‘Insect Apocalypse’ Poses Risk to All Life on Earth, Conservationists Warn
November 20th, 2019Via: Guardian:
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times.
Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threaten a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”.
Insects can be helped to recover by “rewilding” urban gardens and parks, Goulson said. “There is potential for a huge network of insect-friendly habitats right across the country. Already a lot of people are buying into the idea that they can make their gardens more wildlife friendly by letting go of control a bit. There are also quite a lot of councils going pesticide free.”
But he said: “The bigger challenge is farming – 70% of Britain is farmland. No matter how many gardens we make wildlife friendly, if 70% of the countryside remains largely hostile to life, then we are not going to turn around insect decline.”
Billionaires Seek Secure Storage Facilities for Possessions
November 20th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
A few blocks from Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, 46 Park Lane resembles a private club with wood-paneled walls and an ornate fireplace dating back to Britain’s Victorian era.
But down a flight of stairs is one of the most secure rooms in London. Built by IBV International Vaults, the steel-walled stronghold is scheduled to open next month and will cater to billionaires looking for a place to stash their most prized possessions.
“We’re getting calls every week about a room available for 2.5 million pounds ($3.2 million) a year,” said Sean Hoey, managing director of IBV London, referring to an apartment-size space. The firm, which also has 550 safe-deposit boxes on site and room for about 450 more, is betting on London’s reputation as a “safe haven,” even with Brexit.
Humans Put In Suspended Animation for First Time
November 20th, 2019Via: New Scientist:
Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.
Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.
The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.
EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.
A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.
Too Much Screen Time May Be Stunting Toddlers’ Brains
November 19th, 2019Via: U.S. News:
Toddlers who spend loads of time looking at tablets, smartphones or TVs may be changing their brains, and not for the better.
A new study using brain scans showed that the white matter in the brains of children who spent hours in front of screens wasn’t developing as fast as it was in the brains of kids who didn’t.
It’s in the white matter of the brain where language, other literacy skills, and the process of mental control and self-regulation develop, researchers say.
“What we think happens is that the development of these skills really depends on the quality of the experience, such as interaction with people, interaction with the world and playing,” explained lead researcher Dr. John Hutton. He is director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Astronomers Despair As SpaceX Starlink Train Ruins Observation Of Nearby Galaxies
November 19th, 2019That’s just the first 120 Starlink satellites out of tens of thousands that will go up in next few years.
Via: Fortune:
In the early hours of the morning today, Monday, November 18, two astronomers checked in on their remotely operated telescope in Chile, expecting to see images of distant stars and galaxies. Instead, they saw a train of SpaceX satellites crossing the night sky, a worrying sign of what might be to come for astronomy.
“Here we were, we had a second half of the night observing, and then we kind of just see all of these streaks,” says Cliff Johnson from Northwestern University in Chicago, one of the two astronomers. “We put two and two together and it was like oh yeah, it’s the train of all the Starlink satellites.”
Starlink is SpaceX’s impending mega constellation of up to 42,000 satellites that will beam high-speed internet around the world. SpaceX, along with its competitors such as OneWeb and Amazon, has touted the benefits of bringing the internet to all, including the estimated three billion without internet access.
However, with just 3,000 active satellites orbiting earth today, many astronomers have expressed concerns that this dramatic increase will create many more artificial points of light in the night sky. For a science that relies on dark skies, having multiple satellites constantly visible could pose significant problems.
Heliogen Achieves Breakthrough Temperatures from Concentrated Sunlight for Industrial Processes
November 19th, 2019The Heliogen website says, “Can be scaled from sizes as low as 1 MW to several gigawatts.”
Several gigawatts???
“I see broken heliostats. Lots of broken heliostats.”
Anyway, if there is some “secret sauce” here, I can’t tell what it is. Although this gets above 1000C, you have all of the problems with concentrated solar, which has been around for decades and not taken off.
Via: Heliogen – Press Release:
Heliogen, the clean energy company that is transforming sunlight to create and replace fuels, today announced its launch and that it has – for the first time commercially – concentrated solar energy to exceed temperatures greater than 1,000 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, Heliogen can replace the use of fossil fuels in critical industrial processes, including the production of cement, steel, and petrochemicals, dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions from these activities. This singular scientific achievement was accomplished at Heliogen’s commercial facility in Lancaster, California.
Heliogen’s mission is to create the world’s first technology that can commercially replace fossil fuels with carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat from the sun and to transform sunlight into fuels at scale – taking a major step towards solving climate change. Its heat technology represents a key technical breakthrough for concentrated solar thermal. Previous commercial concentrating solar thermal systems have been designed to reach temperatures of up to only 565 degrees Celsius – useful for power generation, but insufficient for many industrial processes. Many of these processes require much higher temperatures, which have traditionally been reached through the burning of fossil fuels.
Japan: Wind and Solar Power Plants Will Be Built on Fukushima Farmland Polluted by Fallout from 2011 Disaster
November 18th, 2019Via: Daily Mail:
Farmland in Fukushima that was rendered unusable after the disastrous 2011 nuclear meltdown is getting a second chance at productivity.
A group of Japanese investors has created a new plan to use the abandoned land to build wind and solar power plants, to be used to send electricity to Tokyo.
The plan calls for the construction of eleven solar power plants and ten wind power plants, at an estimated cost of $2.75 billion.
The project is expected to be completed in March of 2024 and is backed by a group of investors, including Development Bank of Japan and Mizuho Bank.
…
The planners expect the 21 total plants will generate 600 megawatts of electricity, or about two-thirds what a nuclear power plant would generate, according to a report from Nikkei.
Scientists ‘May Have Crossed Ethical Line’ in Growing Human Brains
November 17th, 2019Oh, really? What could possibly go wrong? *sigh*
Anyway, I designate, “Sentient lumps of brain,” as Cryptogon’s Phrase Of The Year.
Have a nice day.
Via: Guardian:
Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn.
The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies.
Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation.
On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab.
“If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”
Prince ‘I-Didn’t-Party-Or-Do-PDAs’ Andrew
November 17th, 2019Maybe this is an attempt to portray him as being interested in adult women and not children???
Via: Daily Mail:
Never-before-seen video footage showing a sweaty Prince Andrew being openly affectionate with a bevy of young women while partying in the late 2000s has been unearthed – just hours after his ‘car crash’ interview with the BBC.
The Prince insisted in his sit-down with Emily Maitlis that he did not sweat or indulge in public displays of affection with women while defending himself against claims he slept with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave Virginia Roberts.
He seemed to cast doubts on the authenticity of a photo which shows him with his arm around Miss Roberts’ waist.
However, the newly-discovered footage, published exclusively by the MailOnline, shows Andrew looking dishevelled and sweaty as he wanders around several raucous parties on the French Riviera.
Photos also show him embracing a string of beautiful women publicly, appearing not to care about the cameras tracking his every move.
Prince Andrew’s Pizza Party Alibi: A Theory
November 17th, 2019Via: Reddit User stop4me_its_the_claw:
Prince Andrew has now denied ever meeting 17 year old Virginia Roberts, as well as denying having sex with her, despite the photograph of him with Virginia with his arm around her bare midrif while Ghislaine Maxell lurks in the background. Prince Andrew bizarrely claims he was at a “pizza party” with his daughter that night as his alibi for why he could not have met or raped Virignia Roberts.
we all know about Pizzagate, and we all know that Epstein is basically considered to be the living proof that Pizzagate is real. so why would Prince Andrew pour gasoline onto the fire by mentioning “pizza” at all in reference to his own involvement with Epstein’s underage rape blackmail ring? obviously Prince Andrew is guilty as sin and is lying, but why did he have to slap us in the face by mentioning “pizza”?
i think i know why.
remember from a few months ago when Boris Johnson gave a bizarre statement about his hobby being making model buses. Boris’ statement made no sense, but it has been claimed that Boris was intentionally “Google Blasting” himself, knowing his statement about making model buses would dominate the ranks in search engine results, and push down the search results about Boris Johnson’s older embarassing gaff from 2016 where he had a campaign bus painted with a slogan claiming the money saved from Brexit should go to fund the National Health Service.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-model-google-news
https://gizmodo.com/did-boris-johnson-ramble-about-model-buses-to-manipulat-1835903361
could Prince Andrew be doing the same thing and Google Blasting himself by claiming he was at a pizza party? now when Normies search for “prince andrew pizza”, they won’t see hundreds of links to pages and forums and blogs about Pizzagate, but instead those pages will be pushed down in rank, and the “more credible” and “official” news sites and tabloids about Prince Andrew’s pizza party alibi will be ranked at the top.
is Prince Andrew attempting to game Google searches to divert renewed public interest in him from discovering search results such as “Pizzagate Dig Thread, Start Here”? there is no way Prince Andrew is smart enough to come up with this idea on his own. Surely someone in the Royal Propaganda office came up with the idea instead. they know they can’t stop obsessive Conspiracists like us from talking about Prince Andrew being the #2 man in Pizzagate, but they can stop the millions of curious Normies who are hearing about this for the first time from discovering Pizzagate and digging into it and then falling down the rabbit hole to break the conditioning and join our ranks.
TPTB know they can’t (yet) win an absolute victory online by silencing all dissent from the Official Narrative, so instead they work to marginalize us onto “containment boards”, and then have their “official” media TV bobbleheads discredit our boards as “crazy racist conspiracy theory nutters”, to discourage Normies from taking us seriously. we saw this tactic in action last week when Trevor Noah point blank asked Hillary Clinton whether she had ordered Epstein to be killed, and everyone had a good laugh at the “joke.” that joke forever framed the very real phemenon of the Clinton Body Count as a punchline for Liberal audiences to ignore as illegitimate.
adding Google Blasting to game the search engine rankings to further marginalize counter narratives is just another step along the way to Mind Kontrol and Thought Crime and 1984.
