The New York Times. "But the sun deity says: 'Even if you stand in a gutter and make an offering, I will protect you for the rest of the year.'"

The festival celebrates the sun deity Surya by fasting and making offerings while standing in water. Photo by Abhishek/UPI | License Photo

The foam bubbles are the result of organic matter decomposing as untreated sewage from Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh are dumped into the river leaving soap-detergent particles, industrial effluents, decomposing vegetation and filamentous bacteria.

Short-term exposure to the foam can cause skin irritation and allergies and if ingested it can lead to gastrointestinal issues and diseases such as typhoid. Long-term exposure to heavy metals found in industrial pollutants can cause neurological issues and hormonal imbalances.

New Delhi treats about two-thirds of its sewage but hundreds of millions of gallons are dumped into the Yamuna untreated as the city grapples with an expanding population.

The government of Delhi attempted to mitigate the impacts of the foam, sending out boats to attempt to sweep it away, laying down bamboo barricades to prevent it from spreading and sending workers to hose down the foam.

Members of India's AAP Party in Delhi accused neighboring states of polluting the water while BJP leaders said the government prevented the festival from taking place in the river to hide the pollution. Photo by Abhishek/UPI | License Photo

Government leaders also resorted to fingerpointing Thursday as Gopai Rai and Raghav Chanda of Delhi's Aam Aadmi Party said Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have released 155 million gallons of untreated waste water into the river while Delhi has worked to upgrade sewage treatment plants to meet Delhi Pollution Control committee standards.

However, Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament Manoj Tiwari accused the AAP government of not allowing the celebration to take place on its banks in order to cover up the pollution.

'Rarest mammal in North America' wanders into Colorado garage

Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Wildlife officials in Colorado said rescuers were summoned to a resident's garage to relocate a black-footed ferret, "the rarest mammal in North America."

Colorado Parks and Wildlife said a resident of Pueblo West, near Walker Ranch, contacted the agency this week to report the discovery of the ferret inside his garage.

"Bears in garages are old news. But an endangered black-footed ferret, the rarest mammal in North America, in a Pueblo West garage?" the wildlife agency tweeted.

The man managed to trap the ferret in a box by the time officers arrived, the agency said.

A microchip implanted in the animal revealed it was one of nine black-footed ferrets released two weeks earlier on a 1,600-acre prairie dog colony near Highway 50 as part of conservation efforts for the species.

"We don't know exactly why this black-footed ferret left the colony," Ed Schmal, an agency conservation biologist, said in a news release.

"We put them into prairie dog burrows, but they may not stay. Sometimes they scramble around the colony to find the right home. This one might have gotten pushed out by other ferrets and it went looking for a new home. We really don't know."

The ferret was determined to be healthy and was successfully returned to the colony, officials said.

Volcanoes hastened Chinese dynasties' collapse, researchers call it a warning

Volcanic eruptions may have contributed to the collapse of dynasties in China, a new study has found. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Volcanic eruptions helped collapse dynasties in China in the last 2,000 years by temporarily cooling the climate and affecting agriculture, a study published Thursday by Communications Earth & Environment found.

Large eruptions created a cloud that blocked some sunlight for a year or two, reducing the warming of land in Asia in the summer and leading to weaker monsoons and less rainfall, the data showed.

This, in turn, led to decreases in crop harvests, causing hunger and migration that were factors in the collapse of several ruling dynasties in the region, the researchers said.

"We confirmed for the first time that collapses of dynasties in China over the last 2,000 years are more likely in the years after volcanic eruptions," co-author Alan Robock said in a press release.

"The impact of a cooled climate on crops can also make conflict more likely, further increasing the probability of collapse," said Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Erupting volcanoes can pump millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, forming vast sulfuric acid clouds that reflect sunlight and lower the Earth's average surface temperature.

Major eruptions can lead to "a double jeopardy of marked coldness and dryness during the agricultural growing season," the researchers said.

These impacts may be worsened by livestock deaths, accelerated land degradation and more crop damage from agricultural pests that survive during milder winters.

For this study, Robock and his colleagues reconstructed 156 explosive volcanic eruptions from 1 A.D. to 1915 by examining elevated sulfate levels in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctic.

They also analyzed historical documents on 68 Chinese dynasties and examined warfare in the region between 850 and 1911.

Smaller volcanic "shocks" to the climate may have caused dynasties to collapse when political and socioeconomic stress is already high, the data showed.

In addition, larger shocks may have led to collapses, even without other factors such as poor leadership, administrative corruption and demographic pressures.

The findings emphasize the need to prepare for future eruptions, especially in regions with economically vulnerable populations, perhaps comparable to the Ming and Tang dynasties in China, the researchers said.

Future volcanic eruptions could also impact countries with a history of resource mismanagement, such as in Syria before the 2011 uprising, which may have been partly triggered by drought.

When combined with climate change, these eruptions are also likely to profoundly affect agriculture in some of the Earth's most populous and most marginalized regions, the researchers said.

Eruptions during the 20th and 21st centuries have been smaller than many during imperial China, but have still contributed to the Sahelian drought of the 1970s to 1990s, resulting in about 250,000 deaths and 10 million refugees in this economically marginalized region, they said.

"The relationship is complex," Robock said.

"If there is ongoing warfare and conflict, dynasties are more susceptible to collapse," he said.

Near-Earth asteroid may have broken off from the moon, study finds


Astronomers used the Large Binocular Telescope in southern Arizona to show that the asteroid Kamo'oalewa, seen in an artist's impression, may be a lost fragment of the moon. Image by Addy Graham/University of Arizona


Nov. 11 (UPI) -- A near-Earth asteroid named Kamo'oalewa, which orbits the sun but remains close to the Earth, may be a moon fragment, University of Arizona researchers said in a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Researchers found that the asteroid's patter of reflected light, called a spectrum, matched lunar rocks from NASA's Apollo missions, indicating it broke off from the moon.

They initially doubted themselves because no other known asteroids have lunar origins, but after three years of looking for another plausible explanation, they found it was the most likely scenario, according to the study.

"We doubted ourselves to death," study co-author Vishnu Reddy, a university professor who started the project in 2016, said in a press release.

Study lead Ben Sharkey, a planetary sciences graduate student at Arizona, said that the team reached its finding this spring after their observations were delayed by the shutdown of the telescope last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We got much needed follow-up observations and went, 'Wow it is real,'" Sharkey said. "It's easier to explain with the moon than other ideas."

Study co-author, Renu Malhotra, a university professor who led the orbit analysis portion of the study, said Kamo'oalewa's orbit, which was similar to the Earth's, but with the slightest tilt, was not typical of near-Earth Asteroids, and was another clue to its lunar origins.

"It is very unlikely that a garden-variety near-Earth asteroid would spontaneously move into a quasi-satellite orbit like Kamo'oalewa's," Malhotra said in the release.

"It will not remain in this particular orbit for very long, only about 300 years in the future, and we estimate that it arrived in this orbit about 500 years ago," Malhotra said.

Researchers defined Kamo'oalewa as one of the Earth's "quasi-satellites," which "are faint and difficult to observe."

The research team used the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona for the study, which also included data from the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Flagstaff, Ariz.

The near-Earth asteroid, which is roughly the size of a Ferris wheel and gets as close as 9 million miles from the Earth, was discovered in 2016 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System located at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii.

The name Kamo'oalewa, found in a Hawaiian creation chant, alludes to an offspring that travels on its own.

Back in 2018, a study found that both the Earth and moon formed from the same giant collision.

The scientists in that study hypothesized that a pair of planet-size bodies collided to create a donut-shaped cloud of vaporized rock called a synestia.

As the rock vapors condensed into liquid form, the cloud shrunk and transformed into molten planet, but a glob of vaporized rock escaped during impact, resulting in the seed for what became the Earth's moon.

GM's Oshawa Assembly plant builds its first Chevy Silverado pickup

Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press
Wed, November 10, 2021, 

General Motors has started production of the Chevrolet Silverado pickup at the Oshawa Assembly plant in Ontario.

The first Silverado, a 2022 heavy-duty High Country trim in red, rolled off the assembly line around 11:45 a.m. Monday, but GM announced it publicly on Wednesday, said Monte Doran, GM spokesman.

It is a remarkable feat considering the plant was slated for closure in 2018 when GM said it would permanently close Oshawa and four other factories in North America in a cost-saving effort. The plants targeted for closure, Oshawa included, all built cars, and consumer tastes had shifted to pickups and SUVs.

The first pickup trucks coming down the assembly line at Oshawa Assembly in Ontario on November 10, 2021.

But in labor talks last year, Unifor — the union that represents GM auto workers in Canada — struck a deal with GM to build the automaker's overflow of pickup trucks.

Located about 40 miles east of Toronto near the Lake Ontario shoreline, Oshawa Assembly has undergone a $1.1 billion overhaul and is now building the full-size light-duty and heavy-duty pickups far ahead of schedule to help GM meet increased demand for that vehicle.

"The rapid retooling, hiring, and training needed to reach today’s start of production was an extraordinary accomplishment," Scott Bell, GM Canada president and managing director, said in a statement. "We continue our work with the federal and Ontario governments toward even larger transformative investments in Canada.”

The retooled facility includes a new body shop that covers 13 acres, 1,200 new robots, 10,300 feet of new conveyors and 310 miles of electric wiring. It contains 5,000 parts from 370 different suppliers, Doran said.

Oshawa will begin shipping trucks to dealers next month.

The plant will begin shipping trucks to dealers in December 2021. The first truck off the line will be auctioned to help GM and our Canadian dealers raise money for Sharon’s Kids, one of our favourite charities in Durham Region.

But GM Canada will raffle the first one, which will come with an exclusive VIN 001 wrap, to its dealers in Canada to benefit the Durham Children’s Aid Foundation (DCAF). For every $250 a dealer donates to DCAF, it earns an additional entry into the raffle, Doran said. Dealers can donate until Nov. 29 and GM Canada will announce the winner Dec. 8.

It's common practice for automakers to use the first car off a line to benefit charity.

Donating to DCAF honors former Oshawa employee Sharon Clark, who died last year after battling cancer. For years, Oshawa Assembly employees have donated holiday gifts for children, through “Sharon’s Kids.”

Since 2018, GM Canada and its employees have donated more than $500,000 to Sharon’s Kids, which is now part of DCAF, GM Canada said in a statement.

Oshawa Assembly will be the only GM factory to build both heavy duty and light duty pickups, exclusively building the Silverado.

"That said, Oshawa will add to GM’s North American manufacturing footprint, allowing the company to significantly increase production across both the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra lineups," Doran said.

GM Canada said it will create 1,800 jobs, mostly new hires, to support two shifts of production and support thousands of additional jobs for suppliers.

Mary Ann Kidd, an employee working on the line at Oshawa Assembly plant, assembles a truck door.

Unifor National President Jerry Dias said the return of vehicle assembly to the Oshawa plant is unprecedented and it is because of the "resiliency and dedication" of Unifor members.

The union fought GM's plan to close the plant with pickets, calling GM "Greedy Motors," a call for customers to boycott GM vehicles made in Mexico, and a media campaign against the automaker so negative that in 2019, GM threatened to sue Unifor over a union spot critical of GM that aired in Canada during the Super Bowl.

Unifor defied GM's threat and continued the ad campaign during the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards and other high-profile shows.

"Seeing the first of many trucks roll off the newly reopened Oshawa assembly line was a proud moment for everyone who fought shoulder-to-shoulder for these jobs," Dias said in a statement Wednesday. "The auto industry has and will continue to be the bedrock of Oshawa and Durham region’s economy.”

More: Documentary takes aim at GM's move to close Oshawa Assembly Plant

More: Here's how Canada's autoworker union won big with GM, Ford and FCA

Chevron, partners to fork out for carbon offsets for Gorgon LNG carbon capture shortfall


Dow Jones Industrial Average listed company Chevron (CVX)'s logo is seen in Los Angeles

Sonali Paul
Wed, November 10, 2021

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Chevron Corp and its partners in the Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Western Australia have agreed to buy carbon credits likely to cost more than $180 million as a penalty for failing to meet a five-year target for carbon capture and storage (CCS).

The costs, which could amount to well over A$250 million ($184 million) based on Reuters calculations, will be shared with its Gorgon LNG partners - Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell, and Japan's Osaka Gas, Tokyo Gas and JERA.

The A$3.1 billion Gorgon CCS project, the world's largest commercial CCS project, is being penalised by the Western Australian government for injecting far less carbon dioxide than planned since the LNG plant started up five years ago.

Chevron said in a statement that it would invest A$40 million in "lower carbon projects" and would buy and surrender 5.23 million greenhouse gas offsets to fulfill the Gorgon project's obligations to the state government, ideally by mid-July 2022.

"The package we have announced ... ensures we meet the expectations of the regulator, the community and those we place on ourselves as a leading energy producer in Australia," Chevron Australia Managing Director Mark Hatfield said in a statement.

Based on the current price of carbon offsets on the voluntary Australian spot market, which last week hit a record high of A$37 a tonne, 5.23 million offsets would cost at least A$195 million.

Amid short supply of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), Chevron is unlikely to meet its obligation just with those offsets and said in a report to the government it would also use other internationally verified carbon units and offsets.

Gorgon CCS was designed to inject up to 4 million tonnes a year of CO2. Since starting injecting CO2 in August 2019, three years later than scheduled, it has injected a total of about 5.5 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent.

The project was delayed by three years due to a range of technical problems.

($1 = 1.3563 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Sonali Paul; additional reporting by Sameer Manekar in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M. and Kenneth Maxwell)

Earth Has a Second Moon—For Another 300 Years, At Least

Jeffrey Kluger
Thu, November 11, 2021, 

Full frame of the full moon at sunset with a sky with clouds.
The big guy has a little friend 

Credit - Getty Images; © Jose A. Bernat

It’s easy to be brand loyal to the moon. We’ve only got the one, after all, unlike Jupiter and Saturn, where you’d have dozens to choose from. Here, it’s luna or nada. Or not. The fact is, there’s another sorta, kinda moon in a sorta, kinda orbit around Earth that was discovered only in 2016. And according to a new study in Nature, we may at last know how it was formed.

The quasi-moon—named Kamo’oalewa, after a Hawaiian word that refers to a moving celestial object—is not much to speak of, measuring less than 50 m (164 ft) across. It circles the Earth in a repeating corkscrew-like trajectory that brings it no closer than 40 to 100 times the 384,000 km (239,000 mi.) distance of our more familiar moon. Its odd flight path is caused by the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun, which continually bend and torque the moonlet’s motions, preventing it from achieving a more conventional orbit.

“It’s primarily influenced just by the sun’s gravity, but this pattern shows up because it’s also—but not quite—on an Earth-like orbit. So it’s this sort of odd dance,” says graduate student Ben Sharkey of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the lead author of the paper.

None of this means that Kamo’oalewa has to have especially exotic origins. The solar system is littered with asteroids, some of which are captured by the gravity of other planets and become more conventional—if fragmentary—moons. Others don’t orbit other planets in the common way but fall into line in front of them or behind them and pace them in their orbits around the sun, like the flocks of so-called Trojan asteroids that precede and trail Jupiter.
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Either way, Kamo’oalewa was bound to get attention because its composition posed a stubborn mystery. Asteroids tend to reflect brightly in certain infrared frequencies, but Kamo’oalewa just doesn’t. It’s dimmer somehow—clearly made of different stuff, which suggests a different origin.

To investigate the mystery, Sharkey, under the guidance of his PhD adviser, planetary scientist Vishnu Reddy, first turned to a NASA-run telescope in Hawaii routinely used for studying Earth-vicinity asteroids. But even through the usually reliable instrument, the infrared signature seemed too faint. Instead they switched to a University of Arizona-run monocular telescope that, as Sharkey says, could “squeeze every last ounce of photons out of that object.”

That produced better, clearer results, but still they were incomplete. The rock was made of common silicates like other asteroids, but they were common only in their general composition, not in their infrared signature, which remained stubbornly off.

At last, the answer suggested itself. If Kamo’oalewa was behaving like a sort of quasi-moon, perhaps it was an artifact of the actual moon. Earlier in Sharkey’s PhD program, one of his advisers published a paper on lunar samples brought back by the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. When Sharkey compared the data he was getting in his telescope with what the earlier geologists came up with in the rock lab, the results matched perfectly. The kind of space-weathering lunar silicates undergo when they’re still on the surface of the moon precisely accounted for the differences in the infrared reflectivity between common asteroids and Kamo’oalewa.

“Visually, what you’re seeing is weathered silicate,” says Sharkey. “The eons of exposure to space environment and the micrometeorite impacts, it’s almost like a fingerprint and it’s hard to miss.”

How Kamo’oalewa shook free of our lunar companion is no mystery. The moon’s been getting bombarded by space rocks for billions of years, resulting in all manner of lunar debris getting ejected into space (nearly 500 bits of which have made it to the surface of the Earth as meteorites). Kamo’oalewa is one such piece of lunar rubble that spiraled away from the moon. But rather than landing on Earth or simply tumbling off into the void, it found itself a quasi-satellite in its own right.

“We see thousands of craters on the moon, so some of this lunar ejecta has to be sticking around in space,” says Sharkey.

Kamo’oalewa won’t stick around all that long, as its current trajectory is not entirely stable. According to estimates from Sharkey and others, the object will remain an earthly companion for only about 300 more years—nothing at all on the cosmic clock—after which it will break free of its current gravitational chains and twirl off into the void. Originally a part of the moon, then a companion of Earth, it will spend the rest of its long life traveling on its own.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent nearly $1.8 million on political lobbying this year, more than Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin

Isobel Asher Hamilton

Wed, November 10, 2021

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (left) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Joe Raedle/Getty Images/Axel Springer

• Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent nearly $1.8 million on political lobbying this year, CNBC first reported.

• Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has spent just under $1.4 million, data from Open Secrets shows.

• Blue Origin has been locked in a legal challenge with NASA over a SpaceX contract.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has spent more on political lobbying this year than rival billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, data suggests.

As first reported by CNBC, SpaceX has spent just under $1.8 million so far this year and Blue Origin has spent just under $1.4 million, data from Open Secrets, a nonprofit that monitors political lobbying expenditure, shows.

Musk said in a September tweet he prefers to "stay out of politics." He has been known to give his personal opinion on politics, however, calling lockdown measures "fascist" and attacking Joe Biden over the president's supposedly "biased" stance on unions.

SpaceX spent $2.2 million on lobbying in 2020 while Blue Origin spent $1.9 million in the same year, per the Open Secrets data.

SpaceX this year spent $590,000 directly lobbying lawmakers, including the Executive Office of the President, CNBC reported. The company also spent more than $210,000 on campaign contributions to bipartisan congressional candidates in the first half of 2021, CNBC said.

While SpaceX has spent more on political lobbying than Blue Origin, per the Open Secrets data, Blue Origin has been notably active in the courts.

SpaceX was awarded a $2.9 billion contract by NASA in April to help take US astronauts back to the moon. Blue Origin filed a challenge with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in April but its case was rejected by the GAO in July.

Blue Origin also sued NASA in August but the US Court of Federal Claims ruled against Bezos' company on November 4.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday that NASA's target for getting astronauts to the moon by 2024 had been pushed back to 2025, and partially blamed Blue Origin's legal fights for the delay.

Rare 520-year-old coin found at site of first English settlement in Newfoundland

Thu, November 11, 2021

The rare silver coin is known as a Henry VII half groat or two-penny piece

Archaeologists in eastern Newfoundland have unearthed what could be the oldest English coin ever found in Canada.

The rare silver coin - around the size of a US nickel and just smaller than a 10p coin - was discovered at the historic site of Cupids Cove, the first English settlement in the nation.

Known as a Henry VII half groat or two-penny piece, it is believed to have been minted more than 520 years ago.

The coin is expected to go on display at the site in the 2022 tourist season.

"It is incredible to imagine that this coin was minted in England and was lost in Cupids over a hundred years later," said Steve Crocker, the provincial tourism, culture, arts and recreation minister, in a statement on Wednesday.

"It links the story of the early European exploration in the province and the start of English settlement."

A team of archaeologists studied the coin in consultation with a former curator of the Bank of Canada's Currency Museum and determined it had been minted in Canterbury sometime between 1493 and 1499.

Head archaeologist William Gilbert, who has led digs at the site since 1995, hailed the discovery as "a major find".

"Some artefacts are important for what they tell us about a site, while others are important because they spark the imagination. This coin is definitely one of the latter," Mr Gilbert said.

"One can't help but wonder at the journey it made, and how many hands it must have passed through."

In August 1610, a group of English settlers landed at what was then known as Cupers Cove, in Conception Bay, Newfoundland. They were led by a merchant from Bristol by the name of John Guy.

Within years, the colonists had built several structures there, including a fort, sawmill, gristmill and brew house.

In 2001, Mr Gilbert's team uncovered an Elizabethan coin at the same site, which was at the time considered to be the oldest English coin found in Canada.

The newly unearthed half groat is believed to be about 60 years older.