Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

[Beebo Brink]

Deep-sea microbes are invisible to our immune systems, researchers find

Human and mouse cells recognized only 20% of the bacterial species found miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

www.livescience.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

A singing fish: it glows green during courtship and looks like Boris Johnson’s hardship face | Helen Sullivan

People were uncertain the fish existed, until citizen scientists made an underwater recording

www.theguardian.com

 

[Free]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Live, if you're curious:

 

[Innula Zenovka]

After the deluge: Australia’s outback springs to life as mighty rivers flow again

Two months after rains fell in the north, billions of litres of water are finally coursing down the Baaka-Darling system, rejuvenating the Menindee Lakes and farming communities

www.theguardian.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Several hours ago, during local overnight, Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began to erupt. A video shows a neighborhood in the nearby town of Goma being inundated with lava:


This volcano is known for being one of the few in the world that, like Kilauea until recently, contains a persistent lava lake in its crater. But the volcano has erupted a few times in the past, most recently in 2002. In that eruption, lava also reached Goma; I guess we have to wait until local daylight for authorities to establish the extent of the current eruption.

There is concern that if lava enters Lake Kiva, whose deeper waters are over-laden with carbon dioxide and methane, that it could cause a lethal overturn where all of the CO2 erupts from the lake suddenly and a giant gas bubble settles over the surrounding area, suffocating everyone. Some lava entered the lake during the 2002 eruption and did not cause such an overturn; but the concern still exists if this eruption is more productive and more lava enters the lake.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

It's sounding a little too much like "The Volcano Thread" here, so I'm going to have to find some cool non-volcano nature stuff to post I think.

But for now, this might be worth posting. It appears that after a long slow decline, the eruption at Kilauea has finally concluded. The 5-month-old lava lake has completely crusted over and no substantial rising of the surface has been recorded for a while. All signs are that things are pretty much done - at least for now. The hardened surface of the now-former lake is 229 meters, or 751 feet, above the deepest point of the crater when it was empty; if the Seattle Space Needle was placed standing up in the bottom of the crater, the tip of its flagpole would be buried to a depth of 148 feet.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Correction to virtually every video and article on this event: It's Halemaumau caldera in Kilauea crater, not Kilauea crater itself, that is filled with lava.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Hey look, it's not a volcano!

 

[Beebo Brink]

Hey look, it's not a volcano!

1) I had to change my Zoom to 50% to fit the entire height of the tornado, and
2) if you watch until nearly the end, you'll see a truck pull out of the driveway and turn LEFT -- going straight towards the tornado. WTF?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

It's a landspout! The wind can get pretty fast in one this big, but usually not nearly as fast as a full-fledged tornado.

Still, yeah driving into one is pretty dumb. At the very least there's no visibility inside one, it's like a highly localized haboob.

 

[Free]

2) if you watch until nearly the end, you'll see a truck pull out of the driveway and turn LEFT -- going straight towards the tornado. WTF?

When you REALLY need that coffee...

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Telephoto shots can be deceptive.

 

[Free]

Maglink

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I'd not heard of this before -- a disaster in Chamoli, in northern India, in February, when a massive rockslide took with it a huge chunk of glacier and smashed its way down the mountain

Chamoli disaster: 'It hit the valley floor like 15 atomic bombs'

Scientists detail February’s catastrophic rock and ice slide in the Indian Himalaya that claimed 200 lives.

www.bbc.co.uk

A wedge of glacier-covered rock more than 500m wide and 180m thick just suddenly let go.

The team calculates almost 27 million cubic metres of material was put into a minute-long descent that at one point was in complete freefall.

To put this volume in context, it's about 10 times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

When the mass hit the Ronti Gad valley floor, it released the energy equivalent to 15 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Rare orchids found in City of London bank's rooftop garden

Usually seen in southern Europe, the plants have not been found in the wild in the UK for decades.

www.bbc.co.uk

Serapias parviflora is generally found in the Mediterranean basin and Atlantic coast of France, Spain and Portugal.

The 15 plants growing in Nomura International's 11th-floor garden represent the entire known wild UK colony of the species.

The joy of the previous colony's discovery, at Rame Head in Cornwall in 1989, was in sharp contrast to the pain felt when it disappeared 20 years later. At this point, the small-flowered tongue-orchid was thought to have become extinct as a wild plant in the UK.

How the plant came to be in the Japanese investment bank's roof garden remains unknown, although as Mr Patterson points out, its seeds can travel great distances by wind.

"The plants could have originated on the continent and been brought over the Channel on southerly winds which frequently bring Saharan dust deposits to the capital," he said.

"Once settled on the Nomura roof, the seeds would have formed a symbiosis with a mycorrhizal fungus enabling them to germinate and grow. Whilst possible, the odds are astronomical."

 

[Essence Lumin]

I'd not heard of this before -- a disaster in Chamoli, in northern India, in February, when a massive rockslide took with it a huge chunk of glacier and smashed its way down the mountain

Chamoli disaster: 'It hit the valley floor like 15 atomic bombs'

Scientists detail February’s catastrophic rock and ice slide in the Indian Himalaya that claimed 200 lives.

www.bbc.co.uk

Here's an article about some of the history and politics leading up to that.

Chamoli disaster: Chronicle of a Himalayan tragedy foretold

Lands in ecologically sensitive zones were sold and resold against all rules as the law looked the other way. The constant push for ‘sustainable development’ created the scenario for this tragedy

www.nationalheraldindia.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

This morning Mrs. Beebo and I noticed a small thing, but nonetheless unsettling. All around our back porch and down the sidewalk were strewn the bodies of dead earwigs. There were at least two dozen of them. Now, normally a dead earwig is something to celebrate -- I'm not a big fan of this particular insect -- but a mass die-off does rather change the equation because we can't explain it. We don't spray chemicals of any kind around our garden, nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and yet they are all dead in what I would consider a most non-normal way.

Google wasn't any help. All the search results were about how to kill them, not how to explain them unexpectedly dying.

Ideas, anyone?