Environmental News

A few fewer tweets:

Baby tiger sharks eat songbirds: DNA analysis of shark barf tells scientists what kinds of birds the sharks scavenge -- ScienceDaily

 

Agricultural yields have been changed by climate. Weather. Er, conditions:

Climate change has likely already affected global food production

"Our results show that impacts are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia but generally positive in Latin America. Impacts in Asia and Northern and Central America are mixed."

This is ~1% scale. Only newsworthy for folks who anticipate such changes are off in the future, or will not happen.

 

Big offshore wind farm:

Link

May I also say that the word "epicenter" is very often misused as it was here.

 

C'mon, you know this. Earthquake forces are centered some distance below the surface. That's the center. A line drawn straight up from that is epicenter (upon or on the surface of).

But it soundz kool and seems more flashy than just saying "center". There are so many compelling things to communicate in science journalism, without such games.

 

Another mosquito engineering, separate from @989:



Here mosquito genomes are directly modified using CRISPR. Offspring are certain to carry modification because of gene drive (which may be GENE DRIVE).

Risk here, apparently, is that some other insect might get "doublesex" by horizontal gene transfer (involving bacteria or viruses). All of them would die; not necessarily a desired outcome.

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It is interesting to speculate what might happen if two different engineering projects were done in a particular area. I do not find such experiments.

 

With all this talk about DNA I enjoyed seeing this:

Extraction: DNA from strawberries - CSMonitor.com

It is a well-written description of an easy science thing. Granted, it may seem boring to look at DNA sludge. But you can put it in a little bottle and spread it around the next crime scene you happen to visit. Forensics will later be perplexed by this.

"Why were there so many strawberries and where did they go?"

 

Folks I know were examining environmental DNA (meaning collection from wherever, not from a particular organism) from Tibet. They found sequences specific to dolphins. Or maybe it was porpoises. Anyway, a similar chicanery may have occurred.

 

As you now know, weirdly huge modern strawberries have 8 DNA copies. They are 8-ploid. I looked around for 16-ploids (which would be even better for chicanery) but no luck.

Anyway now I understand how seedless watermelons 'work'. Comforting because when I first saw them I thought abomination!

 

Oh gawd yes. Make fruit whatever shape by letting baby fruit develop inside shaped containers. Again I rather suspect you knew this.

Growers of huge pumpkins (up to 1 ton now?) have not yet caught on that they could be shaped like whales, etc. Would require a whale-shaped bolt-together mold, but there may be people with even more free time than you or I.

 

An empirical argument: Absence of whale-shaped pumpkins is evidence against time travel.

do not know what other people chat about in bars but for bisco and tochatihu it would be weird.

 

How high was their confidence?

I really do not know the answer. Series of software steps (called workflow -- trendy!) remove a lot of primer-amplification artifacts. Sometimes a conscious being (terrestrial or otherwise) is still needed as observer.