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A new study has uncovered the mystery of how mini sand dunes form on beaches and in deserts.

The Cosmic Microwave Background is one of the bedrock pieces of evidence for the Big Bang. It's described as the cosmic afterglow from the Universe's birth. However, new research calls into question our understanding of the CMB and what it tells us about the evolution of the Universe.

Here’s the comedy bit from a recent edition of Bill Maher’s “Real Time” (there are two; I’ll put up the other one tomorrow). The title is “New Rule: Retake the Flag!

He first gives examples of politicians using profanity, something they never did in previous decades. That bit is pretty funny.

Maher’s guests are Democrat Donna Brazile and Republican Mike Lawler, and after his bit on profanity, Maher, citing statistics on how few Democrats say they’re proud to be American, goes on to extol the USA in an unusual burst of patriotic fervor.  He says, for example, “The U.S is leagues ahead of the rest of the world on most of the progressive issues that are important to young people,” citing statistics about gay freedom, a rise in diversity, women and black people increasingly owning businesses,  and contrasting the U.S. with third-world countries (and the Middle East).  He goes on to deplore what is especially odious: the fact that young people often appear to regard Hamas as a role model (here I agree with him 100%).  He adds, “If the thought leaders in the Democratic Party keep encouraging and not rebuking the idea that America is cringe and the people who run Gaza are great, the Democrats are doomed. . . the Democrats’ problem is the energy of the party is with the young, and the young are with the terrorists. That’s not good!”  His comment on the AOC/Bernie Sanders rally is quite apposite, but watch to see it.

He finishes by extolling all the technical advances that came from America, like smartphones and Grubhub, presumably to show the kids that they’re living an American-buttressed life.

This is a bit too jingoistic for me, though I agree with Maher’s view that young Democrats often wrongly admire terrorists, and I laughed at the profanity bit.  But other countries are at least as progressive as America in some ways, and more progressive in others. Think of Canada or Europe, especially Scandinavia. In many of those countries the penal system is more rational and humane than America’s, and there is more paternity/maternity leave, help for old people, and free medical care for all.

I will not attribute this to Maher’s demonized Dinner with Trump, but he does have a point that America is a good country to live in (or was until January), and countries ruled by terrorists are not ones we should admire.  I think he just decided to extol what is good about America. Unfortunately, we’re not unique in many of the ways he extols.

 

 

The drug ubrogepant doesn't just ease the headache of a migraine, but also relieves symptoms like neck stiffness and fatigue if taken early enough

Finding out whether gravity – and therefore space-time itself – is quantum in nature has long been thought impossible. But innovative new ideas might be about to help answer this crucial question

The drug rizatriptan is often recommended for vestibular migraines, which cause vertigo as well as headache, but doesn't actually seem to be effective

Could some type of life find refuge in Venus' clouds? The detection of phosphine and potentially ammonia in the planet's atmosphere is posing that question. If life could survive there, would it be like Earth life? Or would it have a different molecular basis?

A team has developed Boccia XR, a rehabilitation program using extended reality technology that can be introduced even in environments with limited space.

A team engineers created a twisty high-temperature heat exchanger that outperformed a traditional straight channel design in heat transfer, power density and effectiveness and used an innovative technique to 3D print and test the metal proof of concept.

The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 10^78 years (a 1 with 78 zeros) to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 10^1100 years (a 1 with 1100 zeros).

Massive ripples in the very fabric of space and time wash over Earth constantly, although you'd never notice. An astrophysicist is trying a new search for these gravitational waves.

Massive ripples in the very fabric of space and time wash over Earth constantly, although you'd never notice. An astrophysicist is trying a new search for these gravitational waves.

ChatGPT responses matched or outperformed epileptologists' responses related to the regions where epileptogenic zones are commonly located. Yet epileptologists provided more accurate responses for the regions rarely affected.

How might floating solar energy projects impact wild birds and vice versa? A paper outlines key considerations for a growing floating solar industry.

Getting a probe to the Icy Giant planets takes some time - a journey to Uranus could take as long as 13 years, even with a gravity assist from Jupiter. However, several ideas are in the works to speed up that process, especially given the increased interest in sending a probe their way. One of those ideas is to use an aerocapture system to slow a probe down once it reaches its intended target. A new paper from Andrew Gomez-Delrio and their co-authors at NASA's Langley Research Center describes how a proposed Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) mission could utilize the same aerocapture technology that Curiosity used to dramatically improve both the speed and payload capacity of the mission.

I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s engrossing essay on sex, gender, and wokeness, and something struck me—a notion that’s not original since it occurred to Rebecca Tuvel when she wrote her infamous essay for Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal, on “transracialism” Tuvel’s essay pointed out the philosophical and moral parallels between declaring you’re a member of your non-natal “race” (again, I prefer “ancestry”) and declaring that you’re of  your non-natal sex.  Yet Tuvel’s philosophical analysis of this issue, an analysis which I applauded, got her in hot water. As Wikipedia notes:

 

The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.  The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it.  The controversy exposed a rift within the journal’s editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.

In the article—”In Defense of Transracialism”, published in Hypatia‘s spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races”.  After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia‘s editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.

On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article.  When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned.  The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance.  In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.

And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.

Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.”  The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.

Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex.  After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black).  But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.

This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker.  And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.

Yes, a woman is whoever she says she is. Clearly, sex is a social construct here, and you can be whatever sex you want, regardless of your natal gamete-producing system.  Grant was widely applauded by many on the gender-extremist side, while my response was taken down by the FFRF for being hurtful and offensive (you can still read it here, here or here).

 

This fracas, which I call “The KerFFRFle,” has reminded me of the seeming hypocrisy of regarding both sex and race as social constructs, but allowing you to declare whatever sex you feel you are, but not allowing you to declare whatever race you feel you are. Transracialism would seem especially laudatory because one would think it would be a bold move to declare you’re of an oppressed minority group. (Again, I prefer “ancestry” or “population” to “race” for reasons I’ve explained many times.)

I am not taking a stand on these issues here, but merely trying, as did Richard, to understand the difference.  And so I ask readers?

Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?

 

Plummeting temperatures forced some human populations to adapt to the new conditions thousands of years ago, but the changes they made varied widely

Please send in your wildlife photos as I need MOAR! Thx!

Today we have a text-and-photo essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, emphasizing two of his favorite themes: history and pollination.   Athayde’s words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Help yourself, but don’t overdo it

Throughout the history of the Roman Empire, women had hardly any employment opportunities. Locusta was an exception. This immigrant from Gaul was celebrated for her knowledge and technical skills: Agrippina, Emperor Claudius’ wife, and Agrippina’s son, Nero the unhinged, were among her clients. Nero even hired Locusta as his advisor and as a tutor for young apprentices who could absorb her expertise in an occupation in high demand in the Empire. Locusta was a professional poisoner.

From emperors to slaves, affluent merchants to muleteers, poisoning was a convenient and effective way to dispose of a difficult spouse, secure an inheritance, settle scores with an enemy or encourage an aging relative to free up some space at home; the practice was common enough that praegustator (food taster) guilds arose among slaves and freedmen (Kaufman, 1932). Women were particularly skilled at the craft, partially as self-defence in a violent and radically male-controlled society.

Locusta testing poison on a slave, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1847–1926) © Bridgeman Art Library, Wikimedia Commons:

CHT219368 Locusta Testing Poison on a Slave, c.1870-80 (oil on canvas) by Sylvestre, Joseph-Noel (1847-1926); Private Collection;  (other info used by Agrippina to poison her husband the emperor Claudius in 54 AD; used by Nero to poison Britannicus and his mother Agrippina; adviser to Nero on poisons;); Archives Charmet; French, it is possible that some works by this artist may be protected by third party rights in some territories.possible copyright restrictions apply, consult national copyright laws

Locusta had an arsenal of poisonous plants at her disposal such as deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and hemlock (Conium maculatum) (Cilliers & Retief, 2000). But none of these handy tools were as reliable as aconite, aka monkshood or wolfsbane (Aconitum napellus), which the poet Ovid called ‘the mother-in-law’s poison’. Like all the 250 species in its genus, aconite is loaded with aconitine and related alkaloids that cause all sorts of neurological and cardiovascular disorders. Besides being a favourite of ne’er-do-wells and sorcerers for centuries, the plant has been on herbalists’ shelves as a local anaesthetic, tonic for the heart and for other pharmacological uses. These applications are benign but exceedingly risky, as 1 g of aconite biomass may despatch a patient to the underworld: this plant is about 100 times more lethal than strychnine.

A deceptively sweet-looking aconite. But the root of the plant’s name reveals its danger: akonitos (without dust), short for ‘without the dust of the arena’, implies biting the dust without a struggle © Llez, Wikimedia Commons:

Gardeners attracted to aconite’s violet-blue flowers may resent the plant’s mean streak, but for the plant, poisoned people are collateral damage. The alkaloids stuffing the plant to the gills are a defensive weapon against leaf munchers, root borers, seed predators and other enemies. Chemicals such as aconitine are known as secondary metabolites: they are energetically expensive to produce and have no role in plants’ day-to-day physiological processes such as photosynthesis, respiration or growth. Yet, they are vital for survival and reproductive success by repelling or killing herbivores that target the plant. But this form of chemical warfare has a drawback: secondary metabolites may leak into nectar and pollen, putting flower visitors at risk. In the case of aconite, nectar has low levels of alkaloids, but pollen is loaded with them. Understandably, aconite pollinators – mostly bumble bees – avoid the powdery stuff, so as not to end up dead. Such reluctance is not good for plant reproduction, but aconite has a cunning plan.

All Aconitum spp. flowers are hermaphrodite and dichogamous, that is, their male and female reproductive organs mature at different times. The male phase, i.e., the period when only the male bits are mature, occurs first and lasts for 5 to 6 days; the female phase, when the male organs wither and the female ones are receptive to pollen, lasts 1-2 days. This setting nudges visitors to explore male-phase flowers first and for longer, then hopefully transport pollen to a female-phase flower. To overcome bees’ unwillingness to play along, male-phase flowers produce more scents and over four times more nectar than the female-phase ones. This nutritional bribe persuades bumble bees to drop by for a sip of nectar, which is relatively harmless, and leave the toxic pollen alone. But even if not purposedly gathering pollen, a bee is unlikely to depart from a flower without some attached to its body. That’s all the aconite needs: the few pollen grains stuck to a bee are more than sufficient to assure pollination when the bee then takes nectar from a female-phase flower (Jacquemart et al., 2019).

Help yourself to a drink, but don’t take pollen away. Or else © Franz van Duns, Wikimedia Commons:

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate aconite’s endeavours. Like most flowering plants, it needs insects to transfer its pollen and get fertilised. To attract them, it offers rewards in the form of protein (pollen) and sugars (nectar). But the plant can’t give these goodies away willy-nilly because they are metabolically expensive. Aconite prevents the excessive harvesting of pollen by spiking it with a toxic alkaloid, but promotes the involuntary taking of some pollen grains by selectively stocking male-phase flowers with better nectar.

The aconite story is not an isolated case. Many plants regulate pollen consumption with toxins, while hermaphrodite species are often gender biased regarding nectar volume and quality (Carlson & Harms, 2006), which affect the number and duration of pollinator visits, and the number of flowers visited (Parachnowitsch et al., 2019). Natural selection doesn’t manifest itself much more gloriously than through the intricate arrangements between toxic plants and their pollinators.

The pollen stuck to this bumble bee’s corbiculae (pollen baskets) will end up as food for baby bees; from the plants’ perspective, it’s a loss of resources. Judiciously dabbing it with poison could have prevented that © Tony Wills, Wikimedia Commons:

My last post was about floating nuclear power plants. By coincidence I then ran across a news item about floating solar installations. This is also a potentially useful idea, and is already being implemented and increasing. It is estimated that in 2022 total installed floating solar was at 13 gigawatts capacity (growing from only 3 GW in 2020). The growth rate is estimated to be 34% per year.

“Floatovoltaics”, as they are apparently called, are grid-scale solar installations on floating platforms. They are typically installed on artificial bodies of water, such as reservoirs and irrigations ponds. Such installations can have two main advantages. They can reduce evaporation which helps preserve the reservoirs. They also are a source of clean energy without having to use cropland or other land.

Land use can be a major limiting factor of solar power, depending on how it is installed. Here is an interesting comparison of the various energy sources and their land use. The greatest land use per energy produced is hydroelectric (33 m^2 / MWh). The best is nuclear, at 0.3 (that’s two orders of magnitude better). Rooftop solar is among the best at 1.2, while solar photovoltaic installed on land is among the worst at 19. This is exactly why I am a big advocate of rooftop solar, even though this is more expensive up front than grid-scale installations. Right now in the US rooftop solar produces about 1.5% of electricity, but the total potential capacity is about 45%. More realistically (excluding the least optimal locations), shooting for 20-30% of energy production from rooftop solar is a reasonable goal. If this is paired with home battery backup, this makes solar power even better.

Floating solar installations have the potential of having the best of both worlds – less land use than land-based solar, and better economics and rooftop solar. If the installation is serving double-duty as an evaporation-prevention strategy, this is even better. This also can potentially dovetail nicely with closed loop pumped hydro. This is a promising grid-level energy storage solution, in that it can store massive amounts of energy for long periods of time, enough to shift energy production to demand seasonally. The main source of energy loss with pumped hydro is evaporation, which can be mitigated by anti-evaporation strategies, which could include floating solar. Potentially you could have a large floating solar installation on top of a reservoir used for closed-loop pumped hydro, which stores the energy produced by the solar installation.

But of course no energy source is without its environmental impact. For floating solar one significant concern is the impact on water birds (where there are bodies of water, even artificial ones, there are water birds). This is an issue because water bird populations are already in decline. Unfortunately, right now we have very little data. We need to see how the installations effect water birds, and how those bird would affect the installations. The linked research is mainly laying out the questions we need to ask. I doubt this will become a deal-killer for floating solar. Mainly it’s good to know how to do this with minimal impact on wildlife.

This is true of energy production in general, and perhaps especially renewable energy as we plan to dramatically increase renewable energy installations. There has already been a big conversation around wind turbines and birds. Yes, wind turbines do kill birds. Even off shore wind turbines kill birds. In the US it is estimated that between 150k and 700k birds are killed annually by wind turbine. However, this is a round-off error to the 1-3 billion birds killed by domestic cats annually. It is also estimated that over 1 billion birds die annually by flying into windows. We can save far more bird lives by keeping domestic cats indoors, controlling feral cat population, and using bird-safe windows on big buildings than all the birds killed by renewable energy. But sure, we can also deploy wind turbines in locations designed to minimize the impact on wild life (birds and bats mostly). We should not put them in corridors used for bird migration or feeding, for example.

The same goes for floating solar – there are likely ways to deploy floating solar to minimize the impact on water birds and their ecosystems. The impact will never be zero, and we have to keep things in perspective, but taking reasonable measures to minimize the negative environmental impact of our energy production is a good idea.

We also have to keep in mind that all of the negative environmental impacts of renewable energy (and nuclear power, for that matter – any low carbon energy source), is dwarfed by the environmental impact of burning fossil fuel. Fossil fuel plants kill an estimated 14.5 million birds in the US annually – about a 500-1000 times as many as wind and solar combined. And this is direct causes of death from impact with infrastructure and pollution. This doesn’t even count global warming. Once we factor that in, any environmental impact comparison is very likely to favor just about anything except fossil fuel.

Likely we will have a lot more floating solar installations in our future, and this is also likely a good thing.

 

The post Floating Solar Farms first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Dyson spheres, a type of huge megastructure designed to capture the energy output of a star, would be a sign of an alien civilisation – if we can find one before they disappear