A report on the covid-19 pandemic as of 18:00 GMT on Tuesday, 29 September 2020.
Author: ishinobu
Hope uplifts when feeling beset. Yet some rare souls never feel beset.
2020 has been a watershed year. A look at the state of man’s relentless onslaught on Nature and what mitigation might be made.
Physics is the study of matter and its motions. Energy is the idea of propellant motion behind manifest matter. This imagined conception takes many forms.
Innate subconscious processing predisposes individuals to paradigmatic worldviews.
Insects are the only invertebrates that evolved flight. Their wings are a marvel of engineering skill.
Terroir is the French term for the distinctive flavors and scents from artisanal crops such as wine, coffee, and chocolate.
The world is rapidly hotting up. Heatwaves are frequenting in an accelerating trend. The toll on trees is severe, killing off the greatest terrestrial carbon sink.
Vehicles are a major contributor to polluting emissions which damage health and foster global warming. So too are the asphalt roads which they ride upon.
Copper has been prized for keeping water clean since antiquity. But at least one bacterium is positively electric about copper.
Quantum field theories are buttressed by mathematics which provide only approximations – too coarse to inspire confidence. Positronium illustrates the dilemma.
Civilization as we know it now will collapse by 2070 and humans will be extinct by 2100 – an obvious destiny. Why is humanity’s imminent demise not widely recognized?
There is no simple formula for how fast Earth is hotting up. If there were, 2 key components in the equation would be greenhouse gas emissions and temperature sensitivity to those emissions. Those 2 factors suggest that Earth is racing toward hellish heat.
Responsibility diffuses among animal groups, influencing behaviors related to safety and morality.
The hype that electric vehicles are environmentally preferable to petrol-powered cars is untrue.
The heat waves happening across the world this year are just a warming up of what’s to come. The most profound aspect of events is how nothing is being done to adapt.
Soil is a significant store of carbon. Warming soils will release more CO2 into the atmosphere than previously supposed, accelerating global warming well beyond what current climate models predict.
Plants have coopted many animals to help them thrive and propagate. Ants may not be the best pollinators, but properly motivated they make precious porters for progeny.
Presented with bad news, most people tend to play it down if they can. Professional forecasters are no exception. Alas, their untoward optimism often hurts those they smile upon.
The world hotting up has made wildfires more frequent and intense. Siberia, which has the world’s most extensive forest, has been ablaze for months.
There are at least as many microbes in the human body as there are cells. These naturalized commensal citizens guide development, provide nutrition, and help fight infection. Indeed, by way of resident bacteria, diet may be a significant determinant of susceptibility and virulence of the virus which causes covid-19.
Half of the world’s land has been degraded by man’s exploitation: an unsustainable percentage that keeps rising. One unintended consequence is the increasing unleashing of infectious disease.
Less than a year ago, an alarmed and alarming 16-year-old captured the world’s attention when she declared “entire ecosystems are collapsing; how dare you look away.” Then came covid-19 – and people looked away. “Everybody’s got such a short attention span,” remarked American musician Bob Dylan.
The convenience of a science oven is long ubiquitous; so too the issue of uneven heating. The problem is confused convection.
Global warming is just one aspect of the man-made major mass extinction event underway but is the facet upon which the most attention has been paid. Here’s a summary of the modeling effort and a prediction of fate.