Monitoring whales from space
by British Antarctic Survey

Brazilian polar vessel, NPo “Almirante Maximiano” on the West Antarctic Peninsula conducting visual surveys alongside a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the foreground. Credit: Luciano Dalla Rosa/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
Scientists have found that studying high-resolution images of whales from space is a feasible way to estimate their populations. A team, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), compared satellite images to data collected from traditional ship-based surveys. Reported this week in the journal Scientific Reports, this study is a big step towards developing a cost-effective method to study whales in remote and inaccessible places, that will help scientists to monitor population changes and understand their behavior.


The results show that satellite-estimated whale densities were about a third of the densities estimated by ship. This is positive news, because it means that although satellites have poorer detection rates than ships, they still detect enough whales to make the method useful, for example for monitoring changes in whale abundance, particularly in remote regions where more expensive, traditional surveys are difficult.

The study took place in the Antarctic Peninsula, the primary summer feeding ground for many baleen whale species. Satellite images of the Gerlache Strait region spanning ~1000 km2 were collected over two days, and compared to the Brazilian Antarctic Program's annual ship-based whale survey, taking place at a similar time.

Satellite imagery provides a viable means of gathering high volumes of whale observation data with potential for estimating whale densities at unmatched spatial and temporal scales.

Lead author, Connor Bamford, a higher-predator ecologist at BAS and University of Southampton, says:

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz deploying a motion-sensing and dive recording tag on a humpback whale off the western Antarctic Peninsula. Research conducted under NMFS Permit 23095, ACA Permit 2015-014, and IACUC Friea1706. Credit: British Antarctic Survey

"While this is a new method and we have a lot of work still to do, we hope this will pave the way for further developments that will provide a low budget means of collecting data on whales in the future. It will supplement existing efforts in remote regions, and provide information to safeguard whale populations and their remote feeding grounds."

Senior author, whale ecologist Dr. Jennifer Jackson at BAS, says:

"This new technology could be a game-changer in helping us to study whales remotely. Our study shows that satellite surveys can be a feasible method for monitoring changes in whale abundance. This approach may be especially useful in remote areas that are hard to access with ships and planes, and where densities of whales may be high, such as the Southern Ocean."

New methods offer exciting opportunities, but also need robust testing before they become operational. One issue is the ability to account for whales that are underwater. In this study researchers were able to utilize suction-cup tracking data collected by a US National Science Foundation whale tagging program that provides detailed information on dive duration and behavior of humpback whales in the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula. This accounts for those whales that were likely to be missed as a result of being underwater, beyond the depth where satellite detection is possible. Further work is now underway using machine learning tools to assist with identifying whales on satellite imagery.

Watching whales from space

More information: C. C. G. Bamford et al. A comparison of baleen whale density estimates derived from overlapping satellite imagery and a shipborne survey, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-69887-y

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by British Antarctic Survey

Drug resistant parasites cost European livestock industry millions each year

by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)

Credit: European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)

An international research study has estimated that drug-resistant parasitic worms cost the European livestock industry more than €38 million per year in production losses and veterinary costs.

Parasites can cause major welfare and productivity problems in cattle, sheep and goats worldwide, affecting growth, fertility and milk production. Worryingly, drug resistance is increasing against the veterinary medicines widely used to treat and prevent infection. This means that current farming methods may not be sustainable in the longer term.

Now a major new study has estimated that parasitic worms cost the European livestock industry more than €1.8 billion per year, with drug-resistance costing at least €38 million per year in production losses and treatment costs. The study can support the identification of livestock sectors and regions where the largest losses occur and inform control programs and research policies at national and European level.

Agricultural economic data was combined with the latest data on the levels of disease and drug-resistance in 18 European countries. Data were not available for all European countries and only one class of veterinary medicine was included in the analyses. There are five classes of veterinary medicine available to treat parasitic worms in livestock, and drug resistance is widespread against at least three of these classes. This means that the costs are likely to be higher than the conservative estimates reported in the study.

The study was led by Dr. Johannes Charlier of the Belgian scientific consultancy Kreavet, as part of a European Cooperation in Science & Technology COST Action, COMBAR (Combatting Anthelmintic Resistance in Ruminants). It involved a total of 23 organizations who brought together regional expertise and the latest data on the economic impacts of parasitic disease in the European livestock industry

Controlling parasitic worms with genetic selection

More information: J. Charlier et al. Initial assessment of the economic burden of major parasitic helminth infections to the ruminant livestock industry in Europe, Preventive Veterinary Medicine (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2020.105103

Provided by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST

Short wind turns with strong cooling effect

by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Map of the eastern, tropical North Atlantic with the route of the Meteor from 13 to 15 September 2015 (black line). The sea surface temperatures of 14 September 2015 are shown in color, the arrows indicate the direction and strength of the wind at that time. The turbulence measurements with the microstructure probe are marked by the light blue diamonds and the position of the PIRATA buoy is marked by the light blue star. Credit: GEOMAR
Sea surface temperatures in the tropics have a major influence on the climate in the tropics and the adjacent continents. For example, they determine the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the beginning and strength of the West African monsoon. Therefore, it is important to understand the variability of sea surface temperatures for climate predictions. Until now, the seasonal cycle of sea surface temperature in the tropical North Atlantic could not be sufficiently explained. "More precisely, the sea surface is colder than predicted by the combination of previous direct observations of solar radiation, currents and mixing, especially in the summer months from July to September," explains Dr. Rebecca Hummels from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and first author of a study now published in Nature Communications.

Ship-based observations with the German research vessel METEOR in September 2015 provided first measurements of a strong turbulent mixing event below the sea surface, where mixing was up to a factor of 100 higher than previously observed at this location. "When we noticed the greatly enhanced turbulence in the water column during data processing, we at first suspected a malfunction of our sensors," says Dr. Marcus Dengler, co-author of the study. "But when we also noticed strong currents at the ocean surface, we became curious." Precisely such events can explain the lower temperatures at the ocean surface.


"We were able to isolate the process behind this strong mixing event, which lasted only for a few days," explains Dr. Hummels. "It is a so-called inertial wave, which is a very short but intense flow event," Hummels continues. Inertial waves are horizontal wave phenomena in which the current at the surface rotates clockwise with time, whereas the movement rapidly decays with increasing depth. The different velocities at the surface and in the layer below cause instabilities and ultimately mixing between the warm water in the surface layer and the colder water below. Such inertial waves can be caused by brief variations in the near-surface winds. Up to now, generally only weak currents have been observed in this region and the rather steady trade winds at this time of year did not suggest particularly strong mixing events. However, wind variations are crucial to trigger these waves in the upper ocean. The winds do not have to be particularly strong, but ideally should rotate the same way the ocean currents do. Since such wind fluctuations are relatively rare and only last a few days, it has not yet been possible to measure such a strong wave phenomenon with the associated strong mixing in this region.

Microstructure probe at the stern of the Meteor when launching with the instrument's own winch. The fast fading of the orange Kevlar cable allows the turbulence measurements to be carried out almost in free fall of the probe through the water. Credit: M. Dengler, GEOMAR.
After the discovery of this event during the METEOR cruise in September 2015, the Kiel scientists wanted to know more about the frequency and the actual impact of such events. "Through model-based data analysis, we were able to give a context to the in-situ observations," explains co-author Dr. Willi Rath from the Research Unit Ocean Dynamics at GEOMAR. "Together, we have scanned 20 years of global wind observations looking for similar events triggered by wind fluctuations and described their occurrence in the region and during the course of the year," Dr. Rath adds. This has supported the hypothesis that the temporal and spatial distribution of such events can indeed explain the gap in the heat balance of the upper ocean.


The strong turbulent mixing caused by the inertial waves at the base of the surface layer is also crucial for biology: For example, the cold water that is mixed into the surface layer during such an event also brings nutrients from deeper layers into the upper ocean penetrated by sunlight. "This also explains the hitherto largely unexplained occurrence of chlorophyll blooms in this region, which could now also be attributed to the seasonally increased occurrence of these inertial waves," explains Dr. Florian Schütte, also co-author of the study.

The ship measurements in the tropical Atlantic were carried out in close cooperation with the international PIRATA program. For more than 20 years, the PIRATA surface buoys have been providing valuable data for studies of ocean-atmosphere interaction, which were also used for this study. "Indeed, the intensive mixing measurements resulted from a failure in the hydraulic system of the METEOR, which made other measurements impossible at that time," says Prof. Dr. Peter Brandt, chief scientist of the expedition. Despite buoys and series of ship expeditions to this region, new phenomena are still being discovered—sometimes by chance—which decisively advance our understanding of the tropical climate.

Climate predictions several years into the future?

More information: Rebecca Hummels et al, Surface cooling caused by rare but intense near-inertial wave induced mixing in the tropical Atlantic, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17601-x

Journal information: Nature Communications


Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

UNDERSTANDING ALIENS
10 things we do that puzzle and scare horses

by Paul McGreevy, Cathrynne Henshall, The Conversation

Credit: Kenny Webster/Unsplash, CC BY

Horses, like our dogs and cats, are familiar to many of us, be they racehorses, police horses, or much-loved pony club mounts. So it might surprise you that horses, in Australia, are more deadly than snakes, and indeed all venomous animals combined.


An equine veterinarian is more at risk of workplace injury than a firefighter. Does horses' apparent familiarity lead us to misinterpret or misunderstand their behavior?

Some of our interactions with horses correspond to interactions between horses themselves. Giving our horse a scratch on an itchy spot or allowing them to rub their head against us, while frowned on by some trainers, mimics how horses behave together.

But there are many other interactions which, from the horse's perspective, are unusual or downright rude.

The culture clash between horses and humans can trigger defense or flight responses that can leave us badly injured. Here are ten common challenges we present to horses:

1. Invasive veterinary care

There are many veterinary practices we impose on horses to keep them healthy. Some of them, such as injecting or suturing, are invasive or painful. Horses' natural reaction to pain is to flee. If they can't, they may resort to aggression, such as biting or kicking.

Horses don't know veterinary treatments are meant to help them, and hence vets who treat horses are at more risk of injury than those treating other species. Equine vets sustain more workplace injuries than construction workers or firefighters.

2. Patting them

Many horse people routinely pat their horses as a reward for a job well done. But horses have not evolved to find this rewarding. They don't pat each other—instead, they scratch or gently nibble each other as a form of bonding.


A recent study showed patting increased horses' heart rates, whereas scratching lowered them and was associated with behavioral signs of relaxation and enjoyment.

Credit: Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

3. Picking up feet, hoof trimming and shoeing

An important task in horse-keeping is hoof care through regular cleaning, trimming or shoeing. This requires us to pick up a horse's foot and hold it aloft for several minutes. This practice of immobilizing the hoof restricts the horse's ability to flee if it perceives a threat, which may be why many horses find hoof-handling stressful. Training a horse to accept having its feet and legs held requires patience to prevent injury to both the horse and the handler.

4. Grooming sensitive areas

Horses in groups regularly groom each other, favoring areas that aren't sensitive or ticklish. We like to groom our horses all over. Grooming the sensitive groin, inguinal and perineal regions is likely to be unpleasant for horses. This may account for the tail-swishing, agitation and even biting of the handler often seen when people groom these taboo areas.

5. Pulling or clipping hairs and whiskers

Many horse owners like to impose strict order on their horses' body hair, including pulling out "excess" hair from the mane and tail, and trimming or removing body hair, facial whiskers and the protective hair inside the ears. These activities are frequently resented by horses. Some European countries have banned whisker trimming altogether because of the importance of whiskers to horses in detecting the proximity of surfaces and foraging outside their field of view.

6. Spraying them with chemicals such as flyspray

Spraying fly repellent is common enough for many humans. But it creates a strange noise and may also be perceived as aversive when it lands on sensitive skin. The strong scent of the chemicals can also be aversive to horses, given their highly sensitive sense of smell. Patient training is often needed to counter-condition horses so they stand quietly while being sprayed.

7. Feeding by hand or from a bucket

As grazers, horses do not feed each other (except when nursing foals) and in free-roaming situations, aggression over food is rare. In contrast, food aggression is often seen in domestic horses. We provide highly palatable foods and treats that can bring out unwelcome behaviors because horses are highly motivated to eat these foods.

Some learn to mug their carers, for example by knocking the feed bucket out of their hands. In such a situation, crime really does pay and the horse can swiftly learn to repeat the behavior. Of course, the horse's confusion increases and its welfare plummets if it is punished for this.

Credit: Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

8. Putting them in a trailer or horse box

Horses are claustrophobic and have 320° vision, so our practice of loading them into dark, narrow spaces with unstable footing, such as into trailers (floats) and horse boxes, is often a challenge for a species that has evolved to avoid such spaces. Difficulties with loading and with dangerous behaviors during transport are routinely reported. These responses are generally manifestations of panic and include rushing off the trailer and pulling back when tied up.

9. Branding

Searing a permanent mark onto the skin of horses is often required for identification purposes. The use of super-cooled brands or firebrands is unpleasant because they cause a third-degree burn and require the horse to be restrained, either in stocks or via chemical sedation. Thankfully, less invasive methods of identification, such as microchipping, are gaining increasing acceptance among breed and competition societies.

10. Stabling and other forms of isolation

Putting horses in stables might seem benign, and many horses voluntarily enter stables because that is where they are fed. But stabling prevents horses from engaging in most of their grazing and social behaviors. Horses rarely voluntarily isolate themselves from other horses, and prolonged social isolation can lead to behavioral problems such as separation distress, rug-chewing and stereotyped behaviors such as weaving and stall-walking.

If you'd like to benchmark your horse or pony against thousands of others that we have gathered data on, consider using the Equine Behavior Assessment Research Questionnaire. Understanding why horses find so many procedures unpleasant, frightening or painful is the first step to cutting them some much-needed slack.

They do not defend themselves out of malice but from fear. Taking a walk in their hooves allows us to make them happier and safer to be around.


Explore furtherOuter Banks wild horses get mass DNA testing to uncover true lineage
Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Thoughts while reading (about) Colin Wilson

COLIN WILSON THE MISFITS THE STUDY OF SEXUAL OUTSIDERS

FOLLOWING UP ON MY POST ON CJS THOMPSON ON WOMEN DRESSED AS MEN AND MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN, I WAS LOOKING FOR COLIN WILSON'S WORK ON TRANSGRESSION, TRANS SEXUALITY; THE MISFITS AND I CAME ACROSS THIS REVIEW WHICH DEALS WITH WILSON'S BOOK  I ALSO READ THE  MISFITS IN THE CONTEXT OF FOUCAULT WHICH ZAGRIA DISCUSSES.

THEIR BLOG IS A FASCINATING READ 

A Gender Variance Who's Who

Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

31 May 2017

Thoughts while reading (about) Colin Wilson

Over the years I have read many of the books by Colin Wilson – one of those whom the newspapers in the 1950s designated as Angry Young Men - on existentialism, motiveless murder, Jack the Ripper, the occult, ancient civilizations etc, etc., although I never read either of his two autobiographies. There is a new biography out by Gary Lachman, previously Gary Valentine who played bass with Blondie and guitar with Iggy Pop, and then moved to London where he has published a whole slew of books on consciousness and the occult.

I have recently read his biography of Colin Wilson. Reading, as I do, lots of LGBT history it is useful and refreshing to read books in other areas. However trans history does seem to pop up everywhere these days. On page 7 we find:

“another example of what Wilson called his early ‘sexual perverseness’ was one he shared with other creative individuals, like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a young boy Wilson loved to dress up in his mother’s clothes, including her underwear. Authorities such as the pre-Freudian sexologist Havelock Ellis suggest that such behaviour ‘indicates a tendency to homosexuality’, as did, for Ellis, Wilson’s attachment to his mother and dislike of his father. But Wilson never observed any trace of homosexuality in his makeup.”

This perhaps sounds rather old-fashioned. Most writers today would relate child transvestity to either Richard Green’s contentious Sissy Boy Syndrome, or, more productively, cross-dreaming. Lachman gives no indication of being aware of either of these approaches. He does, later, page 262-9 summarize Wilson’s interaction with the trans activist and theorist Charlotte Bach, but a check on his footnotes shows that it is simply a repetition of what Wilson says about her in his book, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. There are a couple of attempts to compare Wilson to Bach’s theoretical schema: p265 “According to Bach’s system, he was a ‘normal’ male, and should therefore not be creative”; p383n27 “Wilson disagreed that the male sexual drive was to become the female, as Charlotte Bach argued. It was rather to possess her, which ultimately is an expression of will”.

Reading from a trans perspective, several other trans persons appear or almost appear. Kenneth Tynan – also an Angry Young Man – pops up several times, but his fondness for dressing female, and especially as the silent film star Louise Brooks is never mentioned. In 1960, Wilson and his wife went on a cruise to Leningrad. There, they sought out the palace of Felix Yusupov (where Rasputin was put to death) but there is no mention of Yusupov as transvestite. Kenneth Walker, Gurdjieffian and Harley Street urologist gave a positive review of Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, 1956 and they became friends. This was the very same time that Walker was introducing Georgina Turtle to surgeons – she had correction surgery in 1957, and then became Georgina Somerset by marriage. Walker wrote the Foreword to her 1963 book, Over the Sex Border. None of this is mentioned.

Let us turn to Wilson’s The Misfits. Lachman tells us: 

“Following Charlotte Bach’s story, Wilson runs through a gauntlet of practices that some readers may find surprising, if not disturbing. What may also be surprising is that the people engaging in these ‘perversions’ are not anonymous case studies from Krafft-Ebing or Magnus Hirschfeld, although material from these and other sexologists appears. Wilson’s case studies involve some of the most famous creative individuals of the past two centuries. Among his sexual Outsiders we find philosophers, novelists, composers and poets, and we are treated to analyses of the intimate lives of, among others, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, Algernon Swinburne, Yukio Mishima, Ludwig Wittgenstein, TE Lawrence, Paul Tillich, Percy Grainger, and aptly enough, the pre-Freud sexologist Havelock Ellis.”

Readers of this encyclopedia will quickly realise that all the persons on this list are men. On the other hand I would contend, even if it is based on anecdotal evidence, that 45-50% of persons indulging in heterosexuality are female. Wilson seems to have almost no interest in the female experience of sex, although there is no shortage of such persons writing about it. Off the top of my head, what about Anaïs Nin, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Erica Jong, Leah Schaefer, Anne Rice, the pre-transition Pat Califia, Kathy Acker (more).

In 1971 Wilson wrote a book on Abraham Maslow, the US psychologist who developed ideas about hierarchies of need, and peak experiences. They agreed enough with each other that each referred to the other in several books. Here is Lachman’s summary of Maslow on women: [Maslow] “discovered that women could be divided into three dominance groups: high, medium and low. The level of dominance influenced their sexuality. High-dominance women enjoyed sex and were promiscuous and experimental, medium-dominance women were romantics looking for ‘Mr Right’, and low-dominance women were shy and afraid of sex.” Could a woman have written that sentence? We have a 21^st century word ‘mansplaining’ – does this apply? I think so. I went googling to see if any woman writer had ever done anything with this typology. While almost all women writers did in fact fail to find any use in the typology, one writer does discuss it and use it: Betty Friedan in her foundational feminist text, The Feminine Mystique.

In reading Wilson’s The Misfits, one can see that Wilson’s readings in sexology are Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. That is: nothing after the Second World War – no Benjamin, Green, Stoller, Money; no Butler, Halberstam, Faderman etc. And certainly no queer theory. He reports at second hand that Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestites and found that most were not homosexual. However he did not read it. His book was 1988, and the English translation of Hirschfeld’s Transvestites did not come out until three years later. Wilson’s source was Charlotte Wolff’s biography of Hirschfeld and the volume Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, attributed to Hirschfeld but written/edited by Arthur Koestler and Norman Haire, which Wilson found for sale in what passed for a sex shop in the 1950s. He finds it an amazing source of sexual ‘perversions’ including ‘transvestism, sadism, masochism, necrophilia’. He continued to use the word ‘perversion’ even after John Money had persuaded most sexologists that ‘paraphilia’ was less offensive.

Despite the reservations that I have expressed here, I am intrigued with Wilson’s suggestion that in the later 18^th century and afterwards there was an ‘imaginative explosion’ that we can trace in sex novels and this was accompanied by a greater variety of sexual and gender activity. He is therefore arguing for a social construction approach – although he never uses the term, nor does he mention Foucault or Trumbach who have developed competing social construction models. (In a later book, Below the Iceberg, 1998, Wilson did engage with some of the ideas of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida – he denounced Foucault as an ‘intellectual con-man’ out to deceive his readers).

• Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton, 1989.
• Gary Lachman. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Tarcher Perigee, 2016.

https://zagria.blogspot.com/2017/05/thoughts-while-reading-about-colin.html#links

The mysteries of sex : women who posed as men
 and men who impersonated women
by Thompson, C. J. S. (Charles John Samuel), 1862-1943
Publication date 1900
Topics Transvestism
Publisher London : Hutchinson
https://archive.org/details/b30320070/page/n3/mode/2up

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/08/i-was-following-up-on-my-post-on-cjs.html

Experts denounce Trump’s ‘dangerous’ call to ‘delay the election’

July 30, 2020 By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement


President Donald Trump’s Thursday morning tweet calling for a delay in the November 2020 presidential election drew immediate concern and outrage from leading experts.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” the president tweeted, after railing against the proven safe practice. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

Legally, experts say, Trump has no authority to delay an election. Here’s Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare:

Good news, he cannot do this https://t.co/rAA4xSFRBZ
— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic) July 30, 2020


But that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

Here’s Matthew Miller, an MSNBC Justice & Security Analyst, formerly the DOJ spokesperson:

Buffoonish, incompetent fascism is still fascism.
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) July 30, 2020

David Rothkopf, professor of international relations and visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, calls it “Trump’s most dangerous Tweet ever,” and an “authoritarian power grab.”

This is Trump's most dangerous Tweet ever. And I know that is saying something. It is not within his power to change the date of the election. But that he wants to try should set off alarms everywhere. He is publicly contemplating a dangerous, authoritarian power grab. https://t.co/QhOMi6AlTr
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) July 30, 2020

White House reporter for the Los Angeles Times:
There it is — the president is suggesting that the country delay the election. https://t.co/9YWtmYUzKG
— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) July 30, 2020

Legal expert on voting rights:

Trump cannot delay the election. Only Congress, through a new law could do so. In any event, per the US Constitution his term expires noon on January 20. That cannot be moved, period.https://t.co/hqg8j1vGZD https://t.co/K7Cxt3Q2qJ
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) July 30, 2020

CNN White House Correspondent:
Trump is now openly floating delaying the election. https://t.co/0u1bQtgbr3
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 30, 2020

Former head of USDOJ Civil Rights Division:
Trump CANNOT delay the election. Date of the general election is set by federal law, fixed since 1845. It would take a change in federal law – an act of Congress – to move that date.
If he wants people to safely vote, he should urge the Senate to pass $3.6B in election funding. https://t.co/uyoZbjB5rF
— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) July 30, 2020

Former Director of the Office of Government Ethics:
We all knew it was coming to this. Make no mistake about it: Any announcement of a delay of the election will be a declaration of war against America by our criminal president. https://t.co/fIAE4spGWd
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) July 30, 2020


Dartmouth Political Science Professor
So dangerous. Straight out of the authoritarian playbook. https://t.co/zVJRrp6F9L
— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) July 30, 2020


ABC News Reporter/Producer:
Joe Biden, April 23: "Mark my words: I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow; come up with some rationale why it can't be held."
President Trump, April 27: "I never even thought of changing the date of the election. Why would I do that?"
July 30: https://t.co/NXMXztlZCV
— Ben Siegel (@benyc) July 30, 2020

John Tyndall: the forgotten co-discoverer of climate science

by Roland Jackson, The Conversation

JULY 31, 2020

The greenhouse effect. Credit: US EPA

It is surprising that the Irish scientist John Tyndall, born 200 years ago on August 2 1820, is not better known. This is despite the existence of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the Tyndall National Institute and the Pic Tyndall summit on the Matterhorn in the Alps. There are even several Mount Tyndalls, Tyndall glaciers and Tyndall craters on the Moon and Mars.
From that, you could surmise that he was both a significant scientist and a notable mountaineer. Yet, due to unfortunate circumstances, he is no household name.

In 1859, Tyndall showed that gases including carbon dioxide and water vapour can absorb heat. His heat source was not the Sun, but radiation from a copper cube containing boiling water. In modern terms, this was infrared radiation – just like that emanating from the Earth's surface.

Previous work had shown that the Earth's temperature was higher than expected, which was put down to the atmosphere acting as an insulator. But no-one knew the explanation for what we now call the greenhouse effect – gases in the atmosphere trapping heat.

What Tyndall did was to discover and explain this mechanism. He wrote: "Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet."

He realised that any change in the amount of water vapour or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could change the climate. His work therefore set a foundation for our understanding of climate change and meteorology.

Tyndall was not, however, the first to make the climate link. That prize goes to the American Eunice Foote, who showed in 1856 using sunlight that carbon dioxide could absorb heat. She suggested that an increase in carbon dioxide would result in a warmer planet.

Research suggests Tyndall was unaware of her work. He would no doubt have been surprised to find that an amateur woman had beaten him to a general demonstration of the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide. To his discredit, he did not believe that women possessed the same creative abilities in science as men.
Tyndall made many other discoveries in disparate fields of physics and biology. He made his initial reputation in the obscure topic of diamagnetism, the weak repulsion of substances by a magnet. That brought him to the notice of influential people such as physicist Michael Faraday.

Within a few years he was a fellow the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific body, and professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he remained for the rest of his scientific career.

Soon he was at work on understanding glacier structure and motion. After that came the work on the absorption of heat by gases, and then the action of light in causing chemical changes. In the process Tyndall explained why the sky is blue—blue light is scattered more by gases in the sky than other colours because of its short wavelength.

He also discovered "Tyndallisation"—a bacteriological technique of sterilisation—when undertaking experiments alongside French biologist Louis Pasteur to support the theory that germs can cause disease. That line of research led to the invention of a respirator for firefighters, though Tyndall never took out a patent. He committed himself to fundamental research, confident that others would generate useful applications.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain from about 1838.

Science versus religion

As a public intellectual, Tyndall's was one of the loudest voices advocating a scientific explanation for the natural world and for life itself, a scientific naturalism. In this, religion and theology had no place. He gave the starkest statement of this position in his famous, indeed notorious, Belfast Address, in 1874.

In the Ulster Hall, he thundered: "We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, insofar as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it."

But he was never one to belittle the role of religion. Science, for him, provided reliable knowledge of the world. Religion met people's emotional needs, a role he thought might eventually to be replaced by poetry.

Representing the past

Tyndall didn't marry until he was in his 50s, but his beloved Louisa killed him by accident in 1893—giving him an overdose of the wrong medicine in the dark. She then gathered huge amounts of material to write his biography, but died 47 years later with it uncompleted.

Her drafts, as well as Tydnall's diaries, laboratory notebooks and thousands of letters, are held at the Royal Institution in London. All his correspondence is currently being published by the Tyndall Correspondence Project. I was able to use the material when writing my biography The Ascent of John Tyndall, just released in paperback for his birthday.

Louisa's failure to write a biography is part of the reason he is not better known, but he also had the misfortune to die on the cusp of revolutionary discoveries in physics such as quantum theory and relativity. In a sense, he represented the past.

But today, climate research is more important and pressing than ever—and scientists are making huge strides. I am sure Tyndall would be gratified to find that his foundational work had proved so important.

In his time, however, few people made the connection between the burning of fossil fuels and possible global warming. Tyndall was more worried that Britain would run out of coal and be unable to compete economically with America, given its vaster supplies. One imagines though that, as a scientist, he would be convinced by the current evidence.

Climate science is now the future rather than the past, and it is therefore time to recognise and reinstate Tyndall as a major Irish scientist, mountaineer and public intellectual.
A 150-year-old experiment with a beam of light showed germs exist—and how a face mask can help filter them out

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
5 shares

Sea level rise: three visions of a future summer holiday at the coast

by Nick Davies and David Jarratt, The Conversation

JULY 31, 2020

Heavy engineering could keep some resorts afloat. Credit: Serge Skiba/Shutterstock

The COVID-19 pandemic will ensure summer 2020 is a washout for most. With international travel restrictions limiting holidays abroad, many people in the UK have opted to stay somewhere closer to home. As a result, there have been remarkable increases in the number of visitors to beaches across the UK. Thousands flocked to a beach in Bournemouth on a single day in June, causing the local council to declare a major incident.


But far greater disruptions to our summer holidays lie ahead. About half of all tourism takes place in coastal areas, but with global warming set to raise sea levels by somewhere around two metres over the next 80 years, how will our relationship with the coast change?

Will we commemorate the old coastal boundaries with forlorn sojourns above the sunken land? Will we recreate the beach in the heart of our cities? Or will we preserve the drowned coast as a nature reserve—a quiet memorial to what was lost?

We imagined three different versions of what a beach holiday might look like as climate change eclipses the coastline we once knew.

1. Floating in place

Sea level rise may seem a distant threat, but resorts and other tourism operators are already considering how they can stay near the coast and operate above the water. On the Caribbean island of Barbuda, resort huts have been built on stilts.

The aim is to keep tourism viable in the same place it has thrived for decades, while minimising damage from higher water levels.

‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ Credit: Efired/Shutterstock

Seasteading is one answer to this conundrum. The idea to build settlements on platforms at sea originated with the hope of creating more sustainable and equal societies away from land. The technology is still being developed, while researchers consider the engineering, legal and business implications.

New research suggests that coastal flooding could threaten up to 20% of global GDP by 2100, with much of it tied to the tourism industry. Tourism could instead become a new source of income for seasteads. Given the dwindling coastal space for tourists, creating new spaces out at sea might be a way to meet the problem of sea level rise head on.


2. Bringing the beach to you

The urban beach is a concept that's growing in popularity worldwide. It involves creating sandy areas in towns and cities by importing sand onto concrete. There may also be artificial pools and fairground rides. Each one has different features. There are family-friendly options, and those catered to adults, with cocktail bars or restaurants.

The opportunities for hedonism are still there, but instead of travelling miles to enjoy it, it's right on your doorstep. Less travel means less carbon emissions, and urban beaches might help ease pressure on the real coast.

Perhaps the most famous urban beach is the Paris Plage. Since its opening in 2002, Parisians and summer tourists have been able to lounge under palm trees on the banks of the river Seine. It cost over two million Euros to create and has since been extended due to its popularity.

The Nottingham Riviera is an attempt to recreate this success in the UK. The landlocked beach in the middle of the city has sand and water, amusement arcades and beach bars.

The urban beach is becoming an industry in itself, with companies specialising in fake beaches that can be built as seasonal fixtures or permanent areas. If reaching the coast becomes too arduous in the future, these examples could provide everything needed for a seaside experience without the sea.

Rewilding the coast would provide new wetland habitat for threatened species. 

Credit: Lara Danielle/Flickr, CC BY

3. Rewilding the coast

Perhaps the most pragmatic solution is to accept nature taking its course and relinquish control as rising seas reshape the terrain. Allowing the new coastline to rewild could create millions of acres of new wetlands—habitats that are very good at storing carbon and that have deteriorated by about 50% since 1900.

Examples from Hong Kong, Spain, and Wallasea Island in the UK demonstrate how turning heavily managed coastal areas into new habitats can create new opportunities for wildlife and people.

So does the Mexican island, Mayakoba. Its unique mangrove forests were damaged and polluted by the building of numerous hotel chains on the seafront, but today, only 10% of these hotels remain on the coast.

The local community abandoned their high-density model of tourism and protected the dunes and mangroves, which were being eroded by excessive development. New canal networks were dug to create an estuary, attracting birds and amphibians. This new wetland was designated as a nature reserve and visitors arrived to enjoy a new kind of tourist experience.

Visitor capacity and beach activities were reduced to ensure sensitive coastal environments could remain protected. But allowing the sea back into reclaimed coastal territory allowed a more sustainable model of tourism to flourish—one which could be replicated elsewhere as sea levels rise.

But before that can happen, our views of the coast must change. Humans once saw land and sea as a continuation of one another, rather than two discrete entities. Reviving this concept could allow us to navigate a future in which once certain borders have blurred beyond recognition.


Explore further Beach building is keeping the Atlantic Coast from going under

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UH OH
Canadian ice caps disappear, confirming 2017 scientific prediction

by University of Colorado at Boulder

This outline of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps, taken from the 2017 The Cryosphere paper, is based on aerial photography from August 1959, GPS surveys conducted during August 2001, and for August of 2014 and 2015 from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). It shows the area of the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1959, 2001, 2014, and 2015. The ice caps were markedly smaller in 2015 than in previous years. Credit: University of Colorado at BoulderThe St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.


Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and lead author on the paper, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.

"When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape," said Serreze. "To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away."

In 2017, scientists compared ASTER satellite data from July 2015 to vertical aerial photographs taken in August of 1959. They found that between 1959 and 2015, the ice caps had been reduced to only five percent of their former area, and shrank noticeably between 2014 and 2015 in response to the especially warm summer in 2015. The ice caps are absent from ASTER images taken on July 14, 2020.

The St. Patrick Bay ice caps were one-half of a group of small ice caps on the Hazen Plateau, which formed and likely attained their maximum extents during the Little Ice Age, perhaps several centuries ago. The Murray and Simmons ice caps, which make up the second half of the Hazen Plateau ice caps, are located at a higher elevation and are therefore faring better, though scientists predict that their demise is imminent as well.

This NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite image from July 14, 2020, shows the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps once were (area circled in blue). As of July 2020, satellite images show that these ice caps have disappeared. Credit: Bruce Raup, NSIDC

These NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite images show the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps used to exist on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. The ice caps were still intact in the photo on the left, which was taken in August of 2015. As of the photo on the right, which was taken in July of 2020, the ice caps have melted out and no longer exist. Credit: Bruce Raup, NSIDC

This NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite image from August 4, 2015, shows the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps (circled in blue). As of July 2020, satellite images show that these ice caps have disappeared. Credit: Bruce Raup, NSIDC

This NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite image from July 14, 2020, shows the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps once were (area circled in blue). As of July 2020, satellite images show that these ice caps have disappeared. Credit: Bruce Raup, NSIDC

These NASA Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite images show the location where the St. Patrick Bay ice caps used to exist on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. The ice caps were still intact in the photo on the left, which was taken in August of 2015. As of the photo on the right, which was taken in July of 2020, the ice caps have melted out and no longer exist. Credit: Bruce Raup, NSIDC





"We've long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic," said Serreze. "But the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal. All that's left are some photographs and a lot of memories."

More information: Mark C. Serreze et al. Rapid wastage of the Hazen Plateau ice caps, northeastern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, The Cryosphere (2017).

DOI: 10.5194/tc-11-169-2017

Provided by University of Colorado at Boulder