A report on the Covid-19 pandemic as of 19:00 GMT on Friday, 10 July 2020.
Author: ishinobu
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is widely used as an insulator in high-voltage electrical equipment for electricity production and transmission. SF6 is also the most potent greenhouse gas, and its emission is burgeoning.
2 types of advanced-technology refuse are especially noxious to the environment: plastic and electronic waste. Both are unsustainably burgeoning.
Human mental arithmetic simplicity limits popular support for dealing with pandemics and industrialized self-extinction.
The process of living boils down to data processing. To render the mirage of physicality, symbolic processing fabricates physical correlates. Genetics is just the beginning.
In a planetary circuit, electricity courses throughout Earth’s atmosphere and its surface. By 1749 Benjamin Franklin concluded that the properties of lightning were similar to those found in machines. This is also true of organisms on Earth, right down to their cells.
Plants are green because photosynthesis is optimized – not to maximize energy, but to minimize stress.
Animal pupils are attuned to lifestyle.
Life runs on a universal workforce: the proteins which build and maintain cells. Despite vast diversity, regardless of life form, the jobs proteins do are […] Read More
Since antiquity man has sought to conquer Nature rather than peaceful coexistence. Covid-19 is simply a reminder by Nature that it cannot be overcome. How humanity has responded to covid-19 has hastened its demise later this century.
From fighting fish to sharing love, intense relations engender energetic synchrony.
Plants are constantly battling herbivores to avoid being eaten. One way they do so is to disguise their scent.
Optical illusions involving luminance and lines result from distributed mental processing, beginning with the cells which first catch sight.
The distinction between what the eye sees and what the mind perceives is a hoary philosophical debate. Do we infer a 3D world from the 2D snapshots our eyes take, as Enlightenment philosophers John Locke and David Hume posited, or is the 3D “objective” world before us, as more contemporary psychologists Hermann von Helmholtz and James J. Gibson presumed?
The global success of CoV-2 owes to its asymptomatic infectiousness. Whereas the specific source of V2’s superlative furtiveness remains a mystery, virologists now have a handle on its high hit rate.
Since its widespread commercialization in the early 1950s, plastic has become ubiquitous: first in products and their packaging, and now everywhere on Earth.
Cyclones are accelerating global warming.
Communications between a cell’s energizer – mitochondria – and its recycler – lysosomes – regulate cell senescence.
Plastic debris concentrates on the surface of the ocean via the currents of ocean gyres, with agglomerations shockingly visible from space. Plastic pollution further flows into the deep sea, following the same currents that historically have provided nutrients.
Recent widespread police brutality against those protesting police brutality vividly illustrates that self-preservation is the state’s predominant priority, with justice an anachronism.
Spittlebugs are the nymphs of froghoppers. The nymphs are better known, as gardeners consider them especial pests.
Coral reefs worldwide have been stressed by pollution, warmer seas, and outright destruction by men. Cyclones add another hazard.
The onset of organelles by eukaryotes seemed such an innovation over the apparent pandemonium in prokaryotes lacking organizational membranes. Look closer and cells run tidy businesses whether inside or outside protein fortresses.
The Devonian period closed with multiple mass extinction events. The 2 most severe were the Kellwasser Event 372 million years ago (MYA) and the Hangeberg Event, which ended the Devonian 359 MYA.
We live in a world of ideas. An idea becomes communicable by being encapsulated into a word.