Article Archive for April 2009
Flu Pandemics can be Sparked by Researchers
New Scientist said:
It’s emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.
They only realised this because the ferrets died… This suggests that similar accidents may have occurred undetected.
Regarding the current Swine Flu outbreak, the fact that only Mexicans have died is bizarre, and the media has not provided any possible reasons. I figure it is one of the following:
there is something different about Mexicans – perhaps a lack of a childhood inoculation, or even something that is administered to pigs outside of Mexico than flows on to humans that eat pork… giving them immunity
two different strains -one that is mild …
Asteroid Tsunamis Not So Bad After All?
A new computer simulation has determined that if a 200 metre wide asteroid lands in the ocean, where the water depth is 5 kilometres, the following will occur:
Initial tsunami with a height of hundreds of metres
The height of the waves makes them prone to collapse, and they start breaking immediately
After they are 30 kilometres from the impact site, they have shrunk to a height of less than 60 metres
Extrapolating the shrinkage suggests a height of less than 10 metres after it has travelled 1000 kilometres
Ultimately, how close to the shore the impact is would make a big difference…
Although 10 metres would ordinarily mean massive devastation, apparently the wavelength would be shorter (2 minutes), and therefore not as damaging as regular tsunamis (8 minutes). The results of another simulation “suggest much slower wave decay”, ie worse.
The article concludes with something we all, perhaps, should keep in the back of our mind:
Brian …
Mammoth and Rhino in Ancient Scotland
The main thrust of the article from The Scotsman is that human settlements dating to 14,000 years ago have been unearthed in Scotland – the oldest yet. But what stood out, for me, was this sentence:
This was a time when nomadic humans hunted giant elk and reindeer using bows and arrows, and when mammoth and rhino also roamed the land.
This is not new information, but is a reminder of how very different our world was not so long ago. Not only did we have megafauna that went extinct during the last cataclysm, we had species living a long way from where they live now. Why were there rhinos in Scotland at the tail-end of the ice age?
Space Storm Alert
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
Rather catastrophic stuff for a New Scientist article! However the reason they are reporting it is because the threat is very real indeed. They …
Supernova Theory Wrong?
It looks like the previously accepted theory regarding the life cycle of Luminous Blue Variable (LBV) stars is faulty. It had been thought that LBVs needed to first evolve a massive iron core of nuclear fusion ash, lose most of their hydrogen envelope, and only then would they be primed for a core implosion that would trigger a supernova.
However before and after photos of supernova SN 2005gl have shown that pre-explosion it was a LBV that had not lost most of its hydrogen envelope. This places it in the same category of LBV Eta Carinae, which is only 7500 light years from Earth.
From Wikipedia:
Due to the similarity of Eta Carinae and SN 2006jc, Stefan Immler of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that Eta Carinae could explode in our lifetime or even in the next few years. However, Stanford Woosley of the University of California in Santa Cruz disagrees …
Flightless Sea Duck – Not Tasty?
The extinction of so many species during the great global cataclysm of 10-12,000 years ago has regularly been put down to lots of hunting, by orthodox science. Supposedly humans crossed the Bering Strait, worked their way south through the Americas, and killed most of the living things they came across. Until now the best argument from fringe science has been the sheer numbers of animals that perished, far more than the estimated numbers of humans could have found time to kill, let alone eat. Here’s the icing on the cake:
[Scientists have] demonstrated that humans first hunted the flightless sea duck (Chendytes lawi) more than 10,000 years ago, but the bird persisted until about 2,400 years ago. Their findings that Chendytes survived more than 7,500 years of human predation are based on the first radiocarbon dating of Chendytes bones from six coastal archaeological sites.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080317150150.htm
I’m not a hunter, I’d sooner eat grass. …
