The primary food for seagulls is fish. Yet, they also prey on terrestrial arthropods and invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, and small rodents.
Category: Enviroment
When the power goes out…
You’re never ready for the unexpected. But you can try to be prepared.
After water, food , shelter in that order, comes electricity. Having lived through a number of hurricane outages, we have installed a generator that runs on natural gas. As backup, we have a solar panel rechargeable battery system. We keep a Starlink around for an internet connection. There is a rain barrel connected to a gutter from the roof. It’s like insurance. You hope you’ll never need it, but you can sleep at night. If you realize how vulnerable is the Grid that we depend on, then you should get prepared now. Maybe you will after reading this article.
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More Than Meets the Eye DOOMBERG
MAY 31 ∙ PREVIEW 
“If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.” – Doug Larson
At the outset of 1998, a series of devastating ice storms blanketed much of lower Quebec and parts of neighboring provinces with a previously unfathomable deluge of freezing rain. While mere millimeters of solid ice can be enough to disrupt road travel and collapse trees, vast swaths of the region experienced several inches of the stuff in five compounding waves. For Hydro-Québec, the province’s power producer, the storms resulted in countless transformer explosions, “400 damaged transmission towers, 24,000 power poles to be replaced, 120,000 km of downed power lines and roughly1.4 million customers in the dark for almost a month.” The devastation was most acute just east of Montreal inside the triangle formed by the cities of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Granby, and Saint-Hyacinthe—a zone dubbed the Le “Triangle Noir” as the catastrophe dragged on. 
Frozen hell | Hydro-Québec
Although the brunt of the event was felt in Canada, parts of New England were also severely impacted. In Maine, some 700,000 of the state’s 1.2 million residents lost electricity, necessitating the activation of the Maine National Guard. It took 23 days and the assistance of hundreds of crews from around the country to fully restore power. 
Devastation in Maine | AP As disastrous as the Great Ice Storm of 1998
was for local utilities and the populations they served, one shudders to ponder the consequences should a similar event unfold in a high-population area of the US today. Take the I-95 corridor—sometimes called the Northeast megalopolis—which stretches from Washington, DC to Boston and experiences its fair share of freak winter storms. While its 50 million residents undoubtedly pride themselves on their ability to power through whatever Mother Nature throws at them, no grid could withstand the relentless onslaught of ice like what occurred 25 years ago. To a rough approximation, the area encompassed by the Le “Triangle Noir” alone would cover all five boroughs of the city of New York. Imagine the Big Apple without power for a month in the dead of winter. Now consider that a month might be wildly optimistic. For years, a burgeoning supply chain crisis has been plaguing the US power industry, straining grid reliability just as the pursuit of the Green Energy Utopia™ is stretching this hallmark of the developed world to a breaking point. A chronic shortage of transformers can no longer be ignored, and in a letter to federal lawmakers in November, the electric utility sector bluntly sounded the alarm (emphasis added throughout): “Throughout 2022, the electric sector and representatives from residential and commercial building sectors have been calling attention to the unprecedented supply chain challenges both industries have been facing in procuring equipment used to maintain and grow the electric grid.Specifically, electric utilities continue to have significant problems in procuring basic equipment – particularly distribution transformers – needed to operate the grid, provide reliable electric service, and restore power following severe storms and natural disasters. In housing construction, this is further exacerbating their ability to address the housing affordability crisis facing our nation…. Between 2020 and 2022, average lead times to procure distribution transformers across all segments of the electric industry and voltage classes rose 443 percent. The same orders that previously took two to four months to fill are now taking on average over a year. This is a serious threat to reliability.” Transformers play an essential role in enabling our modern standard of living. To transport electricity over vast distances at reasonable efficiency, stations must generate power at extremely high voltages. Before such electricity can be safely used in the home, it needs to be stepped down—transformed—to the standard 240 volts around which the US economy is designed. (This is further split at a home’s main circuit breaker panel into two 120-volt halves, called phases.) Distribution transformers—the equipment in short supply that most concerns the utility sector—provide the final voltage transformation in the electric power distribution system, connecting homes to the juice that powers everything. 
Unsung heroes to our way of life | Getty
The letter’s signatories request a $1 billion appropriation towards transformer production via the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate supply. Despite the industry’s urgent call for resources, the Department of Energy is making decisions that will only accelerate the crisis. Let’s dig into the industry’s claims, the administration’s exacerbating policy decisions, and most importantly, the preparatory measures homeowners can take ahead of a major disruption.
Flesh Eating Bacteria Found in Sargassum
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/perfect-pathogen-storm.php
‘Pathogen’ Storm: Vibrio Bacteria, Sargassum and Plastic Marine Debris
Some cultivation-based data show beached Sargassum appear to harbor high amounts of Vibrio bacteria. (Photo credit: Brian Lapointe, FAU Harbor Branch)
By gisele galoustian | 5/18/2023
A new study uncovers how the interplay between Sargassum spp., plastic marine debris and Vibrio bacteria creates the perfect “pathogen” storm that has implications for both marine life and public health. Vibrio bacteria are found in waters around the world and are the dominant cause of death in humans from the marine environment. For example, Vibrio vulnificus, sometimes referred to as flesh-eating bacteria, can cause life-threatening foodborne illnesses from seafood consumption as well as disease and death from open wound infections.
Since 2011, Sargassum, free-living populations of brown macroalga, have been rapidly expanding in the Sargasso Sea and other parts of the open ocean such as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, including frequent and unprecedented seaweed accumulation events on beaches. Plastic marine debris, first found in surface waters of the Sargasso Sea, has become a worldwide concern, and is known to persist decades longer than natural substrates in the marine environment.
Currently, little is known about the ecological relationship of vibrios with Sargassum. Moreover, genomic and metagenomic evidence has been lacking as to whether vibrios colonizing plastic marine debris and Sargassum could potentially infect humans. As summer kicks into high gear and efforts are underway to find innovative solutions to repurpose Sargassum, could these substrates pose a triple threat to public health?
Maasai Are Getting Pushed Off Their Land So Dubai Royalty Can Shoot Lions
Tanzania’s government wants big tourism money. Herders don’t want to lose their livelihood
A friend from Tanzania had this response to this outrage…
Started Last year, they started moving villages out of the reserve when they have been living for 100’s of years, some refused and had to be moved by force. Very Sad story, and not the first time. They even had big middle east military plane suspected to be loaded with wildlife for Zoos in Emirates.
T.I.A (That Is Africa)
Critics have argued that the Tanzanian government doesn’t want Maasai herding cattle where safari-goers expect to see giraffes and elephants.
As noted in this Bloomberg article
Scientists insist proper land use planning could have helped avoid today’s conflicts, and conservationists say photographic tourism concessions would bring far more money into the state budget than hunting, leading to suspicions that the corruption uncovered in 1996 and 2017 persists.
One Masai, who has an Economics degree pointed out that…
Uneducated Maasai women have few options beyond marriage, and in polygamist societies, that often means as a second or third wife. Since women in such situations compete for status by having more children, “if you want to depopulate this area, just educate every Maasai girl to university level,” he says. “It’ll be solved in 15 years.”
Lake Orville, California Before & Now
Fish eat plastic like teens eat fast food, researchers say
Young fish become hooked on eating plastic in the seas in the same way that teenagers prefer unhealthy fast food, Swedish researchers have said
The fish that did hatch in these waters with high quantities of micro-plastics were “smaller, slower, and more stupid” than those that hatched in clean waters, lead author Dr Oona Lonnstedt, from Uppsala University, said.When exposed to predators, about half the young perch from clean waters survived for 24 hours. Those that had been raised with the strongest plastic concentrations were all consumed by pike over the same period.
Most surprising for the research team was the way that plastic changed food preferences.
“They all had access to zooplankton and yet they decided to just eat plastic in that treatment. It seems to be a chemical or physical cue that the plastic has, that triggers a feeding response in fish,” Dr Lonnstedt told BBC News. “They are basically fooled into thinking it’s a high-energy resource that they need to eat a lot of. I think of it as unhealthy fast food for teenagers, and they are just stuffing themselves.”
Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie | WIRED
In the process of learning how to engineer chemical and pest resistance into corn, researchers at Monsanto had learned to read and understand plant genomes—to tell the difference between the dogshit germplasm and the gold. And they had some nifty technology that allowed them to predict whether a given cross would yield the traits they wanted.
The key was a technique called genetic marking. It maps the parts of a genome that might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple genes working in concert. Researchers identify and cross plants with traits they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf, really—through a machine that can read more than 200,000 samples per week and map all the genes in a particular region of the plant’s chromosomes.
They had more toys too. In 2006, Monsanto developed a machine called a seed chipper that quickly sorts and shaves off widely varying samples of soybean germplasm from seeds. The seed chipper lets researchers scan tiny genetic variations, just a single nucleotide, to figure out if they’ll result in plants with the traits they want—without having to take the time to let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto computer models can actually predict inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired traits will successfully be passed on. It’s breeding without breeding, plant sex in silico. In the real world, the odds of stacking 20 different characteristics into a single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature, it can take a millennium. Monsanto can do it in just a few years.
And this all happens without any genetic engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene into a single genome.
Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto knew it couldn’t just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed great vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases a company mantra: “The best gene in the world doesn’t fix dogshit germplasm.”
What does? Crossbreeding. Stark had an advantage here: In the process of learning how to engineer chemical and pest resistance into corn, researchers at Monsanto had learned to read and understand plant genomes—to tell the difference between the dogshit germplasm and the gold. And they had some nifty technology that allowed them to predict whether a given cross would yield the traits they wanted.
The key was a technique called genetic marking. It maps the parts of a genome that might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple genes working in concert. Researchers identify and cross plants with traits they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf, really—through a machine that can read more than 200,000 samples per week and map all the genes in a particular region of the plant’s chromosomes.
They had more toys too. In 2006, Monsanto developed a machine called a seed chipper that quickly sorts and shaves off widely varying samples of soybean germplasm from seeds. The seed chipper lets researchers scan tiny genetic variations, just a single nucleotide, to figure out if they’ll result in plants with the traits they want—without having to take the time to let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto computer models can actually predict inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired traits will successfully be passed on. It’s breeding without breeding, plant sex in silico. In the real world, the odds of stacking 20 different characteristics into a single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature, it can take a millennium. Monsanto can do it in just a few years.
And this all happens without any genetic engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene into a single genome.
How Global Warming Can Start an Ice Age
In the last month, there’s been much attention to a cool patch in the North Atlantic Ocean, where record cold temperatures over the past eight months present a stark contrast to a globe that is experiencing record warmth. And although there is certainly no consensus on the matter yet, some scientists think this pattern may be a sign of long-feared consequences of climate change — a slowing of North Atlantic ocean circulation, due to a freshening of surface waters.
The cause, goes the thinking, would be the rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet, whose large freshwater flows may weaken ocean “overturning” by reducing the density of cold surface waters (colder, salty water is denser). If cold, salty waters don’t sink in the North Atlantic and flow back southward toward Antarctica at depth, then warm surface waters won’t flow northward to take their place.
Now, two new studies just out in Nature Geoscience help to underscore why scientists have a good reason to think this sort of thing can happen — namely, because it appears to have happened in the Earth’s distant past. And not just once but on multiple occasions.
Back in 2007, I posted this sun spot research that predicted that by 2020 we would be cooled by a low solar activity ( a cooler sun) period. http://terryorisms.com/2007/06/23/read-the-sunspots/ 
The Reign of Recycling
According to the E.P.A.’s estimates, virtually all the greenhouse benefits — more than 90 percent — come from just a few materials: paper, cardboard and metals like the aluminum in soda cans.
Once you exclude paper products and metals, the total annual savings in the United States from recycling everything else in municipal trash — plastics, glass, food, yard trimmings, textiles, rubber, leather — is only two-tenths of 1 percent of America’s carbon footprint.
As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.
It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed after conducting what is probably the most thorough comparison of the social costs of recycling, landfilling and incineration.
The Reign of Recycling http://nyti.ms/1iUpbBE
Why Science is so Hard to Believe
We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.
Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. They, too, are vulnerable to confirmation bias — the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once the results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them — and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or an absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.
That provisional quality of science is another thing a lot of people have trouble with. To some climate-change skeptics, for example, the fact that a few scientists in the 1970s were worried (quite reasonably, it seemed at the time) about the possibility of a coming ice age is enough to discredit what is now the consensus of the world’s scientists:
Americans fall into two basic camps. Those with a more “egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a “hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to — some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.
via Why science is so hard to believe – The Washington Post.