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Antarctica
January 18, 2019 The Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) mission discovered the remains of creatures in Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Mercer, a lake covered by a 1,067 metre thick sheet of ice. SALSA scientists used a high-pressure hot-water drill to cut a small channel through the ice to the lake. In the mud they found the remains of tiny crustaceans, tiny invertebrates called tardigrades, as well specimens that likely come from plants or fungus. (Source: CTVNews)
Arctic
January 12, 2019 Could be linked the fast motion of the north magnetic pole to a high-speed jet of liquid iron beneath Canada? Every year, geophysicists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey do a check on how the Earth’s magnetic field is varying. This is necessary as the liquid iron churning in the Earth’s core does not move in a consistent manner. In 2016, for instance, part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean. The movement of the north magnetic pole has been the object of study since 1831. Initially, it was tracked moving into the Arctic Ocean at a rate of about 15km each year. But, since the mid 1990s, it has picked up speed. It’s now shifting at a rate of about 55km a year. Why the magnetic field is shifting so dramatically is unknown. On January 30 (delayed due to the US Government shutdown), the World Magnetic Model - which governs modern navigation systems - is due to undergo an urgent update. This model is a vital component of systems ranging from geopositioning systems used to navigate ships through to smartphone trackers and maps. The current model was expected to be valid until 2020. But the magnetic pole began to shift so quickly, it was realised in 2018 that the model had to be fixed - now. It was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable (safe) limit for navigational errors. (Source: News.com.AU)
China
Jan 14, 2019 China’s 2018 trade surplus with the United States surged to a record $323.3 billion. China's global trade surplus was $352 billion, a marked drop from 2017’s $509.7 billion. (Source: MoneyandMarkets)
India
January 17, 2019 At the Kumbh Mela, or “festival of the pot”, held this year in Prayagraj in north India, organizers expect up to 150 million people to bathe at the confluence of three holy rivers: the Ganges, the Yamuna and a mythical third river, the Saraswati. The eight-week Kumbh generally is held every three years in one of four cities in India. (Source: Reuters)
January 17, 2019 High in the Himalayas, Sikkim is one of the smallest states in India. The Sikkim ruling party announced an ambitious plan to implement a universal basic income for each of its 610,577 citizens. A universal basic income is a guaranteed regular income guaranteed by the government, universally and unconditionally, to all citizens. It is a cash payment that aims to replace the often confusing states of assistance offered to citizens and places spending decisions in the hands of the recipients. Sikkim already has a progressive past: it was one of the first Indian states to ban plastic bags in the distant 1998 – a ban that managed to successfully implement unlike many other states. More recently, it has become the country's first organic state, eliminating the use of pesticides and fertilizers. Its social indices are also distinguished from the rest of the country, with a 98% literacy rate, and managed to significantly bring the percentage of people living below the poverty line to about 8% – compared to almost 30% national. The notion of a universal basic income has found supporters in Silicon Valley, with technology moguls like Zuckerberg and Musk approving it. In his opening speech at Harvard in 2017, Zuckerberg spoke about the need for a "new social contract", with ideas such as a basic income to provide a "cushion" for everyone. Musk described it as a Pass "necessary" as the automation deals with human work. (Source: TheWashingtonPost)
United States
January 18, 2019 Seven tunnels were dug underneath the border wall near Yuma, Arizona on Jan. 14. A record large group of migrants tunneled under the border wall near Yuma, Arizona, and turned themselves in to Border Patrol officials for asylum. The agency says 179 of the record 376 people who crossed were children, including over 30 unaccompanied minors - children under 18 traveling on their own. Parents with children now comprise over 80 percent of the total apprehensions of those crossing the 2,000-mile long border with Mexico. Another huge group of migrants in New Mexico: the 247-person group, including unaccompanied minors, crossed near the Antelope Wells Port of Entry. (Source: ABCNews)
January 18, 2019 Democrats now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives are working out which House panels will take the lead in investigating President Trump’s business ties to Deutsche Bank. A 2017 financial disclosure form showed liabilities for Trump of at least $130 million to Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, a unit of German-based Deutsche Bank AG. (Source: Reuters)
2019. I. 17. A Soros-ingatlan kerítését kolbászból fonták? (Forrás: FaceBook): https://tinyurl.com/y7vv2ac4
Jan 16, 2019 From 2001 through 2018, the remains of at least 3,011 dead migrants have been recovered in southern Arizona. Migrant deaths have remained high despite a sharp decrease in the overall number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol, which in fiscal year 2018 totaled just under 400,000, down from 1.6 million in 2000, when Border Patrol apprehensions peaked. In 2018, the remains of 127 dead migrants were recovered in southern Arizona. On the weekend before Christmas, a group of volunteers set out to search for the remains of dead migrants on the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, a remote desert area in southwestern Arizona where military jets from bases in Arizona conduct live bombing exercises. The volunteers recovered the skeletal remains of eight migrants over a span of two days. (Source: AZCentral)
2019. I. 14. „A gének miatt lényeges különbségek vannak a fehér és a fekete bőrű emberek intelligencia-szintje között, a fehérek javára” – vallotta a DNS kettős spirált formáló szerkezetének feltárásáért 1962-ben megosztott Nobel-díjjal jutalmazott Watson az amerikai közszolgálati televízióban (PBS) a hónap elején egy róla szóló dokumentumműsorban. Kutatóintézete, a New York-i Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory múlt pénteken közleményben tudatta, hogy Watson személyes véleménye alaptalan és meggondolatlan, kijelentését nem bizonyítja semmi, ezért a 90 esztendős tudóst rasszista megjegyzései miatt megfosztotta minden címétől. 2014-ben Watson elárvereztette az 1962-ben kapott Nobel-díjjal járó arany emlékérmet, arra hivatkozva, hogy máskülönben nem finanszírozható tudományos munkája. A Nobel-díját a Christie's decemberi aukcióján 4,8 millió dollárért az üzbég származású, Nagy-Britanniában élő 18 milliárd dolláros vagyonú Uszmanov vette meg, aki azonban azzal a lendülettel vissza is adta a medált Watsonnak, mondván, hogy a tudós kiérdemelte azt. (Forrás: Qubit)
Globalization
2019.01.020 Biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide. Dramatic rates of decline may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades. In terrestrial ecosystems, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) appear to be the taxa most affected, whereas four major aquatic taxa (Odonata, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Ephemeroptera) have already lost a considerable proportion of species. Among aquatic insects, habitat and dietary generalists, and pollutant-tolerant species are replacing the large biodiversity losses experienced in waters within agricultural and urban settings. The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change. The latter factor is particularly important in tropical regions, but only affects a minority of species in colder climes and mountain settings of temperate zones. A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends. Effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments. (Source: ScienceDirect)
20 January 2019 A new frontier with a multitude of possibilities. Planet Labs, the satellite company, has launched hundreds of small satellites for commercial use. They get over a million photos from them each day. Planet Lab has 200 customers, none more important than the U.S. Government. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency now has access to millions more images than in the past, when the U.S. government had a monopoly on the collection of satellite data. The NGA's analysis of satellite imagery is used extensively by the military and can monitor the movements of foreign militaries, such as the Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. The NGA does not have the authority to declare secret any of the millions of images Planet Lab has collected so far and to come. (Source: CBSNews)
January 20, 2019 Poll commissioned by the World Economic Forum (WEF) will be discussed at panels at this year's meeting in Davos, Switzerland. People in South-east Asia and Africa were the strongest believers in countries working together, with 88 per cent saying it's extremely or very important. The least enthusiastic region was Western Europe, where 61 per cent held that view. In North America, the figure was 70 per cent. Worldwide, it was 76 per cent. A global majority of 57 per cent said immigrants were "mostly good" for their new country, but only 40 per cent of Eastern Europeans thought so. Despite the continuing stand-off in the United States over building a wall along the Mexican border, 66 per cent of North Americans had a positive view of migrants. One theme where there's less optimism is social mobility, with only 20 per cent of Western Europeans and 34 per cent of Americans saying it is common to be born poor and become rich. Across the world, 54 per cent have trust in climate scientists. But in North America, only 17 per cent do. The annual meeting remains relevant even though US President Trump and other major world leaders have announced they would not attend it this year. British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Macron also won't participate at this year's meeting. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazil's recently sworn-in President Bolsonaro will be the leaders topping the list of attendees at the Davos gathering which begins on Jan 22. They count on the presence of about 60 heads of state. (Source: StraitsTimes)
((January 2019)) The US/UK world magnetic model for 2015-2020 (Source: https://tinyurl.com/y9pgay22)
January 17, 2019 A massive global environmental collapse is already well underway. A 2014 summary of global declines in biodiversity and abundance estimated a 45 percent drop in the abundance of invertebrates, most of which are insects. And many individual species and species groups are declining or even being threatened with extinction, from bumblebees in Europe and the United States to fungus weevils in Africa. The most striking decline in vertebrate population was in the tropics in South and Central America, with an 89 percent loss compared to 1970. Freshwater species have also significantly fallen - down 83 percent in that period. Vertebrates include all mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles. And soon 5G cellphone networks will be rolling out all over the world, and that will greatly increase the amount of radiation that we are constantly bombarding our natural environment with. (Source: InfoWars)
16 January 2019 Around 30million more Christians than a year ago suffered from persecution. In total, 245 million faced violence or oppression in 2018, with 73 countries listed as danger zones for Christians. China has been named among the most dangerous places to be a Christian after new laws governing religious expression led to raids and the demolition of scores of churches. At least 50 million people expected to experience some form of repression this year as the government tightens its controls over religious worship. While India has also seen a spate of against ultra-nationalists against non-Hindu minorites. (Source: DailyMail)
Space
January 18, 2019 The list of studies the military's secretive UFO program funded, some were junk. The reports were a real grab bag of research on topics including invisibility, warp drives, dark matter, stargates, fusion reactors, lasers, and more. (Source: TheDrive): http://tinyurl.com/yydzcze5
January 11, 2019 New research suggests that long after our roiling, boiling life-giving star runs out of fuel, it will slowly transform into a cold, dead, super-dense crystal sphere about the size of Earth that will linger like a translucent tombstone for close to eternity. Currently, our Sun is about halfway through the main sequence phase, which means it creates energy by fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. In about 5 billion to 6 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen. Then its core will shrink, and the rest of the star will puff up into a relatively short-lived red giant phase, which will last about 500 million to 1 billion years before it contracts once again. After this contraction, the star can still create energy by fusing helium to create carbon and oxygen. White dwarf stars start off extremely hot, but although they initially radiate enough heat that we can see them in our telescopes, they slowly lose their energy over billions of years. It is not possible to observe crystal structures in white dwarf stars directly, but it is possible to see evidence of the crystallization process. If the stars did not crystallize, they would cool at a steady rate, going from blue to orange to red and losing brightness along a smooth, predictable slope. The used data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope to analyze the color and brightness of 15,000 white dwarf stars within 300 light-years of Earth show an unexpectedly high number of white dwarf stars that seemed stuck in a certain color and brightness region. This pileup, or traffic jam, in the data suggests that at around the same point in the cooling process, the stars simply stop getting colder. The only explanation is that these stars have an extra energy source. As matter crystallizes from a liquid into a solid, it releases energy. As the oxygen and carbon in the star crystallize, they release heat, causing the star to stall its cooling for roughly 2 billion years. white dwarfs eventually resume their cooling. And when the process is complete, they become what are known as black dwarfs - cold crystal spheres that are not detectable with our telescopes because they don’t emit energy. (Source: LATimes)
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