Science & Technology News

[GordMay]

Carbon Inequality:
Research, carried out with the Stockholm Environment Institute, found that over the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, the richest 1 per cent of people (those with a net income of over $109,000 US or $145,000 Cdn in 2015) drove 15 per cent of climate-changing emissions — more than twice the 7 per cent emitted by the poorest half.
The richest 10 per cent (those with a net income of $38,000 US or $50,000 Cdn in 2015) accounted for 52 per cent of emissions over that period, the study said.
Keeping global climate change under control will require, not just helping poorer countries to develop cleanly, but putting in place tough measures to curb over-consumption by the world's richest. The Oxfam report estimates that the richest 10 per cent of people* would have to slash their emissions to about 10 times lower than now, to keep the world on track for the emissions goals — and do it by 2030.
“Confronting Carbon Inequality: Putting climate justice at the heart of the COVID-19 recovery” ~ by Tim Gore
➥ https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository...e/10546/621052


* This will, likely, include a very large majority of US.

[GordMay]

Rescuers battle to save 270 whales stranded in Australia
Scientists said the long-finned pilot whales became stuck on sandbars at Macquarie Harbour, on Tasmania's rugged and sparsely populated west coast, on Monday.
Kris Carlyon, a wildlife biologist at the Marine Conservation Programme, said "about a third" of the animals were already dead and rescuing survivors would be a "challenging" task likely to take several days.
More ➥ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/...033645890.html

[GordMay]

Today’s equinox arrived at 13:31 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
➥ https://www.weather.gov/abq/clifeatures_fallequinox

The equilux occurs on on Wednesday, September 23, this year.
➥ https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essen...of-the-equinox

[GordMay]

42:
Since it was humorously deemed to be the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything”, by author Douglas Adams, in the book The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, 42 has been crowned the most famous of the not-particularly-interesting numbers.
Computer scientist Jean-Paul Delahaye injects the number with added glamour by exploring its more evidence-based qualities.* For instance, it’s 101010 in binary, which is sort of nice, and it is the sum of the first three odd powers of 2 (21 + 23 + 25 = 42).

The number 42 also turns up in a whole string of curious coincidences, whose significance is probably not worth the effort to figure out.
For example:
In ancient Egyptian mythology**, during the judgment of souls, the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of 42 sins.

* “For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42"
Here is how a perfectly ordinary number captured the interest of sci-fi enthusiasts, geeks and mathematicians.
➥ https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...the-number-42/

** ”Assessors of Maat” ➥ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assessors_of_Maat

[GordMay]

Transmission of communicable diseases is very much a function of how much contact we have with each other.

Achieving herd immunity to COVID-19 is an impractical public health strategy, according to a new model developed by University of Georgia scientists Tobias S. Brett and Pejman Rohani.
Brett and Rohani sought to determine if and how countries could achieve herd immunit,y without overburdening the health care system, and to define the control efforts that would be required to do so.

“Transmission dynamics reveal the impracticality of COVID-19 herd immunity strategies” ~ by Tobias S. Brett and Pejman Rohani (September 22, 2020)
➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2.../21/2008087117

Excerpted from their ABSTRACT:
The rapid growth rate of COVID-19 continues to threaten to overwhelm healthcare systems in multiple countries. In response, severely affected countries have had to impose a range of public health strategies achieved via nonpharmaceutical interventions. Broadly, these strategies have fallen into two categories:
1) “mitigation,” which aims to achieve herd immunity by allowing the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus to spread through the population while mitigating disease burden,
and
2) “suppression,” aiming to drastically reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates and halt endogenous transmission in the target population...

... Notably, our modeling did not support achieving herd immunity as a practical objective, requiring an unlikely balancing of multiple poorly defined forces.
Specifically, we found that
1) social distancing must initially reduce the transmission rate to within a narrow range,
2) to compensate for susceptible depletion, the extent of social distancing must be adaptive over time in a precise yet unfeasible way,
and
3) social distancing must be maintained for an extended period to ensure the healthcare system is not overwhelmed ...

... Our modeling confirms that suppression is possible with plausible levels of social distancing and self-isolation, consistent with experience in multiple countries. Our research does not, however, support attempting to mitigate COVID-19 with the aim of building herd immunity. Achieving herd immunity while simultaneously maintaining hospital burden at manageable levels requires adaptive fine-tuning of mitigation efforts, in the face of imperfect epidemiological intelligence—something that is impractical...

The complete paper ➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2.../21/2008087117

Supporting Information ➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/su...87117.sapp.pdf

The first published paper* on second-surge COVID-19 infections, from US states, suggests that policymakers should look for demonstrable turning points in data, rather than stable or insufficiently declining infection rates, before lifting restrictions.
Their analysis shows governments should try not to allow new cases to increase, nor reduce restrictions when case numbers have merely flattened.
* “COVID-19 in the United States: Trajectories and second surge behavior” ~ by Nick James and Max Menzies
➥ https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0024204

[GordMay]

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize Winners:
Certain scientific advancements (such as the discovery of penicillin or the structure of DNA) are such game-changers that the scientists behind them are honored and immortalized with a Nobel Prize.
And then there is the sort of research that involves giving helium to alligators, or identifying narcissists by their eyebrows.
Since 1991, these scientific misfits have found recognition by the Ig Nobel awards.
This year, the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual event celebrating quirky, comical discoveries, carried on despite the pandemic in a virtual ceremony, riddled with bugs, and bug jokes. The Annals of Improbable Research, the science humor magazine that hosts the event, selected bugs as the theme for the 30th annual event, although the winning studies spanned an array of icky, wondrous, and unconventional research. The ceremony took place entirely online, for the first time, with a series of prerecorded speeches, musical numbers, and lightning-speed lectures.
➥ https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/winners/#ig2020

[fgd3]

> it is the sum of the first three odd powers of 2 (21 + 23 + 25 = 42)


That threw me for awhile until I figured out is was 2^1+2^3+2^5.

[GordMay]

“Global Climate Report - August 2020" ~ by U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)
➥ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202008

“Should We Expect Each Year in the Next Decade (2019–28) to Be Ranked among the Top 10 Warmest Years Globally?” ~ by Anthony Arguez et al
➥ https://journals.ametsoc.org/bams/ar...he-Next-Decade

[GordMay]

“The Impact of a Six Year Climate Anomaly on the “Spanish Flu” Pandemic and WWI” ~ by Alexander F. More et al
Scientists have spotted a once-in-a-century climate anomaly, during World War I, that likely increased mortality during the war, and the influenza pandemic in the years that followed.
“... Incessant torrential rain and declining temperatures increased casualties in the battlefields of World War I (WWI), setting the stage for the spread of the pandemic at the end of the conflict. Multiple independent records of temperature, precipitation, and mortality corroborate these findings...”
➥ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley....9/2020GH000277

[CatNewBee]

Originally Posted by GordMay

“The Impact of a Six Year Climate Anomaly on the “Spanish Flu” Pandemic and WWI” ~ by Alexander F. More et al
Scientists have spotted a once-in-a-century climate anomaly, during World War I, that likely increased mortality during the war, and the influenza pandemic in the years that followed.
“... Incessant torrential rain and declining temperatures increased casualties in the battlefields of World War I (WWI), setting the stage for the spread of the pandemic at the end of the conflict. Multiple independent records of temperature, precipitation, and mortality corroborate these findings...”
➥ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley....9/2020GH000277

So global warming is the cure for C19?

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Carbon Inequality:
Research, carried out with the Stockholm Environment Institute, found that over the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, the richest 1 per cent of people (those with a net income of over $109,000 US or $145,000 Cdn in 2015) drove 15 per cent of climate-changing emissions — more than twice the 7 per cent emitted by the poorest half.
The richest 10 per cent (those with a net income of $38,000 US or $50,000 Cdn in 2015) accounted for 52 per cent of emissions over that period, the study said.
Keeping global climate change under control will require, not just helping poorer countries to develop cleanly, but putting in place tough measures to curb over-consumption by the world's richest. The Oxfam report estimates that the richest 10 per cent of people* would have to slash their emissions to about 10 times lower than now, to keep the world on track for the emissions goals — and do it by 2030.
“Confronting Carbon Inequality: Putting climate justice at the heart of the COVID-19 recovery” ~ by Tim Gore
➥ https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository...e/10546/621052


* This will, likely, include a very large majority of US.

Actually that outcome suggests to keep the poor poor and make the rich poorer. Sounds familiar...

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Actually that outcome suggests to keep the poor poor and make the rich poorer. Sounds familiar...

Looking at the data, the two biggest aggregate contributors are the top fifty percent. The top 1% per cap contribution is far and away the most, but there are fewer of those folks, so their total contribution is relatively small. And the lower 50% basically make little contribution at all.

So, do away with the global middle class really gives the biggest bang for the buck. When you think about it, this is exactly what is happening. The wealth gap is pushing most people out of the middle, down into the poor section.

So perhaps global wealth inequality is a positive solution for our environmental problems. It's a modest proposal that we're already pursuing.

[SailOar]

A Physicist Has Come Up With Math That Makes 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Plausible

Moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.....

To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.

Tobar's work suggests that the disease would still escape some other way, through a different route or by a different method, removing the paradox. Whatever the time traveller did, the disease wouldn't be stopped.....

[GordMay]

Macquarie Harbour whale stranding update (Sept 26/20)
Australian wildlife officials began disposing of hundreds of dead whales on Saturday, following one of the largest-ever mass stranding events globally. They have officially ended rescue efforts, believing there are no more survivors.
Conservation experts and trained volunteers were able to save 108 of the approximately 470 long-finned pilot whales, spotted on a remote sandbank, in Tasmania's Macquarie Harbour, on Monday. Rescuers have spent the last five days performing dangerous rescue missions amid unpredictable conditions to save as many animals as they could.
DPIPWE ➥ https://dpipwe.tas.gov.au/Documents/...tag=MSF0951a18
CBS News Video ➥ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whales-...tag=MSF0951a18
CF ➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3238470

[GordMay]

Here are five cool facts about Thursday's Harvest Moon
Look up in the sky on Thursday night (October 1/20), for one of the smallest Full Moons of 2020. Based on the timing, and a quirk of how we perceive the world around us, some extraordinary things are going on with this particular Full Moon.
➥ https://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/to...K7c?li=AAggNb9