Astronomy Picture of the Day

First, peace to all, and make it a good International Day of Peace. Next, the Autumnal/Spring Equinox is tomorrow morning at 7:44 AM USCDT/whatever time it is where you are. Here’s a beautifully peaceful photo from NASA’s Photo of the Day:

2024 September 21

Sunrise Shadows in the Sky
Image Credit & Copyright: Emili Vilamala

Explanation: The defining astronomical moment of this September’s equinox is at 12:44 UTC on September 22, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving south in its yearly journey through planet Earth’s sky. That marks the beginning of fall for our fair planet in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere, when day and night are nearly equal around the globe. Of course, if you celebrate the astronomical change of seasons by watching a sunrise you can also look for crepuscular rays. Outlined by shadows cast by clouds, crepuscular rays can have a dramatic appearance in the twilight sky during any sunrise (or sunset). Due to perspective, the parallel cloud shadows will seem to point back to the rising Sun and a place due east on your horizon on the equinox date. But in this spectacular sunrise skyscape captured in early June, the parallel shadows and crepuscular rays appear to converge toward an eastern horizon’s more northerly sunrise. The well-composed photo places the rising Sun just behind the bell tower of a church in the town of Vic, province of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Tomorrow’s picture: Equinox in the City

“Scuba-diving” lizards use bubble to breathe underwater

I thought this would be cute to post for a science article, and now that I’m getting it done, I’m thinking Scottie posted video about these little guys, a few months or so back. I hope this isn’t a boring duplicate. Earlier it didn’t hit me, but now at bedtime, the photo is ringing a vague bell. Still, it’s really cute for a Friday morning, so enjoy the side eye from the anole being called a chicken nugget.

September 18, 2024, Ariel Marcy

Researchers have found a type of lizard – referred to as the chicken nugget of the forest – that can hide underwater thanks to a special bubble they produce around their nostrils.

Details of the scuba-diving lizards are published in Biology Letters.

Image of blue-gray lizard standing underwater with large bubble emerging from its nostrils. — A water anole produces a special bubble over its nostrils to breathe underwater. Credit: Lindsey Swierk.

For animals that have adapted to live on land, air-based breathing limits the amount of time they can survive underwater.

Many invertebrates, including species of beetles and spiders, are known to use bubbles of air to extend the amount of time they can spend underwater. These bubbles allow air-breathing animals to inhale previously exhaled air and take in additional oxygen. This behaviour is called rebreathing, inspired by the scuba technology of the same name.

Until recently, there were no known examples of vertebrates using bubbles to rebreathe underwater. In 2021, Lindsey Swierk, an assistant research professor at Binghamton University in New York in the USA, and her colleagues documented rebreathing in several species of Anolis lizards.

One such species, the water anole (Anolis aquaticus), is a semi-aquatic lizard that lives near streams in the forests of southern Costa Rica.

“Anoles are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest. Birds eat them, snakes eat them. So, by jumping in the water, they can escape a lot of their predators,” says Swierk. “We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer.”

The question remains whether the bubble over the water anole’s nostril functionally extended the amount of time these lizards could hide underwater.

To test this, Swierk and coauthors applied a bubble-impairing substance to the skin of one group of lizards.

“Lizard skin is hydrophobic. Typically, that allows air to stick very tightly to the skin and permits this bubble to form,” said Swierk. “But when you cover the skin with an emollient, air no longer sticks to the skin surface, so the bubbles can’t form.”

Swierk’s team then measured how long the control group stayed underwater compared to the bubble-impaired group. They found that the control group stayed underwater 32% longer on average.

“This is significant because this is the first experiment that truly shows adaptive significance of bubbles. Rebreathing bubbles allow lizards to stay underwater longer. Before, we suspected it – we saw a pattern – but we didn’t actually test if it served a functional role.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/animals/scuba-diving-lizards-breathe-bubble/

Van Gogh painting mirrors real atmospheric physics

September 18, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

(One of the teachers with whom I worked had a beautiful tattoo of this painting on her inner wrist. She said it gave her strength. I need to send this to her, as she tutors STEAM aside from classroom work, and this is her top favorite painting.)

Scientists have peered at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting and discovered it displays a startling resemblance to real atmospheric turbulence.

To see stars, one needs clear skies. But just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean there aren’t intricate patterns of air movement above us on a clear night.

A paper published in Physics of Fluids, suggests that van Gogh had an “intuitive” understanding of this while making his famous painting in 1889.

A Chinese and French team analysed the brush strokes in The Starry Night, aiming to see how similar they were to real atmospheric movements.

The masterpiece has been the subject of several atmospheric studies before, with contradictory conclusions, but the researchers say they’re the first to look at all of the painting’s whirls and eddies.

They looked at the 14 main swirls in the painting, and compared these with theories on energy and turbulent flows in the atmosphere.

“The scale of the paint strokes played a crucial role,” says author Associate Professor Yongxiang Huang, a researcher in fluid dynamics at Xiamen University, China.

“With a high-resolution digital picture, we were able to measure precisely the typical size of the brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories.”

Cropped and annotated sections of van gogh's the starry night — The authors measured the whirling brush strokes in van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” along with variances in brightness of the paint colours, to see how closely they reflected real atmospheric physics. There were several matches between the painting and fluid dynamics, suggesting van Gogh had an “intuitive” understanding of these concepts. Credit: Yinxiang Ma

As well as brush stroke size, the researchers also examined the “relative luminance” of paint colours used in the painting’s swirls.

They found that the picture aligned with a theory of turbulence called Kolmogorov’s Law, which predicts atmospheric movement based on measured inertia.

The changes in brightness reflect a process called Batchelor’s scaling, which describes how fluids diffuse at smaller scales.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” says Huang.

“Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/van-gogh-starry-night-atmosphere/

Watch: GOP Ohio AG gets testy after being fact-checked live on CNN

https://www.rawstory.com/dave-yost-cnn-interview/

Brianna Keilar interviews Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (Screen cap via CNN

Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost grew testy on Monday when CNN host Brianna Keilar fact-checked him for promoting false claims about Haitian immigrants.

During an interview about bomb threats that have been leveled against schools in Springfield, Ohio in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s attacks on the community there, Keilar asked Yost about his own role in helping Trump advance false claims about immigrants kidnapping and eating residents’ pets.

Keilar pointed out that Springfield Mayor Rob Rue has said that local police have investigated and found no evidence to back up claims that Haitian immigrants in the city are eating either pets or local wildlife.

“Do you think the mayor is lying?” she asked him.

Yost dodged the question and said that most of his social media posts about Haitian immigrants in Springfield have been on the “real impacts” they’ve had rather than the fictional pet-eating impacts.

ALSO READ: Scientific American magazine backs Harris with second endorsement in 179-year history

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“My tweet was about the media’s disregard for citizen reports, citizen interaction with their government,” he said.

Keilar then pressed him for more information about these “citizen reports” and Yost said he was referring to “several videotaped comments that were made by citizens regarding a variety of things going on in Springfield.”

Yost added that these comments from citizens “are not enough to make a case” against Haitian immigrants, and he then pivoted to saying that too many children attending school in Springfield don’t speak English.

Keilar then asked Yost why he and other Republicans don’t simply talk about the strain on local resources that migrant communities are placing on public services instead of telling lurid and false tales about pet eating, especially “when you are supposed to be a very serious law enforcement individual.”

Yost took exception to this statement.

“Implying, of course, that you think I’m not [serious],” he replied indignantly.

Earth will have new “mini moon”, length of a bus, for 2 months

September 16, 2024 Evrim Yazgin Cosmos science journalist

An asteroid is approaching, but it won’t crash into Earth. Instead, it’ll be our planet’s little companion for 2 months before continuing on its merry way.

Asteroid approaching earth, computer artwork — Asteroid approaching Earth, computer artwork. Credit: SCIEPRO / Science Photo Library / Getty Images Plus.

2024 PT₅ is about 11m wide. The asteroid was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in South Africa on 7 August.

In a study published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS, a pair of asteroid dynamics researchers calculated the asteroid’s size, speed and path. The researchers determined the asteroid would complete a single orbit around Earth over 53 days before being flung back into outer space.

The asteroid will start its orbit of Earth on 29 September. The bus-sized “mini moon” is scheduled to depart on 25 November.

Many asteroids follow a similar journey, falling into partial or full elliptical orbits around our planet as they pass by. One such “quasi-moon” is an asteroid discovered last year which astronomers believe has been orbiting Earth for more than 2,000 years.

Other quasi-moons make much briefer visits, like the 5m 2006 RH₁₂₀ which orbited Earth for about a year and 2020 CD₃ which was a mini companion of our planet for several years before leaving us in May 2020.

The researchers also believe they know from where 2024 PT₅ is joining us based on its trajectory.

“Such orbital elements are consistent with those of the Arjunas, a sparsely resonant population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in a secondary asteroid belt found surrounding the path followed by the Earth–Moon system,” they write.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/mini-moon-asteroid-2-months/

From MPS:

The Morning Jam

Ephemera

Fully recovered from the effects of my multi-vacs, I took Corky out on a nice, long walk while it was cool in the morning on Thursday. Of course there were numerous species of pollen blowing around, but I was bulletproof because I use Allegra . Anyway, my sinuses have been protesting since then, but that’s a thing I’ve always had, anyway, so it is what it is. Corky was quite happy, and is looking forward to doing it again tomorrow. Yes, she told me so. (She didn’t. I just know. She’ll go on a walk any time, anywhere, no matter what else she may be doing.)

I went to the store to stock back up today, and I found a thing. It was an irresistible thing, and I love it, so I bought it. She’s a she, and her name is Millie. That’s her up above. Closer to the season, I’ll put her in the front window, but right now, we’re enjoying her in our front room. She seems to enjoy being photographed.

It’s been one heck of a week. A debate that was almost fun, some stochastic terrorism agged on and on and yet further on by Maga, and good news, too, some of which got posted. I had a few other things up to post, but the puter thought it was too hot, shut down, and lost my tabs (at least one of which must have been too busy. Time for maintenance on the puter, probably.) Anyway, I’ve got a few posts up anyway, and whatever I didn’t will either come around again, or be way outdated when I recall what they were. My apologies, but get a look at Millie, why don’t ya? 😀🦴💀

Reblog from Octoberfarm:

Germany Laughs at Trump With the Rest of The World

September 13, 2024

Germany is denying an assertion made by former President Donald Trump during the presidential debate Tuesday about the country’s renewable energy industry.

“You believe in things like we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to be strong, whether you like it or not,” Trump said in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “Germany tried that, and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants.”

But on Wednesday, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office decided to issue a rebuttal, echoing the former president’s language.

“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables,” the Federal Foreign Office shared on X. “And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest.”

The German Foreign Office also poked at Trump for another comment he made during the debate.

“PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs,”

https://octoberfarm.blogspot.com/2024/09/germany-laughs-at-trump-with-rest-of.html

Hey, Any Good Environmental News Lately? There IS?

Thanks Joe Biden.

DOKTOR ZOOM SEP 14, 2024

The presidential election has turned into a contest between a capable, smart woman who emphasizes what Americans can achieve when they work together for the common good, and a sundowning old racist creep who would be pathetic if he weren’t so dangerously close to returning to power.

In case you’re wondering what the difference looks like, compare the hate and division the old racist creep is spreading with some recent announcements from President Joe Biden’s administration, nearly all of them about programs funded by one or another of Biden’s big legislative packages. Just a little reminder of why elections matter, and of the legacy that Kamala Harris is committed to building on. For, y’know, the people.

Lots of news-go read! 🌞

https://open.substack.com/pub/wonkette/p/hey-any-good-environmental-news-lately?r=1pk2l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email