Missing Dwarf Galaxies Found Near The Milky Way in The Worst Place

And we are now seeing them? that and red dots and we obviously know nothing. without begging dark matter, it is now possible that most dark matter means just that.  stars and planets we cannot see.  and galaxies.

Now is the red shift only showing us what we can see?

The moment we can set up a wormhole, we need to launch a space station observatory out into the cosmos in order to steadily increase triangulation.  this can sort out a lot and such a station can operate for centuries.

Missing Dwarf Galaxies Found Near The Milky Way in The Worst Place

02 July 2024

By

MICHELLE STARR

An artist's impression of the Milky Way in its dark matter bubble. (Melissa Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

https://www.sciencealert.com/missing-dwarf-galaxies-found-near-the-milky-way-in-the-worst-place

The Milky Way is not alone in its little corner of the Universe.

Tiny, faint dwarf galaxies, many with as few as a thousand stars, swoop around our cosmic neighborhood on long graceful circuits. It's unclear exactly how many there are, but there should be a lot more than the 60 or so we've found to date.

Astronomers have recently identified two more of these itty-bitty companions, but the news isn't as problem-solving as you might think. Now, there appear to be too many.

That's because the two new satellites, named Virgo III and Sextans II, were discovered in a region of space already crowded with more dwarf galaxies than models of dark matter predict.

"Including four previously known satellites, there are a total of nine satellites in the HSC-SSP footprint," write a team led by Daisuke Homma of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

"This discovery rate of ultra-faint dwarfs is much higher than that predicted from the recent models for the expected population of Milky Way satellites in the framework of cold dark matter models, thereby suggesting that we encounter a 'too many satellites' problem."

The locations of the two newly discovered dwarf galaxies. (NAOJ/Tohoku University)

Dark matter is an invisible, unknown something in the Universe that contributes additional gravity that can't be attributed to normal matter. Galaxies, including the Milky Way, are imbued with and surrounded by this mysterious stuff, giving more speed to the galactic rotation and more gravitational oomph to attract, retain, and eventually eat satellite galaxies.

Based on models of the Milky Way's dark matter, astronomers expect that the galaxy should have many more dwarf galaxy satellites than have been found to date. That doesn't necessarily mean those galaxies aren't out there, and scientists are leaving no cosmic stone unturned in their effort to find them in the gloom.

Dark matter-based models also give us fairly detailed predictions about how many satellite galaxies we should expect to see in specific places, and this is where Virgo III and Sextans II are posing a problem.

Homma and his colleagues studied data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) to study a segment of space, looking for Milky Way satellite galaxies. According to dark matter models, there should be around four dwarf galaxy satellites in that slice of the sky.

The location of Virgo III. (NAOJ/Tohoku University)

The two new galaxies bring the total in that region to nine. Even before their discovery, the number of satellites there was too high to explain.

Moving things around – excluding the classical dwarf galaxy Sextans, for example, or adopting a different model to predict the number of satellites we should see – also doesn't resolve the problem.

The best model currently predicts that there should be around 220 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. If the distribution found in the HSC-SSP footprint is extrapolated to the rest of the space around our galaxy, that total would in reality be closer to 500 satellites.

It is possible, however, that the HSC-SSP footprint contains a higher concentration of satellites than the average section of space. The only way to determine whether this is the case is to keep looking at other patches of the sky, and count the dwarf galaxies we find there.

"The next step is to use a more powerful telescope that captures a wider view of the sky," says astronomer Masashi Chiba of Tohoku University. "Next year, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will be used to fulfill that purpose. I hope that many new satellite galaxies will be discovered."

The research has been published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

How ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilisation

folks are waking up to terra preta agriculture.  I woke up when i began this blog in 2007 and that was because i researched natural zeolites in 1990 or so and discovered that carbon was a zeolite.

The direct take home is that adding biochar to spent tropical soils make them fully productive forever as the nutrient will not escape.

Agriculture then in the tropics becomes maintaining an active food forest and garden sufficient to feed your family.

Populations of millions result as is proven here.

How ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilisation

Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution

By Colin Barras

2 July 2024

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26334980-500-how-ghost-cities-in-the-amazon-are-rewriting-the-story-of-civilisation/

Try to imagine an environment largely untouched by humans and the Amazon rainforest might spring to mind. After all, large swathes of this South American landscape are blanketed in thick vegetation, suggesting it is one corner of the world that humans never managed to tame. Here, there must have been no deforestation, no agricultural revolution and no cities. It seems like a pristine environment.

Or so we thought. But a very different picture is emerging. Archaeologists working with Indigenous communities have been shown crumbling urban remains and remote sensing technologies such as lidar are revealing the footprints of vast ghost cities. With so much evidence of ancient human activity, it is now thought the pre-Columbian Amazon was inhabited by millions of people – some living in large built-up areas complete with road networks, temples and pyramids.

But that’s not all this research reveals. Paradoxically, it also provides evidence that the traditional view of the Amazon isn’t completely wide of the mark. For instance, while the ancient Amazonians managed their landscape intensively, they didn’t deforest it. And although they developed complex societies, they never went through a wholesale agricultural revolution. This might suggest that the pre-Columbian Amazonians broke the mould of human cultural development, which is traditionally seen as a relentless march from hunting and gathering to farming to urban complexity. The truth is more surprising. In fact, we are now coming to understand that there was no such mould – civilisation arose in myriad ways. What looks like an anomaly in the Amazon is actually a shining example of a process that was as vibrant and diverse as the rainforest itself.

Despite its obvious biodiversity, the Amazon rainforest is rooted in impoverished soil. This realisation led to the long-held belief that it couldn’t sustain large numbers of people. The first hint that this assumption might be wrong came in the 1960s, with the suggestion that mysterious patches of fertile soil, known as terra preta, were created by past societies to boost crop growth. The scale of these societies began to emerge three decades later, when Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida in Gainesville began working with the Kuikuro, an Indigenous group who live in Brazil’s Upper Xingu region. “After two weeks, the Kuikuro chief, Afukaka, took me to a site that was 20 times as big as the contemporary village,” says Heckenberger. “Then he took me to another.” Clearly, Afukaka’s forebears had built on a grand scale. How was this possible?

The discovery of terra preta sheds light on the Amazon’s earliest inhabitants

Associação Indigena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu

Discoveries made this century have finally allowed us to answer that question. The story begins when humans first arrived in the Amazon. Exactly when that happened is up for debate – estimates vary from 27,000 to 13,000 years ago – but it seems to have been remarkably soon after people arrived in the Americas. Those early Amazonians didn’t immediately start building large settlements deep within the rainforest. Instead, they stuck to the margins of the Amazon basin where an astonishing variety of landscapes still exists. “There are lush evergreen forests, seasonally flooded savannahs, huge areas of wetlands – it’s very diverse,” says José Iriarte at the University of Exeter, UK. “Right from the start, these hunter-gatherers were looking for transitional zones where they could exploit different environments.”

Evidence of this earliest stage of Amazonian life is preserved at several rock shelters in an area of Colombia called the Serranía de la Lindosa. The shelters, which Iriarte and his colleagues have been excavating since 2015, show signs of human habitation stretching back at least 12,600 years. At this time, the Amazon was a few degrees cooler than it is today. But arguably the biggest difference was the presence of large mammals, including giant sloths, elephant-like gomphotheres and huge ungulates. Spectacular rock art in the Serranía de la Lindosa depicts some of these animals, suggesting these megafauna were an important component of the early Amazonians’ diet, says Iriarte. What’s more, the megafauna had co-evolved with flora that produced fruit large enough to satisfy the hunger of enormous herbivores, thereby encouraging them to disperse the seeds. This fruit – including avocado, cacao and various forms of squash – quickly found a place on the hunter-gatherer’s menu too, meaning early Amazonians enjoyed a varied diet.

Read more:A family tree of humanity released in 2022 shows how we’re all related

By 11,600 years ago, most of the megafauna had disappeared, driven to extinction through a combination of human activity and climate change. Then came a new way to obtain food. Instead of simply foraging, some Amazonians began domesticating plants. José Capriles at Pennsylvania State University, Iriarte and their colleagues published the first evidence of this early cultivation in 2020. It comes from the flooded savannahs of the Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon. Here, the modern grassy landscape is littered with curious little hills, many about a hectare in size, and each covered in thick vegetation. “We’ve mapped over 6000 of them,” says Capriles.

It turns out these “forest islands” are human-made mounds, some dating back 10,800 years. They sustain forests today because centuries of human activity left their soils more fertile than the surrounding grassland. Capriles suspects they began as temporary camps, but as the soils became enriched by human waste, some of the plants that the foragers ate, including squash and manioc (also known as cassava), began growing there. Then, people started cultivating and ultimately domesticating them.

Rock art found in Colombia indicates that the early inhabitants of the Amazon hunted megafauna

Jose Iriarte/Last Journey

Domestication evidently caught on. Soon, as well as growing these short-lived crops in small gardens, the Amazonians were planting groves of long-lived trees, including peach palms and Brazil nuts. In fact, as the scope of these endeavours has become clearer, researchers have begun to recognise the south-west Amazon as an independent centre of plant domestication – one of only five in the world.

Gardeners not farmers

At this point, it seems we are on a familiar trajectory. With the traditional model of human cultural evolution as a guide, we might assume the Amazonians would recognise the advantages of growing their own food and become full-time farmers living in permanent settlements. Their populations would then grow and expand across the entire Amazon, and their culture – from farming to languages – would spread far and wide. That isn’t what happened.

There is so little evidence of intensive farming in the pre-Columbian Amazon that recent studies conclude there never was a farming revolution in the region like the one that swept across Europe from around 10,000 years ago. There is some evidence for cultural spread – languages in the Arawakan family, for instance, are spoken in many parts of the Amazon – but this diffusion was never particularly strong. The lack of a sweeping wave of farmers might help explain why the Amazon of today retains a mind-boggling diversity of languages – more than 300, including about 50 that are unrelated to any known language, according to Jonas Gregorio de Souza at Pompeu Fabra University, Spain, who has explored the spread of Amazonian languages.

Why did farming fail to take hold? Environmental factors might have played their part – not least, those impoverished Amazonian soils. “They are naturally nutrient poor,” says Crystal McMichael at the University of Amsterdam. “It’s really hard to grow a big sedentary agricultural society unless you have some type of soil modification.”

Amazonian societies did eventually begin modifying the soil and improving its fertility, creating the patches of terra preta that researchers have known about for decades. But this didn’t happen on a large scale until about 2500 years ago. Research by McMichael and Mark Bush at the Florida Institute of Technology suggests it was only then that human populations began to grow exponentially and people spread freely across the region.

Perhaps more importantly, early Amazonians may not have seen farming as a worthwhile pursuit. They still had access to rivers teeming with fish, and their cultivated gardens and orchards provided plenty of fruit and vegetables. Abandoning this smorgasbord to focus on farming just one or two cereal crops such as maize, which arrived in the Amazon some 7000 years ago, may have had little appeal. This ambivalent attitude might seem surprising given that cultivation of crops has long been seen as a step that leads rapidly and inexorably to full-time farming. But recent archaeological findings have changed this thinking. Even in places where cultivation resulted in intensive farming, including North America and East Asia, it often did so only after a significant lag, sometimes lasting millennia.

We now also know that the adoption of farming wasn’t a prerequisite for further social developments: many complex hunter-gatherer societies have existed throughout human history. Instead, societies tend to become more politically, technologically and economically complex by intensifying production of key foodstuffs, because doing so “almost inevitably” encourages the establishment of an elite that can control access to the resource, says Adrian Jaeggi at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Elites and hierarchies

This, rather than a lack of farming, could have created a barrier to the complexification of pre-Columbian Amazonian societies, relying as they did on a wide range of foods distributed across the landscape. Moreover, controlling access to such resources would have been virtually impossible, limiting the opportunity for Amazonian elites to emerge.

At first glance, this seems to fit with the evidence. For instance, beginning about 1000 years ago, the TapajÓ people established themselves in the central Amazon, where they built a network of settlements based around two large villages, Aldeia and Porto. Generally, such settlements would serve as seats of power for a ruling elite. Not here. Archaeological excavations in the past 20 years have failed to reveal evidence of a concentration of prestigious goods, says Denise Gomes at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Instead, objects of similar social value are found in all TapajÓ settlements, both large and small, suggesting smaller communities retained their autonomy, says Gomes. If the TapajÓ are representative of other Amazonian societies, that would explain why the pre-Columbian Amazon is sometimes described as a region in which states or other forms of permanent hierarchical structures failed to emerge.

However, the story turns out to be more complicated. “The groups we see today in the Xingu [region] and elsewhere are very hierarchical despite living in communities of no more than 100 people,” says Heckenberger. “And it’s because their heritage descended from large, structured and highly organised societies.” Support for this assertion doesn’t just come from the ancient settlements he was shown by Afukaka. In recent years, remote scanning has revealed similarly large settlements across the Amazon, all built in the past 2500 years after the human population expanded. There is also evidence that some of these settlements were linked by extensive road networks. These were sometimes built on a grid system reminiscent of Manhattan, with straight roads up to 10 metres wide. The scans have found signs of engineering work too, including terraced fields, drainage canals and weirs for trapping fish.

Then there are the monuments. In Bolivia’s Llanos de Mojos, these spectacular structures, all made from earth, include stepped platforms and 22-metre-tall pyramids built starting around 1500 years ago. They dwarf the forest islands built by the early Amazonians 10,000 years ago. “Some people would like to think a political system lacking hierarchy can still build such monumental architecture – but I’m sceptical,” says Capriles.

Remote sensing using lidar reveals ancient structures (right) in Ecuador’s Upano valley

Stephen Rostain

Complex societies

The complexity of ancient Amazonian societies is also evident in the way they managed the resources available to them. “We’re looking at societies that had no stone and no bricks,” says Heckenberger. “Everything is organic, and so the industrial demand for wood and grass was tremendous. Not just for house construction, but for portable artefacts – every hammock, every tool.” This economic reliance on the rainforest encouraged the ancient inhabitants of the Xingu to develop an intricate landscape management strategy called “garden urbanism”, which isn’t unique to the Amazon – evidence of similar ways of life is found in other places where civilisations have taken root in tropical forests, including in parts of Africa and Indonesia.

We still don’t really know how some pre-Columbian Amazonian societies achieved complexity. One suggestion is that they did it by focusing on, and then intensifying production of, aquatic resources that could be controlled by an emergent elite. Another idea, favoured by Heckenberger, sees hierarchies forming by accumulating political capital. In other words, the authority needed by elites to command the construction of monuments and other engineering projects was rooted in symbolism rather than the accumulation of food surpluses or prestigious goods. Whatever the explanation, the fact that complex societies did emerge confirms a growing realisation that human cultural development – from hunter-gatherer to urban dweller – came in a wider variety of forms than we had assumed. Far from being an anomaly, pre-Columbian Amazon civilisations are a perfect illustration of that paradigm shift. “The more we learn, the less I believe in Amazonian exceptionalism,” says Heckenberger.

The Upano valley in Ecuador

Stephen Rostain

The Amazon continued to be home to large numbers of people for thousands of years. By the time Europeans arrived in the 16th century, populations in the region had dropped somewhat – perhaps due to disease, says Heckenberger. Nevertheless, the explorers still reported encountering large societies, some so well organised that social elites could assemble an army of 60,000 warriors if the need arose. Such reports were easy to dismiss, however – particularly as Amazonian populations dwindled and fragmented as a result of the expansion of European colonists and the diseases they brought with them – and the idea of the rainforest as a vast natural wilderness took hold.

Now the tide has turned, but Amazonian archaeology is still in its infancy. Undoubtedly, there are many treasures yet to be discovered. With new technology and so much ground to survey, the picture is changing fast. Just last year, remote scans suggested that there are more than 10,000 ancient earthworks still hidden in the Amazon. We can only guess at the secrets they have to reveal. “Anything at this point is conceivable,” says Capriles.

Colin Barras is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan

The New York Times Is Right, Finally; ‘Climate Change’ Is Not Threatening Island Nations

Let us take all this a little further. The fact is that we have extant sea side baths cut in rock from roman Times or 2000 years ago which could be used today.  This informs us that sea levels have been stunningly stable for 2000 years at least.

now this was not always true since the Pleistocene Nonconformity of 12900 BP, the seal level has covered the Continental shelf as the northern Ice Age melted out.  That provides an upper limit of 600 feet of lift.  we know for sure that we have 300 feet at least.  The last phases were slo mo as the cap melted out.  Yet recognizable to those living at hand.

At least the MSM has stopped peddling absurdity.

The New York Times Is Right, Finally; ‘Climate Change’ Is Not Threatening Island Nations

By Marc Morano

July 2, 2024

10:00 am

https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/07/02/the-new-york-times-is-right-finally-climate-change-is-not-threatening-island-nations/

By Linnea Lueken

The New York Times (NYT) recently posted an article, titled “A Surprising Climate Find,” which explains how island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu are not, in fact, in danger of sinking under the seas due to climate change. This is true; a fact Climate Realism has repeatedly discussed. Atolls in particular are known to grow with rising water levels, this has been known for years if not decades.

The NYT climate reporter, Raymond Zhong, explains that as “the planet warms and the oceans rise, atoll nations like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu have seemed doomed to vanish, like the mythical Atlantis, into watery oblivion.”

This is an exceptionally common claim from the climate alarmist media, and some of the nations themselves that are benefitting from massive aid packages and “reparations” from wealthier countries; money not be used to help their people relocate from the “sinking” islands, but rather to build infrastructure and boost tourism. In fact, the NYT promoted this falsehood as late as April 2024, with a story, titled, “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands.“

In his most recent piece Zhong writes:

“Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.”

It is true that the islands are not sinking, but Zhong is wrong when he says this fact has only been discovered “of late.” His own article references a study published in 2018, which found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting. So just three months after the NYT published an article claiming the Maldives were disappearing beneath the waves, the paper is now reversing itself based on research that existed six years before the April article was published. Since, Climate Realism has covered the claim many times, including with regard to Tuvaluan “refugees,” looking at tropical storms, and examining other island refugee claims, one wonders whether the NYT’s fact checkers were asleep on the job when the paper published its false story in April.

The facts about atolls growth and demise are not newly discovered. Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels. Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.

In 2010, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, Rising Seas Are Not Swallowing Island Nations,” studies found that Tuvalu and Kiribati were growing, as well as Micronesia, and some had grown dramatically. Likewise in 2015, the same group of researchers reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown.

Zhong correctly says that ocean currents and waves can cause erosion, but also “bring fresh sand ashore from the surrounding coral reefs, where the remains of corals, algae, crustaceans and other organisms are constantly being crushed into new sediment.”

Climate at a Glance: Islands and Sea Level Rise, also confirms the fact that in Tuvalu in particular –often a poster child for islands supposedly threatened by sea level rise—“eight of Tuvalu’s nine large coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 75 percent of Tuvalu’s 101 smaller reef islands have increased as well.”

The only “surprising” discovery in this story is that the climate desk for the New York Times was allegedly not aware of these facts before now. This information is not new. It could be, of course, that the NYT neglected to report the truth about island nations’ status previously simply because it did not conform to the alarming climate narrative they have been trying to push, but as the data has gotten too strong to ignore, they were forced to admit the truth with regard to growing islands in the face of rising seas.

Humans to Blame For Megafauna Extinctions, New Study Suggests

We have always suspected as much, but lacked anything approaching confirmation and it could be argued.

This study essentially reverses any debate.  If humanity was about, they took down the big boys first and this obviously fed large numbers as well.  Recall how huge fisheries created large populations in the Pacific Northwest using stone age tech.

a commons with large mammoths was an open diner and they could hardly escape a ring of hunters.  Once the population was large, this would become their main method as well

This will now be the default protocol for understanding the collapse of our mega fauna.  Recall lions are extinct everywhere except Africa where they are in sharp decline.

the take home is that all mega fauna needs protective husbandry along with refugia as well for maintenance.  this is happening and restoration biology as well..

Humans to Blame For Megafauna Extinctions, New Study Suggests

NATURE

03 July 2024

ByMICHELLE STARR

Teeming animals painted in Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave more than 30,000 years ago. (Bonnafe Jean-Paul/Moment/Getty Images)

Once upon a time, our world was home to many giants.

Actually, it wasn't so long ago. Once the dinosaurs had had their day, our planet was home to a whole new range of giant animals, from sloths that towered over humans, to wooly mammoths, to huge wombats and kangaroos, to the magnificent giga-goose.

Between around 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, nearly 200 of the world's largest animal species disappeared forever, leaving nothing but their humongous bones (and burrows). It's unclear what ultimately claimed these magnificent creatures.

During the time frame in which the megafauna disappeared, the world warmed and an ice age ended, suggesting one potential mechanism: climate change. Meanwhile, our own species was expanding into new lands, chasing the wealth of resources that came with the retreating ice. And so the debate over the roles of these two potential contributing factors has raged.

Now a new study on the decline of giant herbivorous mammals – megaherbivores – points a finger at humanity.

Fossils show that, 50,000 years ago, there were at least 57 species of megaherbivore. Today, just 11 remain. They include notable behemoths such as hippos and giraffes, as well as several species of rhino and elephant, many of which continue to dwindle.

Such a dramatic decline, researchers say, is inconsistent with climate change as the sole cause.

"The large and very selective loss of megafauna over the last 50,000 years is unique over the past 66 million years. Previous periods of climate change did not lead to large, selective extinctions, which argues against a major role for climate in the megafauna extinctions," says macroecologist Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University in Denmark

"Another significant pattern that argues against a role for climate is that the recent megafauna extinctions hit just as hard in climatically stable areas as in unstable areas."

The new study consists of a comprehensive review of the available evidence since the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. These include locations and timings of extinctions, habitat and food preferences, estimated population sizes, evidence of human hunting, human population movements, and climate and vegetation data going back millions of years.

Loss of megafauna changed patterns of vegetation, which for example lead to denser forests in the Americas. (Svenning et al., Extinction, 2024)

We know that humans coexisted with megafauna, and we have evidence of some species being hunted to extinction. We know our ancestors were capable of hunting large animals effectively.

"Early modern humans were effective hunters of even the largest animal species and clearly had the ability to reduce the populations of large animals," Svenning says.

"These large animals were and are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation because they have long gestation periods, produce very few offspring at a time, and take many years to reach sexual maturity."

The new research shows that these human hunters were effective enough to significantly contribute to many extinctions. The megaherbivores, the team found, died out across a variety of climate scenarios, in which they had been able to effectively thrive even during times of change. Most of them would have adapted well to a warming environment, the researchers found.

And they died at different times and at different rates – but all of those times were after humans had arrived, or developed the means to hunt them. In fact, the exploitation of mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths was pretty consistent everywhere humans went.

Perhaps the reason the mammoths hung on at Wrangel Island after the mainland population disappeared was because there were no humans there.

It's a sobering thought, especially since the megafauna that survive today are declining thanks to human exploitation, as found in a 2019 study. Some 98 percent of endangered megafauna species are at the risk of dying out because people won't stop eating them.

"Our results highlight the need for active conservation and restoration efforts," Svenning says. "By reintroducing large mammals, we can help restore ecological balances and support biodiversity, which evolved in ecosystems rich in megafauna."

Small wonder the rest of the animal kingdom fears us.

Incredible Hydrothermal Environment Discovered Deep Beneath The Ocean

We only found the first oceanic hot spot around forty years ago and a few since.  I think that there are thousands and we need to systematically look.  They are all deep and represent deep hot rock in our crust.

This is a natural heat pump that draws in surrounding water through the crust and then releases produced concentrates on contact with the open sea.  We see those effects deep vin our mines.

We have deep structures that act to open pathways. in the crust.

Incredible Hydrothermal Environment Discovered Deep Beneath The Ocean

01 July 2024

ByMICHELLE STARR

The telltale 'shimmer' as volcanic heat is released into the water at the bottom of the sea. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/incredible-hydrothermal-environment-discovered-deep-beneath-the-ocean

A stunning new wonderland has been discovered, hidden deep beneath the ocean waves of the Arctic Circle.

Off the coast of Svalbard, in Norway, more than 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) down, a field of hydrothermal vents unfolds along the Knipovich Ridge, an underwater mountain range previously thought to be fairly unremarkable.

Instead, like underfloor heating, volcanic activity below the seafloor causes heat to seep through, creating havens of warmth and chemical reactions where life can gather and thrive.

The field, measuring at least a kilometer in length and 200 meters in width, has been named Jøtul, for the giants of Norse mythology that live beneath mountains. In this case, the giant is Earth's internal processes, released through cracks in the seafloor.

"Water penetrates into the ocean floor where it is heated by magma. The overheated water then rises back to the sea floor through cracks and fissures," explains marine geologist Gerhard Bohrmann of the University of Bremen in Germany.

"On its way up the fluid becomes enriched in minerals and materials dissolved out of the oceanic crustal rocks. These fluids often seep out again at the sea floor through tube-like chimneys called black smokers, where metal-rich minerals are then precipitated."

An active black smoker releasing minerals into the water. 

Hydrothermal vent fields are some of the most interesting undersea environments. They're usually very deep beneath the ocean surface, so far down that light from the Sun can't penetrate the vast volume of water above them.

At these depths, conditions are permanently dark, freezing cold, and surrounded by crushing pressures.

This environment isn't exactly conducive to life, but hydrothermal vents act as strange oases. The minerals seeping out and dissolving in the water provide the basis for a food web reliant, not on photosynthesis as most life closer to the surface is, but chemosynthesis – harnessing chemical reactions for energy, rather than sunlight.

These environs make for a much more dynamic and thriving deep seafloor than might be expected, giving us a clue about how life might emerge on worlds very different from our own.

Finding hydrothermal fields is important also for trying to protect Earth's biodiversity, and learning more about how it functions, as well as understanding how the planet itself functions and changes over time.

The Jøtul Field is located right on the boundary between two of Earth's tectonic plates, on what is known as a slow spreading ridge. The plates are very slowly moving away from each other, which causes the crust to stretch, and valleys and ridges to develop.

Scientists have detected hydrothermal activity along almost all the ridges north of Iceland, but the Knipovich Ridge remained a glaring exception.

That was, until 2022. Scientists had seen hints of hydrothermal chemistry in the region, so they took a submersible remotely-operated vehicle to the ridge to see if they could find the source of it.

A chimney vent crawling with amphipods enjoying the warm water. 

They drove the MARUM-QUEST submersible more than 3 kilometers down to the seafloor, where it took images and sampled the waters. And there, they found the Jøtul Field – a large region of seafloor with both extinct and active hydrothermal vents, and the telltale shimmer of volcanic heat seeping into the water.

It's a magnificent find, one that fills in a significant and previously puzzling gap in the hydrothermal layout of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea.

"The Jøtul hydrothermal field is the first to be discovered along the 500-kilometer-long ultraslow-spreading Knipovich Ridge and is significant, because it represents a new link between the active hydrothermal systems of Loki's Castle at the bend of Mohns and Knipovich Ridges and the Aurora hydrothermal field of the Gakkel Ridge," the researchers write in their paper.

"Since these systems are separated by a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers, the discovery of the Jøtul hydrothermal field is important for the understanding of chemosynthetic faunal community distribution."

In addition, the new discovery can help provide insights into ocean chemistry, and how the waters that clothe our world help circulate and distribute material such as carbon.

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

Time Crystals Could Unlock a Radical New Future For Quantum Computers

This could work and it is huge. again we have a usable clock to hand allowing us to tackle a cloud of data that is prone to error.

this will take years to advance though, but it all sounds like the holodeck becomes closer..

I wonder if Star wars and Star Trek was inspired by direct feedback from the future?

Time Crystals Could Unlock a Radical New Future For Quantum Computers

 

01 July 2024

ByMIKE MCRAE

https://www.sciencealert.com/time-crystals-could-unlock-a-radical-new-future-for-quantum-computers?

The path to quantum supremacy is complicated by a fairy tale challenge – how do you carry a cloud without changing its shape?

The potential solution sounds almost as fantastical as the problem. You could guide the cloud to dance as it travels, to the beat of a unique material known as a time crystal.

Krzysztof Giergiel and Krzysztof Sacha from Jagiellonian University in Poland and Peter Hannaford from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia propose a novel kind of 'time' circuit might be up to the task of preserving the nebulous states of qubits as they're carried through tempests of quantum logic.

Unlike descriptions of objects as having clearly defined locations and movements, a quantum perspective of the same particle describes features like its position, momentum, and spin as a blur of likelihoods.

This 'cloud' of possibilities is best understood in isolation. Once the particle interacts with its environment its spread of possibilities changes like the odds of a runner winning the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics, until finally only one outcome is observed.

Just as a classical computer can use the binary states of particles as 'on-off' switches in logic gates, quantum computers can theoretically exploit the spread of uncertainties in a particle to rapidly solve their own kinds of algorithms, many of which would be impractical or even impossible to solve the old-fashioned way.

The challenge lies in preserving the coherence of that quantum cloud of possibility – referred to as a qubit – for as long as possible. With every bump, every electromagnetic breeze, comes an increased risk of errors that ruin the number-crunching process.

Practical quantum computers require hundreds, if not thousands of qubits to remain intact for extensive periods, making a full-scale system a monumental challenge.

Researchers have sought a variety of ways to make quantum computing more robust, either by locking away individual qubits to protect them from decoherence to building safety nets around them.

Now physicists Giergiel, Sacha, and Hannaford have described a new approach that turns quantum computers into a qubit symphony guided by the baton of one very strange kind of conductor.

Time crystals are materials that transform in repeated patterns over time. Theorized as curiosities just over a decade ago, versions of these 'ticking' systems have since been developed using the gentle nudge of a laser and ultra-cold clusters of atoms, where bursts of light send particles into periodical swings that defy the laser's timing.

In a paper available on the pre- peer review server arXiv, the trio of physicists proposes using the unique periodicity of a time crystal as the basis for a new kind of "time-tronics" circuitry. Used to guide the delicate waves of vast numbers of information-laden qubits, this periodicity could help reduce the accidental collisions that are responsible for many errors.

Such a temporal circuit of constantly drifting qubits would make it easier to direct just about any of the computer's particles into another's path, entangling their quantum possibilities in useful rather than error-imposing ways.

While the proposal remains purely theoretical, the team showed how the physics of groups of potassium ions cooled to near absolute temperatures and directed by a laser's pulse could provide an 'orchestra' for qubits to waltz to.

Translating the idea into a practical, full-scale quantum computer would require years of innovation and experimentation, if it works at all.

Yet now that we know at least some kinds of time crystal exist and can be used for practical purposes, the challenge of carrying a cloud just might not be such a fairy tale quest after all.

This study is available on the pre-peer review server arXiv.

President Biden Blasts Supreme Court's "Dangerous Precedent"?

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Somewhere somehow, an appointed leader must have immunity from using discretion.  Meade did not pursue LEE after Gettysburg and he like3ly should have.  Yet there was no case on what he could know.  Same for Midway .

In both cases it was time to break off to simply measure your losses.  Because you could not know.

These were decisive victories. most battles are actually more of a draw.

Your leader was on point and made his best decision. your position is would of, should of, could of.

I personally do not see just how Gettysburg and Midway could have gone any better.  Yet we hear nitpickers.

The president mast have absolute immunity and the SC is correct to establish rules of engagement.  a good president makes sure he never needs to use it.

"The American People Should Dissent, I Dissent" - President Biden Blasts Supreme Court's "Dangerous Precedent"

BY TYLER DURDEN

TUESDAY, JUL 02, 2024 - 03:45 AM

Update (2000ET): Despite the Supreme Court's direct ruling that "the President is not above the law", President Biden delivered lying remarks to the American people this evening about the "terrible disservice to the people of this nation" that SCOTUS delivered today.

President Biden directly attacked SCOTUS (and the 'far-right' justices that Trump appointed) for "gutting voting rights and civil rights, taking away a woman's right to choose, and today's decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation."

Then he lied some more, telling Americans that "my predecessor sent a violent mob to the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power..."

Biden quoted directly from Justice Sotomayor's dissent (which was remarkably political and perfectly bite-sized for today's social media-consuming listener) where she said, "...with fear for our democracy, I dissent", to which Biden added "so should the American people dissent, I dissent."

As Mollie further noted on X:

"Biden was only able to speak for 3-4 minutes and refused questions from even his most reliably allies in the press, as per usual. He is apparently unwilling or unable to speak without the teleprompter."

This is what the leader of the free world has been reduced to...

We strongly suggest putting down all sharp objects and emptying your mouth of food before watching...

* * *

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-3 vote that former presidents, including Trump, enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct involving official acts during tenure in office, but he's not immune from unofficial acts.

As Bloomberg notes, the decision - which kicks the ball back to the lower court - 'all but ensures' that a trial won't happen in Trump's classified documents case before the November election.

The justices, voting 6-3 along ideological lines, said a federal appeals court was too categorical in rejecting Trump’s immunity arguments, ruling for the first time that former presidents are shielded from prosecution for some official acts taken while in office. The majority ordered the lower courts to revisit the case to decide the extent of the allegations that are off limits to prosecution.

"Just as former presidents have immunity from civil liability for official acts, they have immunity from criminal prosecution unless they are impeached and removed from office for the crime alleged. This decision is supported by the writings of the framers of the Constitution, the text of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent," wrote X user Martin Harry.

As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley notes, now "the issue is whether what constitutes official acts," adding that the ruling will "further delay the lower court proceedings, but Trump will have to argue that his actions fall within these navigational beacons."

"The lower court judge has been highly favorable for Jack Smith in the past. Yet the court is arguing that there is a presumption of immunity for their official acts beyond the absolute immunity on core constitutional powers."

‘Little red dot’ galaxies are breaking theories of cosmic evolution

Do we really know anything?  We have galaxies and now we have little red dots that  may be galaxies.  Or are they deeply shifted galaxies that are far far away and happen to be seeable.

Our theoretical basis has always been a set of assumptions that new data questions directly.  this again is unexpected and not explainable using those assumptions.

If we understand that any galaxy is an act of creation and is all sublight, then what happens when photons pass through intergalactic space?  If the Galaxy is packed with a matrix acting as a photon carrier ,just what happens when it crosses to our galaxy?+

Can we ever know?

‘Little red dot’ galaxies are breaking theories of cosmic evolution

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted hundreds of odd, distant galaxies that seem to either produce an impossible amount of stars or host black holes far more enormous than they should be

By Leah Crane

27 June 2024

This red blob is a distant galaxy with strange properties

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2437145-little-red-dot-galaxies-are-breaking-theories-of-cosmic-evolution/

The “little red dots” discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) pose a cosmic conundrum. It seems that these compact galaxies are either stuffed impossibly full of stars or have black holes that are far too large. Either way, it presents problems for our views of galactic evolution.

When JWST started peering into the early universe, it found hundreds of tiny red galaxies everywhere it looked. Their existence alone was surprising, but as researchers dig into the data, they are finding that the properties of these galaxies, nicknamed little red dots, don’t make sense.

“There are a lot of these little red dots, and some of them are so bright, so very luminous, that they kind of defy what we expect,” says Hollis Akins at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his colleagues tested two possible sources of the light from these galaxies: starlight or the light from material falling into supermassive black holes at the galaxies’ centres.

They found that both potential solutions cause problems. If the light is dominated by stars, then little red dots must be churning out so many stars at such high rates that they should, in theory, give the modern universe much more mass than it has. If the light is dominated by black holes, then those black holes are far larger than we would expect to be possible, given the size of their host galaxies.

“Maybe it’s a mix of both – but even if you assume that half of the light is coming from supermassive black holes and half is coming from stars, you still get a problem because the sources are just everywhere,” says Caitlin Casey at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s a real conundrum.”

In fact, Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his colleagues found that even if only 1 per cent of the light from these galaxies comes from black holes, the black holes are still 10 to 100 times too big for their galaxies, based on what we know about the nearby universe. This could be an indication that supermassive black holes formed extraordinarily quickly in the early universe – that is the only way they could have gotten so large.

“It’s the typical chicken or egg question, if the galaxy formed first and the black hole then collapsed at the centre, or if the black hole formed first and then the galaxy assembled around it,” Pacucci says. The extreme masses of these black holes are the strongest evidence yet for the latter situation, he says.

“None of the pieces fit nicely using the common models of galaxies and black holes, meaning that we are probably missing something fundamental,” says Bingjie Wang at the Pennsylvania State University. “But no one has put forward a compelling new theory yet.”

Little red dots have several other strange properties, such as the old ages of their stars and their dimness in X-ray wavelengths, that also need explanations.

“It is really exciting to have a kind of object that we just don’t know how to explain,” says Jenny Greene at Princeton University. “But there are many ways out.” For example, if the black holes are devouring matter just a little bit faster than their modern counterparts do, it could alleviate some of the tension, she says.

JWST is poised to make more observations of little red dots over the next few years, and those should help scientists put the pieces together.

Zelenskyy names only possible format of talks with Putin

This could work because it is a de facto border commission and will provide cover for everyone.

Russia has long since achieved its war aims which is a secure corridor to the Crimea.

Now Zelensky needs to accept that while declaring victory.  this can do it.  this war acknowledges the independence of the Ukraine as permanent.

Zelenskyy names only possible format of talks with Putin

Story by Oleksandra Zimk

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/zelenskyy-names-only-possible-format-of-talks-with-putin

Currently, there is only one model of negotiations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. To do this, we need to use the intermediaries who were involved in the creation of the grain corridor, says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

When asked by a journalist whether there could be circumstances for Ukraine to negotiate with Putin, Zelenskyy mentioned only one option - a document similar to the grain corridor agreement.

"Ukraine can find a model in which solutions can be found. Such a model was first used on the example of the grain corridor, when Ukraine negotiated not with Russia, but with the UN and Turkey. They, in turn, took on the responsibility of negotiating with us and then signing the relevant agreement with Russia. And that's how it worked: two mirror agreements between the UN and Turkey," Zelenskyy said.

According to him, the same model can be used in territorial integrity, energy, and shipping, when countries from different continents prepare solutions to a particular crisis. And then this document, if it suits Ukraine, should be discussed with representatives of the Russian Federation in the same way.

Peace summit

In June, Switzerland hosted the first peace summit on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As of June 28, the final communiqué of the peace summit had 90 signatures.

Later, the head of the President's Office, Andrii Yermak, said that Kyiv wanted to hold the second meeting of the peace summit in Saudi Arabia by the end of the year.

Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine should also develop a clear peace plan. It should be ready by the end of this year.