The T-V and newspaper news outlets tend not to report news about Climate Change these days. I guess it isn’t confrontational enough. But the Nature magazine isn’t afraid to be non-confrontational! In this weeks Feb 25, 2016 issue, Nature told us about a report just produced by NOAA. I am setting here in 77 degree weather in Pacific Grove, CA in February during a supposedly super El Nino season thinking how I shouldn’t really be enjoying this. To relieve my guilt, I will pass this “news” forward.
Last month was the world’s hottest January since records began in 1880, and the ninth month in a row to break a global monthly temperature record, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on 17 February. The average global temperature was 1.04 Celsius above the twentieth-century average for January, beating the previous record, from 2007, by 0.16 Celsius. In the Arctic, which was remarkably warm for the time of year, sea ice was at its lowest January extent since records began in 1979, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
I don’t need NOAA to tell me about February — I can tell this will have been a warm month too.
thinking in 2016 – second decade in the twenty first century CE (the first century of the 3rd millennium)
CRISPR is a genetic editing tool. The name stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. The CRISPR interference technique has enormous potential application, including altering the germline of humans, animals and other organisms, and modifying the genes of food crops.
(germline in organisms refer to those cells that may pass on their genetic material to the progeny. For example, gametes such as the sperm or the egg are part of the germline.)
In the current thinking, many people feel that using CRISPR to modify germline cells in humans would be wrong. The fear is that we would be stepping into the world of “designer babies”, especially where the rich “one percent” would be able to create a master race, similar to Hitler’s breeding program.
The alternate view is that we could use CRISPR to eliminate genetic diseases, removing BRAC1/2 cancer causing genes for example, from a family line. We could potentially stamp out many of our most formidable illnesses.
Using CRISPR to modify food crops is much less controversial. We could, for example, eliminate the spoiling/browning of apples, bananas and mushrooms. Or we could create drought tolerant plants, useful in the global warming scenarios.
My view? Go for it! Eliminate diseases and the need for deodorant, stamp out mosquitoes, and let me be healthier longer.
“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.” – Sir William Osler
The news was announced today, February 11, 2016. The actual detection happened about 5 months ago. It took this long to verify what happened.
Just over a billion years ago, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, gathering speed with each orbit. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light. Space and time became distorted. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. Then space and time became silent again.
The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation
of gravitational waves.
Above text quoted from The New Yorker Magazine. CLICK HERE to read the complete story.
You can see that super simulation of the block hole collision in the following Youtube video. Or CLICK HERE if you are viewing this in the email announcement produced by WordPress.
If you want to read more about this amazing discovery, CLICK HERE and you will be taken to an excellent web site called SXS which stands for Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes.
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I posted this here tonight because if this is true, this is one of the biggest “discoveries” of the last few years! It needs to be remembered that some people really did notice.
My wife asked why it is important. Well hey, if gravity really is made of waves, then maybe those people who saw flying saucers weren’t crazy after all. Because of course they would travel by skimming on the edges of the waves, just like surfers at the beach. It would be much more efficient, and would not create as much pollution as rocket ships! All we have to do now is figure how how to build gravity wave skimmers.
We should also be able to build “telescopes” that see gravity waves instead of light waves and then maybe we can see where all the dark matter is at in the universe. We might even be able to “see” black holes! Perhaps the edge of the universe would show up too.
The only creepy part about this is that those two black holes crashed into each other so long ago. Like, what are they doing now? The only disappointing thing is that the gravitational waves only travel at the speed of light. This discovery won’t let us travel to Mars any faster. No short cuts here….
Jims BBS 