Month: July 2020

Cordoba Thunderstorms

From what the team could gather, each of the storms had generated such large, powerful updrafts that they’d eventually merged together and begun to spawn other, smaller updrafts, creating what’s called a “mesoscale convective system” — in short, a giant, organized complex of perhaps 50 or more updrafts, which becomes self-sustaining as it germinates more and more offspring.

2022-02-01:

 The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established 2 new world records for megaflashes of lightning.

  • The longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020.
  • The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds from the flash that developed continuously through a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020.

Coronaviruses

Eventually I think we will categorize all the recent betacoronavirus outbreaks (Sars-1, Sars-2, MERS) as part of this broader process, and require a vaccination strategy that can be quickly deployed against new recombinations from this original ancestral betacoronavirus as they randomly emerge from the primordial stew across many animal species, including ours. The evidence thus far points to recombinations resulting in the emergence of a distinct dangerous variant with some regularity.

2020-11-23: Horseshoe bat origin?

2 lab freezers in Asia have yielded surprising discoveries. Researchers have found a coronavirus that is closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic, in horseshoe bats stored in a freezer in Cambodia. A team reported the discovery of another closely related coronavirus — also found in frozen bat droppings.

The viruses are the first known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 to be found outside China, which supports the World Health Organization’s search across Asia for the pandemic’s animal origin. Strong evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, but whether it passed directly from bats to people, or through an intermediate host, remains a mystery.

COVID-19 origins

Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-COV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation, the low incidence of COVID-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam.

A great piece on lab vs zoonotic COVID-19 origins

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Subantarctic life

John Priscu’s search for life that thrives under ice took him to subglacial lakes at the South Pole. Now he has his eye on Mars and Europa.

And there are sessile animals under the ice:

The researchers think it’s likely that the drift of this marine snow has been flipped on its side, so that the food source is moving horizontally instead of vertically. The researchers determined that there are productive regions 630-1500 km away. It may not be much, but it’s possible that enough organic material is riding these currents to feed these creatures. That’s an extraordinary distance, given that in the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep near Guam, marine snow produced at the surface has to fall 11 km down to reach the seafloor. To reach the animals on this Antarctic rock, food would have to travel as much as 133x that distance—and it would have to do so by floating sideways.

Individuality information theory

This information theory of individuality offers a very general way to think about biological units. They hope it will inspire algorithms that could allow you to extract figure from ground, organism from environment. Such algorithms could be applied to streams of data collected over time to pinpoint correlations of information that signify the emergence of individuals.

Within this theory, individuals can be cells, tissues, organisms, colonies, companies, political institutions, online groups, artificial intelligence or cities — even ideas or theories. What we’re trying to do is discover a whole zoo of life forms that extend far beyond what we have conventionally called living,