Thanks, Janet! This could happen to anyone taking those meds, and these are prescribed to many people.
Tag: Science
Electric vehicles as grid storage? It’s right around the (model house) corner
October 21, 2024 Ellen Phiddian
Many Australians now sell solar power generated on their rooftops into the grid on sunny days. In a handful of years, it may be possible to do the same thing when it’s dark – with the help of an electric vehicle (EV).
Nascent vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology operates around the idea of EVs with bi-directional chargers: they can charge from power sources, but they can also be used to provide power. EVs could be used as mobile grid storage, with owners charging them on rooftop solar and then either using the power themselves later in the evening, or selling it back to the grid.
At the moment, the technology is rare in Australia, with both technological and economic research still needed to figure out how it will best fit into our energy mix.
Some of that research has just started at a model house in Port Macquarie, on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales.
“If we can get the energy optimisation answer right with vehicle-to-grid technologies, we can avoid unnecessary expansion on the network, and we can help customers minimise their energy bills,” Brad Trethewey, manager of innovation at energy company Essential Energy, tells Cosmos.
Essential Energy has partnered with the CSIRO to trial V2G technology. The trial is running at a mock-home, fitted out with solar panels, batteries, a hot water system, and appliances including a fridge, a dishwasher, a TV and a pool pump.
“In this first phase, we’re looking at how vehicle-to-grid can be technically integrated into the home of the future. We’re doing tests where the vehicle powers a lab for periods of time, and we’re doing scheduled discharge and charge cycles with the vehicle,” says Trethewey.
“The second phase of the test is how we can coordinate the vehicle-to-grid technology, in a more integrated sense, with customers’ appliances and their flexible loads to minimise bills and maximise the use of their renewable energy resources – so, solar.”
The team expects the first phase to finish in late March next year.
“I don’t have an end date for second phase, because we expect the emergence of V2G to have ongoing research needs, even after it’s technically available,” says Trethewey.
While there are currently EVs being made with V2G technology, they’re not yet much use in Australia. Many EVs aren’t sold here with the right hardware or software, and regulations and standards around electricity can’t yet accommodate it.
Part of the work in the trial will be helping to assess how EV and solar owners might best use V2G.
“What is the value proposition? Does the market need to change as a result of vehicle-to-grid capability, or is most of the value in self-consumption – using it for your own energy consumption and needs?” says Trethewey.
Once the second phase of the trial has wrapped, Trethewey says that the team will be interested in seeing how V2G plays out at scale – and in different areas, with different energy mixes.
One way or another, though, he expects bi-directional chargers and energy-storing EVs to become commonplace – soon.
“I think that there’s an inevitability about this. Once vehicle manufacturers produce vehicle-to-grid capability in their cars, cars are going to come with it, and when customers realise the value of that in terms of reducing their energy bills in their house, it’s going to become widespread.”
When might this happen? Trethewey thinks it’s possible before the end of the decade.
“Most vehicle manufacturers are saying they’re going to have some vehicle-to-grid capability in Australia, they’re talking late 2025, early 2026. Now, that doesn’t mean they’ll have it switched on – it just means that they’ll have the vehicles capable for it.
“So the next five years, I think, is probably well within reason.”
Originally published by Cosmos as Electric vehicles as grid storage? It’s right around the (model house) corner
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/vehicle-to-grid-trial/
3 For Science on Friday!
Why did scientists name these new frogs after Star Trek characters?
What sound does a frog make? If you said “croak” or “ribbit” or even “bonk” like the Australian pobblebonk frog, you’d be right. And now, thanks to new research, “Star Trek whistle” is also a correct answer!
Seven newly discovered species of frogs in Madagascar have been named for their unique calls, some of which are similar to whistle-like sound effects used in Star Trek: the “boatswain whistle” and “tricorder” device.
“That’s why we named the frogs after Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, Burnham, and Pike – 7 of the most iconic captains from the sci-fi series,” says Miguel Vences of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, who led the research. (snip-MORE)
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“Stellar volcano” captured in dramatic Hubble images
https://players.brightcove.net/5483960636001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6363356718112 (video on the page; it wouldn’t embed.)
Dramatic and colourful close-ups from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show a binary system of rambunctious stars. See the high-resolution image here.
The system is called R Aquarii. The primary star is an aging red giant more than 400 times heavier than our Sun. Its companion is a burned-out white dwarf.
The red giant pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is nearly 5,000 times brighter than our Sun.
Meanwhile, the white dwarf dances around the red giant. It orbits the giant star every 44 years.
When the white dwarf gets closest to the red giant, its gravity pulls hydrogen gas off the red giant. The material accumulates around the dwarf star and undergoes nuclear fusion. The result is an explosion akin to an enormous nuclear bomb.
Filaments shoot from the dwarf star’s core like a geyser, forming loops and trails of plasma traveling at more than 1.6 million km per hour. (snip-MORE)
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Confirmed: The Sun has reached solar maximum
Representatives from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the international Solar Cycle Prediction panel met on Tuesday and announced that the Sun has reached its solar maximum.
The solar cycle is 11 years. At the height of the cycle, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip and its activity intensifies.
“During solar maximum, the number of sunspots, and therefore, the amount of solar activity, increases,” says Jamie Favors, the director of NASA’s Space Weather Program. “This increase in activity provides an exciting opportunity to learn about our closest star –but also causes real effects at Earth and throughout our solar system.”
Increased solar activity can affect satellites and astronauts in space, as well as communications and navigation systems. (snip-MORE)
Work to focus on engaging communities during the energy transition
(It can’t hurt to put bits like this out into the universe. Somebody’s working on this, and more people ought to. So a nice little discussion of what’s working is appropriate. -A)
October 11, 2024 ARC Laureate Fellows
This Cosmos series on Australian Research Council Laureate Fellows 2024 reflects excellence from world class researchers in Australia.
Chris Gibson is a Senior Professor in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong. For his ARC Fellowship, he is investigating how decarbonisation impacts Australian regions.
Professor Chris Gibson: finding a truce in the climate wars.
Decarbonisation and energy transition are at the sharp edge of a hot political battle. There is a lot of dispute over new technologies like offshore wind, and exactly what mix of energy we need. It’s like a second iteration of the climate wars. But after a decade of stalled policy on climate, we have to embrace the decarbonised future, whether we like it or not. It’s an issue that needs to transcend the political divide.
But we’re faced with a dilemma: we need urgent change, but urgent change rarely occurs, if ever, in a way that is fair. The burdens and benefits of change are not distributed equally across society. And the quicker the change, the more risks there are. Regions can be all too easily left behind.
Geographers think about how substantial change, like this energy transition, affects communities. We think of ourselves as an integrative discipline. We bring together expertise from across environmental science, economics, social geography, legal geography, and from experts who are good on governing transitions. By stitching together insights from all directions, we try to see the bigger picture.
My ARC project is aiming to put together a systematic understanding of what’s happening in decarbonisation, both from the top down, with a nationwide view, and from the ground up, about how people in different regions are responding to change.
We’re putting together a team to look at how decarbonisation hits the ground in different regions, and how it affects different workers, different industries, what kinds of opportunities come out of that, what kinds of changes are needed, how communities and households are responding to the decarbonisation challenge, and how a First Nations’ perspective can lead the way.
Community responses have to be taken seriously. It’s too easy and too convenient to cast aside sceptics as “nimbies” (Not In My Backyard) or selfish or ignorant. If you take the time to hear the diversity of opinions that come from communities, you’ll often find that people are worried about real issues, with valid concerns. Local communities are very knowledgeable about their patch, and have a capacity to understand what kinds of changes are needed. If we can forge a more inclusive process that brings regional perspectives, skills and experience to the forefront, we reduce the risk that regions are left behind. And governments might actually see regional communities as an opportunity rather than a hindrance to change.
A good example is here in the Illawarra, (Coastal New South Wales) where offshore wind has been very controversial in the last year. One of the lessons to be had is to not underestimate the community’s ability to understand what an energy transition means, and not to underestimate the degree of attachment people have to their local places.
The community here is highly knowledgeable about energy. The Illawarra has a workforce with a long history in heavy industry – the number of electricians per capita in the Illawarra must be as high as anywhere in Australia. And people have opinions – it’s not a passive region that knows nothing about the change that’s coming. The task is not purely to convince local people that this is a good thing, but to have a mature conversation with them about the pros and cons.
Who benefits in the energy transition?
There are all kinds of philosophical questions about who benefits, how those benefits are shared, what it means to turn our oceans into a space for energy generation. Some members of the community are asking for a proper conversation, because they don’t feel like they’ve been part of the story so far.
People react unpredictably to change that they see is imposed upon them. Let’s say it’s closing down a coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, or proposing a green hydrogen hub in South Australia – people don’t necessarily assess these as singular proposals that exist outside of everything else in their region or in their lives. People make sense of change in relation to their place, their community, their household, their family.
My work is about putting those people and their households first, and looking at it from their point of view. How does structural change look when we take into account the pressures of cost of living, on housing, on employment? People are grappling with these issues in their everyday lives.
There’s also a real risk in introducing changes that are presented to communities as if they have arrived from elsewhere, as a fait accompli. The direction of the flow of ideas and proposals, how they hit the ground, are a very important part of the process. If a proposal seems to arrive in their backyard from the top down – from a government or a corporation provider – you can get a community offside from the outset.
My work is about setting up different kinds of approaches that recognise that these communities have their own capacities and their own perspectives to offer. What we hope to do in the five years of the ARC Laureate program is develop an evidence base so that we can craft better models of how to manage this change. We’re looking at some of the implementations that have already occurred, tracing where those decarbonisation initiatives are hitting the ground, and looking at different kinds of community reactions – what sorts of processes work better than others in terms of building that relationship with community, as well as what happens when things end up in a more antagonistic situation.
Geography is the study of the relationship between humans and our environment. It has always occupied a slightly slippery position in universities and in public life, because we’re both a science and a social science, because we do this work of integrating perspectives from different areas of knowledge. In fact, we call ourselves all sorts of different things: we’re also environmental managers and coastal managers, policy officers and sustainability experts. It’s a discipline that connects, that fills the gaps. We often find solutions to problems by putting knowledge together from those different perspectives. It’s making these connections that can make a big difference.
As told to Graem Sims
https://cosmosmagazine.com/energise/engaging-communities-during-energy-transition/
Scientists Are Turning Mosquitoes “Trans” So They Can Fight Malaria
New LGBTQ+ insect just dropped. (From A: But is this really trans?)
By Abby Monteil October 8, 2024
From gay polyamorous flamingos to a “half-male, half-female bird” sighting, Mother Nature has proven that she’s pretty damn queer. But sometimes, scientists like to get in on the fun, too. It turns out that some are even using their talents to engineer “trans” mosquitoes (yes, really).
On October 5, the X account @Rainmaker1973 shared a video of a female mosquito attempting to bite a human hand. However, its blood-sucking attempts are thwarted because its proboscis — aka its needle-like mouth — could not break through the skin.
“Using the CRISPR technique, it’s possible to genetically modify mosquitoes by disabling a gene in females, so that their proboscis turns male, making them unable to pierce human skin,” @Rainmaker1973 explained.
Before we go further, a quick science lesson: According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, is a technology that allows scientists to selectively modify DNA.
So why use this technology on mosquitoes? Well, malaria, which kills more than 600,000 people per year, is transmitted to humans by female mosquitoes belonging to the genus Anopheles, which, per the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, encompasses between 30 and 40 mosquito species. According to a 2018 study in the journal Nature Biotechnology, using CRISPR technology on female mosquitoes resulted in egg production reaching the point of “total population collapse” within 7 to 11 generations. In other words, this technique allows scientists to not only ensure that female mosquitoes carrying malaria can’t spread the disease to humans, but that they can’t reproduce in general. This CRISPR-enabled gene editing is just one of several techniques that researchers have used to fight the spread of malaria in humans.
So, sure, in a manner of speaking, scientists are doing their best to curb the spread of malaria by making some mosquitoes “trans.” In addition to being a genetic achievement, @Rainmaker1973’s viral video sharing the news also unsurprisingly inspired some excellent tweets. (see on the page)
She strokin tryna wake it up OMG… hrt no joke,” one X user tweeted.
“Mosquitoes pissing me off so I took out my crispr and gave them gender dysphoria,” another joked.
The past few years have introduced no shortage of queer bugs, from fruit flies who were potentially turned gay by air pollution to cicadas who became hypersexual zombies after being infected with a sexually transmitted fungus. What’s a few more trans mosquitoes?
https://www.them.us/story/mosquitoes-trans-crispr-gene-editing
Space-made next-gen optic fibres touch back down to Earth
October 8, 2024 Imma Perfetto
Next-generation optical fibre manufactured in microgravity aboard the International Space Station has been returned safely to Earth.
Scientists at Adelaide University in South Australia are now comparing the fibres to otherwise identical Earth-made counterparts to confirm whether the space-made product is superior.
It’s thought likely that it is, but the results won’t be known for a couple of months.
The research has already delivered some interesting results: “Seven of the draws went beyond 700 meters, showcasing that it is possible to produce commercial lengths of fibre in space,” says Rob Loughan, CEO of the company that designed the fibre drawing device, Flawless Photonics.
“The longest draw went above 1,141 meters, setting a record for the longest fibre manufactured in space.”
The fibres were made of ZBLAN glass, a substance which has the potential to transmit light 20 times further than traditional silica-based fibre-optic cables.
In an optical fibre, light becomes dimmer and dimmer as it travels along the fibre. Therefore, for example, submarine fibre optics cables require amplifiers about every 100km to boost the light signal to allow it to be transmitted over long distances.
A ZBLAN optical fibre could increase distances between amplifiers, from every 100 km for silica fibres to every 2,000 km.
But this isn’t feasible yet. In practice, ZBLAN fibres perform about 10 times worse than the best silica fibres because the fabrication process introduces defects and impurities, which lower its efficiency at transmitting light.
Professor Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem, and her team at the University of Adelaide’s Australian National Fabrication Facility’s (ANFF) are trying to solve the problem of enhanced impurities and defects in current ZBLAN glass fibres.
“The purity of the glass depends on the purity of the raw material, and it is challenging to make highly pure solid raw materials,” says Ebendorff-Heidepriem. The team is trying to completely remove one of the main reasons the defects form: gravity.
“Gravity here on Earth causes convection … If you heat up something on a hot plate, the liquid is hot at the bottom. That makes the density of the liquid at the bottom become lower, which moves this portion of the liquid up, at the top the liquid becomes cooler, making the density higher, therefore gravity pulls it down, and so on” she explains.
Ebendorff-Heidepriem partnered with Flawless Photonics which designed and operates a fibre drawing device that squeezed all the necessary technology into a 0.8m-long box for the ISS.
In June, the more than 11km of fibre returned to Earth, intact. Now, work is underway at the University of Adelaide and at 5 other organisations around the world to determine how much of an impact gravity has on ZBLAN’s ability to transmit light. They are hoping to complete their analysis by December this year.
“We will see: is it better? Is it worse? Is it the same? And no matter what result we get, I think the biggest outcome is already achieved – we can make commercial lengths of optical fibres in space.”
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/space-fibres-down-to-earth/
Danged Ants! 😏
Catastrophe might have created the first ant farms
October 4, 2024 Ariel Marcy
When an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it caused a mass extinction. Now researchers have evidence that this catastrophe ushered in the invention of agriculture by ants.
“Extinction events can be huge disasters for most organisms, but it can actually be positive for others,” says Ted Schultz, curator of ants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and senior author of the paper. “At the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs did not do very well, but fungi experienced a heyday.”
What’s the link between fungi and ants?
The researchers propose this anti-culture heyday began with a cataclysmic collision that filled the atmosphere with debris and blocked out the sun, halting photosynthesis for years. As plants died en masse, they littered the ground with organic matter.
Fungi proliferated and ants ate the fungi for food. Some ants continued to eat fungi after Earth’s ecosystems rebounded and today more than 250 ant species have adapted and actively create conditions for fungus to thrive.
“Ants have been practicing agriculture and fungus farming for much longer than humans have existed,” says Schultz.
To pinpoint when this symbiotic interaction began, Schultz and colleagues amassed the largest genetic dataset of fungus-farming ants.
They also analysed the genetics of hundreds of fungi species, including those that are farmed by ants and their wild relatives.
Next, the team assembled evolutionary trees for both ants and fungi which revealed that farming ants and their fungus crops have been intertwined for 66 million years.
The data also revealed that “higher” forms of agriculture, where ants and fungi are completely reliant on one another, evolved around 27 million years ago. This coincided with a rapid global cooling event that fractured tropical environments. These changes led to ants cultivating a fungus outside its natural habitat.
“The ants domesticated these fungi in the same way that humans domesticated crops,” says Schultz. “What’s extraordinary is now we can date when the higher ants originally cultivated the higher fungi.”
Like humans, ant agriculturists have dealt with familiar challenges including the problems with monoculture and the trade-offs of selecting for higher food yields.
“We could probably learn something from the agricultural success of these ants over the past 66 million years,” says Schultz.
For Science on Wed.
Some sloths among animals unable to adapt to rapid climate change
A new study warns that sloths living in high-altitude rainforests of South and Central America could face extinction if temperatures there continue to rise according to climatic predictions.
The research, published in PeerJ Life & Environment, suggests that some sloths’ restricted ability to migrate to cooler regions and limited metabolic flexibility make them particularly vulnerable to climate change.
“Sloths are inherently limited by their slow metabolism and unique inability to regulate body temperature effectively, unlike most mammals,” says Dr Rebecca Cliffe, lead researcher of the study from Swansea University and The Sloth Conservation Foundation in the UK.
“Our research shows that sloths, particularly in high-altitude regions, may not be able to survive the significant increases in temperature forecast for 2100.” (snip-MORE)
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Structure of important male contraceptive target finally solved
A team at Monash University in Victoria developing a hormone-free, reversible male contraceptive has now figured out the 3D structure of one of their primary therapeutic targets – the P2X1-purinergic receptor (P2X1).
According to Dr Sab Ventura from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), this has been the main stumbling block that has so far hindered the team from progressing the drug discovery program to the next stage.
“Our primary goal is to develop a male contraceptive pill that is not only hormone-free but also bypasses side effects such as long-term irreversible impacts on fertility, making it suitable for young men seeking contraceptive options,” says Ventura.
In previous research in mice, the team showed that simultaneous inactivation of P2X1 and a second protein, α1A-adrenergic receptor, resulted in male infertility.
“Now we know what our therapeutic target looks like, we can generate drugs that can bind to it appropriately, which totally changes the game,” says Ventura. (snip-MORE)
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River piracy pushing Mount Everest upwards
Mount Everest is tall. In other news, the sky is blue.
But Everest (also called Chomolungma and Sagarmāthā) is taller than it logically should be – towering 238m above the world’s next highest peak, K2, and more than 250m higher than any of its counterparts in the relatively uniform Himalaya range.
Plus, it’s growing at about 2mm a year, faster than the expected rate for the range.
A team of Chinese and UK scientists have now suggested why this is the case.
The researchers think the culprit is a nearby river which “captured” another river 89,000 years ago, causing erosion that made Everest more buoyant.
They’ve published their findings in Nature Geoscience.
The Himalayan peaks get their extraordinary height from the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, causing the Earth’s crust to thicken and the mountain range to push upwards.
“An interesting river system exists in the Everest region,” says co-author Dr Jin-Gen Dai, from China University of Geosciences.
The team used numerical modelling to see how the river changed over time. They found that, about 89,000 years ago, the Arun river “captured” another nearby river.
This event, referred to as “river piracy”, happens when a river diverts its course and takes up the discharge of another river or stream.
“Our research shows that as the nearby river system cuts deeper, the loss of material is causing the mountain to spring further upwards,” says co-author Adam Smith, a PhD student at University College London, UK.
The team estimates that the river piracy has made Everest between 15 and 50m higher than it would otherwise be.
It’s also made neighbouring peaks, Lhotse and Makalu, unusually tall. These are the 4th and 5th highest mountains in the world, respectively. (snip-MORE)
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Science fiction health technology a step closer
It’s not the famous Star Trek tricorder but it’s close: researchers have developed a hand-held scanner that can generate highly detailed 3D images of body parts in almost real time.
The technology can accurately image blood vessels up to 15mm deep in human tissue, which the researchers say could help to diagnose conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis.
“We’ve come a long way with photoacoustic imaging in recent years, but there were still barriers to using it in the clinic,” says Paul Beard of University College London (UCL), UK, corresponding author of the new Nature Biomedical Engineering paper.
“The breakthrough in this study is the acceleration in the time it takes to acquire images, which is between 100 and 1,000 times faster than previous scanners.
“This speed avoids motion-induced blurring, providing highly detailed images of a quality that no other scanner can provide. It also means that rather than taking 5 minutes or longer, images can be acquired in real time, making it possible to visualise dynamic physiological events.
“These technical advances make the system suitable for clinical use for the first time, allowing us to look at aspects of human biology and disease that we haven’t been able to before.” (snip-MORE)
2 For Science, on Monday
Each of these struck my fancy, so I’m sharing.
Could we hit the “pause button” on human embryo development?
September 27, 2024 Imma Perfetto
The mechanisms that allow some mammals to pause the development of their young inside the womb also seem work in human cells, according to a fascinating new study published in the journal Cell.
Biologists discovered they could induce a dormant state in human cells by decreasing the activity of the mTOR signaling pathway, which they previously showed is a major regulator of this process in mice.
They triggered this dormant state not in human embryos, but in human pluripotent stem cells and stem-cell based models known as blastoids, which mimic the blastocyst stage of embryonic development at about 5 days post-fertilisation. (snip)
Until now it was unclear whether diapause could be triggered in humans.
“The mTOR pathway is a major regulator of growth and developmental progression in mouse embryos,” says co-senior author Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Germany.
“When we treated human stem cells and blastoids with an mTOR inhibitor we observed a developmental delay, which means that human cells can deploy the molecular machinery to elicit a diapause-like response.”
Cells in this dormant state show reduced cell division, slower development and a decreased ability to attach to the uterine lining. The ability to enter this dormant stage seems to be restricted to the blastocyst stage of development. (snip-MORE)
Explosive energy-dense material made from air (with plasma)
September 29, 2024 Ellen Phiddian
Chemists have made an extremely energy-dense, environmentally friendly fuel out of nitrogen.
They’ve done it by employing one of chemistry’s favourite hobbies, bullying nitrogen n (N2) into weird structures. An explosion occurred, but it was a small one.
The Chinese team has successfully made the element adopt a diamond-like structure, called cubic gauche nitrogen (cg-N) and importantly made it without extremely high pressures. In fact, they managed it at standard atmospheric pressure.
They’ve published their triumph in Science Advances.
Pure nitrogen-based molecules have drawn interest from chemists because they can release a tremendous amount of energy when they decompose. (snip-MORE)
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
Scottie's Playtime 