Scientists at Yale have used CT scans to develop a better model of “the toothed bird”Ichthyornis. We’ve known about these creatures for a long time, but the new reconstruction indicates that in addition to teeth, Ichthyornis also had a small beak at the tip of its snoot:
Janelle Monáe’s new album just went up!
This isn’t new footage – the video is from 2016, and at least some of the footage in it is from 2015, but it’s useful to have clips like this handy, to help our monkey brains come to terms with solving an invisible problem.
(For those who can’t see or hear, the video shows Californian scrubland on a sunny day, with text-over saying that you can’t see the gas leak, but an infrared camera can. The image then goes to black and white, showing a dark plume of gas blotting out part of the sky. The text-over says that it’s methane, and goes on to explain that that particular leak put out 4.4 billion cubic feet of methane – enough to heat 70,000 homes for the winter – between its detection in October of 2015, and the making of the video four months later. It then talks about Methane’s properties as a greenhouse gas.)
This one’s been bouncing around in my head since Trump announced he was going to meet with Kim Jong Un. Whether or not the Trump administration is working directly with Russia, I think it’s clear by now that Putin has been putting a fair amount of effort toward bolstering his own regime by wearing down any place that seems to have it better. It also seems clear to me that this kind of activity works to the benefit of any other kind of autocratic regime, like the one in North Korea
And so we come to my fear – If Trump’s regime is good for domestic politics from the point of view of Putin and Kim, then it would be trivially easy for them, probably along with China, to effectively stage a massive success for Trump that even he couldn’t screw up. The official end of the “Korean Conflict”, normalization of relationships with Pyongyang, and a promise to behave (now that they have nukes), or even a promise to dispose of their nukes, could easily be enough to get another majority in the Electoral College, if not in the popular vote.
I have no idea how likely this scenario is, but it seems to be well within the realm of possibility, and I find that worrisome.
So I just had my mind blown, and felt a need to share it with the world. This is some serious shit here. It turns out that They Might Be Giants did not write the song Istanbul (Not Constantinople)!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the song, you can hear it here, and for those who need them, the lyrics are here. For all those who understand how crazy this is already, I would like to present to you the original Istanbul (Not Constantinople), by The Four Lads:
Any version of the future that includes the use of modern technology will need better batteries than we have today. Our current technology could support a lot more of our power grid than it does, but even if we could swap over to 100% renewable right now without any power storage problems, better batteries would still be a good thing. This article is not about a better battery design, though; it’s about how to find better materials for any battery that might be designed down the road.
It turns out we weren’t just burying all the trash we didn’t know what to do with! We were just creating resource caches for when we start running out of stuff that’s easy to mine! [Read more…]
So I’m not sure that an adequate introduction is even possible here. I found this, and I think it’s important for everybody to know it exists.
I don’t feel that this needs justification, but it does occur to me that an enterprising congressperson could enter this into the congressional record as part of a discussion on climate change. I’m almost tempted to make a transcript for a senator to use as a filibuster on the issue.
Partial description below for the hearing-impaired, or those who want to see my attempt at describing the sounds I’m hearing.
“The question of the last few years has not been do we have a case, but rather how far will the federal government go to prevent justice?”
-Kirnan Ooman
In 2015 a group of kids and young adults, with the support of Our Children’s Trust, filed a lawsuit accusing the American government of dereliction of its duty to safeguard the rights of the 21 plaintiffs, and by extension the generations they represent:
The lawsuit has been progressing since then, going through the pre-trial discovery process, and resolving a number of issues between the two parties without input from the courts. Despite this progress, the government has been trying, without success, to get the whole thing dismissed. The latest attempt, now by the Trump administration, was to try for a “writ of mandamus”. Basically, their claim was that because the lawsuit was about policy and lack thereof, the plaintiffs’ attempt to seek justice through the courts actually threatened the separation of powers.
The next few decades are going to see some significant changes in global agriculture. Not only will current breadbaskets get worse and worse for farming, but growing water shortages will force significant changes in how we irrigate, and what crops we can grow. Fortunately, I think that agricultural problems will be some of the easier ones to solve, and I’m expecting that we’re going to see a lot more food grown in places like the Sundrop Farm in Port Augusta, AU. [Read more…]