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Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology / Re: What animal made this footprint?

« on: Today at 16:30:33 »

It looks like it could be a foot print, but it could easily be an erosion effect, so a lot more data is needed.  Where was the rock found?  What kind of stone is it?  What was the age of the strata it was found?

The rock was found on Chesil bank some years ago, to me it appears to have flint like qualities. As the bank is an accumulation I could not tell you the strata it had come from, as you will undoubtedly be aware it is the jurassic Coast. I would be interested to learn how erosion could cause the shape.

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Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology / Re: What animal made this footprint?

« on: Today at 12:34:57 »

…plus there appears to be an 'L' under neath the middle toe, so it must be a left foot.

Ha ha 

Thanks Colin, sometimes I think my humour goes unappreciated😀

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Technology / Re: What Question Could You Ask To Determine Sentience Of An AI ?

« on: Today at 12:32:22 »

It's highly likely ai has surpassed some animal life forms in consciousness. I doubt very much the average insect has a cognitive function beyond robotic.

Humor is the biggest sign of higher sentience, ask it if it had a nice day at work,  whether it fancies going out or if they have the favour of the sun god.

 Ot that humour is absolute, it may just not understand, may not like my jokes or delivery or it may be preprogrammed to laugh. Humour though questions consciousness, that is the nature of it.

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Technology / Re: Are solar panels worthwhile?

« on: Today at 10:56:48 »

I should think Australia is not far from being carbon neutral?...just like Canada

Australia is one of the highest CO2 emitters in the Western world (per capita), at 17 tons per capita per year
- Behind Canada at 18.6
- But more than USA at 15.5 tones

This is due to:
- Base load is mostly burning coal
- One of the largest states (Victoria) uses brown coal, which is saturated with water; the water must be driven off before you can get it to burn - very inefficient!
- Political backlash against nuclear power over many years (even though Australia exports a lot of uranium ore)
- A carbon tax implemented in 2011 was quickly reversed by a change of government
- It is a fairly flat and dry country, so not much hydro power
- Far from plate boundaries, so not much geothermal power
- Neglected transmission infrastructure, so it is hard to feed in renewables
- The fossil fuel industry has a lot of money from exports, which funds their vigorous campaign to keep burning fossil fuels locally.
- NIMBY: Even if most people want clean power, everyone says "Not In My Back Yard"!

See: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/

It's a big carbon sink though Evan for the populace, just like Canada. I would think both countries are fairly neutral.

If it wanted it could make a fortune selling solar power to Indonesia, malaysia and the phillipines. It could also make carbon neutral solar panels rather than the ones we buy from China. But then again you have such big back yards it would suffer much resistance. Then if Australia powered itself from solar it could start charging the states carbon credits and get filthy rich just like Elon musk.

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Technology / Re: Are solar panels worthwhile?

« on: Today at 08:26:17 »

answer is Yes.
Ref: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=84600.0

To produce enough solar panels to generate the electricity for the uks current usage would require somewhere in the region of 1 billion tonnes of co2, for all our usage that figure is at 10 billion . 

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Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology / Re: What animal made this footprint?

« on: Today at 06:45:52 »

Because of the shape of the indent, the way the toes protrue into the shape the bulge at the edges. I have included more photos. What else could it be? Teeth or horns seem unlikely, plus there appears to be an 'L' under neath the middle toe, so it must be a left foot.
IMG_20220629_065130.jpg (519.3 kB . 1636x1612 - viewed 114 times)

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Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology / What animal made this footprint?

« on: Yesterday at 22:33:18 »

IMG_20220628_223204.jpg (603.07 kB . 1782x1447 - viewed 182 times)

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COVID-19 / Re: How could we say if omicron variants are intrinsically less pathogenic?

« on: 27/06/2022 10:18:13 »

I would say it is an individual thing.

 Someone who I know of works as an ambulance dispatcher organiser in an A&E department. He has had corona three times, the first 2 times he barely noticed it, the 3rd time he had a massive reaction and felt awful.

On the other hand my brothers family had corona last Christmas and felt awful and recently required it with a few mild symptoms.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 26/06/2022 15:14:25 »

Indeed, it may all come down to quarantine. European invaders just wanted to get on the land, with all their agues and poxes, but the port authorities insisted than anyone travelling east across the Atlantic should have a clean bill of health before disembarking.

At very least then the invader and colonists should have been blighted in a similar fashion to the native populations, but as mentioned previously, cortez did not suffer in a similar fashion to montezuma.

The gene pool  theory looks most likely alan, as in the case of gengis Kahn, but over millenniums. If the king and his issue take 1000 wives each for many thousand years that would create a very narrow genetic group.

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Technology / Re: Are solar panels worthwhile?

« on: 26/06/2022 12:06:19 »

Whilst we are diverting towards money it is worth noting that the permitted price of mains electricity in the UK is linked to the current wholesale price of gas, not the actual cost of generating electricity.

Right now, 80% of demand is being met by non-gas generation, so wind, solar and nuclear generators are profiting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Red/green color blindness?

Many solar producers are producing their highest amounts, yet the feed in tarrifs are around 2.5p a kwh. I have a feeling strip mining coal is about as cheap as you will get elsewhere. The carbon cost though and the environmental costs are great.

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Technology / Re: Are solar panels worthwhile?

« on: 26/06/2022 11:51:36 »

Apparently one contributor to the problem has been the Green party; looking for excess purity, they refused to fund gas-fired generators to be backup supply.
- I thought most people realized that gas is going to be an important bridging power source as we reduce coal consumption, but we still need to meet peak-hour demand.

I should think Australia is not far from being carbon neutral? Its a big place just like Canada, but has few people. In the current economic situation coal is a fantastic fallback.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 26/06/2022 07:13:56 »

(disease) spread through carriers who where immune

I think there are 2 different ideas mixed up there:
- People who are immune have overcome the disease, and will not spread the disease
- Carriers are people who have not overcome the disease, but in lingers on in a chronic condition. They can certainly spread the disease.

For example,  the adult sailors who initially explored a new land did not carry smallpox, because it was endemic in Europe, and they were all immune.
- However, later settlers took babies (who were not immune), and smallpox could circulate on a ship among the non-immune children, carrying smallpox to new countries.
- This caused a problem when doctors wanted to carry a milder version of smallpox to the Americas, for use in "variolation" (a precursor to vaccination). So they drafted young orphans who had never suffered smallpox, and transferred smallpox from one to the next, in a chain stretching across the Atlantic.
- Later, bottles of dried smallpox blister were carried to North America, and used to infect blankets, which were given to the native Americans. One soldier who had seen this done in North America later came to the new colony in Australia - followed by an outbreak of smallpox among Australian aborigines.

So are ebola survivors not immune? Survivors as you put it have been known to pass on disease months or years later.

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Technology / Re: Are solar panels worthwhile?

« on: 26/06/2022 07:11:11 »

Everyone talks about cost, they never talk about the profit. If you install solar panels you're virtually guaranteed to save money, they typically pay for themselves in 5-10 years. The best angles to place them in the UK are usually about 30-40 degrees to the horizontal, facing south east and/or south west. That gives you electricity in the mornings and evenings when you need it (mainly in spring, summer and autumn). The solar electricity costs about 6p/kWh, and it saves you spending ~27p/kWh on electricity.

It was intentionally started as a thread on carbon rather than money. I accept that at present solar can be reasonably profitable, in a similar way electric cars are cheaper to fuel but there are many hidden charges to the average IC engine car, such as road tax fuel duty vat. In carbon terms fully electric cars and IC engine cars are the same in carbon terms to fuel, but the electric car having a higher carbon footprint. Hybrid cars are obviously the best option.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 24/06/2022 23:48:41 »

I say again why did the Americas not spread diseases to Europe, were they disease free?

I think it is partly due to which group had the ocean-going ships.
- Europeans had the ships, and crossed the ocean from Europe to the Americas. They took various European endemic diseases with them (to which they were immune), and deposited them in a land which had no immunity.
- If Pre-Columbian Americans had crossed the Atlantic to Europe, carrying their endemic diseases, they may have managed to spread American diseases in Europe (if they weren't sunk by cannons first).

In fact, Columbus did take some Caribbean native back to Europe, but he would have taken the good-looking ones, not the sick and diseased.
- And they would have been quarantined and checked by doctors before they were paraded before the King of Spain.

The European plagues should have occoured larger on, but they did not and cortez should not have has such an easy time of it.

Ships where known to be disease carriers, many lower class sailors died on voyages from disease which is primarily why most people where so unwilling to become sailors. The quarantine of ships though should not have prevented a later spread through carriers who where immune.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 24/06/2022 22:02:17 »

Eurasia was genetically very diverse and had suffered innumerable plagues and pestilences by the time Columbus left these shores, so what was left of the population (after a very high rate of perinatal and infant deaths) was fairly resistant and understood some methods of quarantine and treatment for the diseases they exported. But they didn't export the treatment.

There is no reason to doubt the genetic diversity of the americas, the fertility seemed reasonable. Plagues are also likely to limit diversity, only 10 percent of people are immune to HIV, probably related to each other in some way, a HIV pandemic would severely limit diversity. I would imagine diseases spreading in the Americas pre columbus too, similarly to Europe.

I say again why did the Americas not spread diseases to Europe, where they disease free? Is there a scientific basis to sacrificing people to the sun god atop a pyramid to protect your populace.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 24/06/2022 07:58:16 »

Plenty of local infections, just the Europeans had so many new ones, and a population that constantly churned through new variants. The American continent, due to isolation for many centuries, and limited trade, had come to homeostasis with the native disease pool, but this new collection was going to be hard to counter, simply as they had no real selection previously for them.

Logic would dictate that what Eurasia experienced with disease in their isolation the Americas would likewise have done. Are you saying that the Americas where a disease mutation free area after their isolation?

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 23/06/2022 23:17:52 »

I would say the ones that went back to Europe were finding a very wide range of hosts, all with large exposures to other diseases, so well prepared immune wise to a novel infection. Other way a long isolated population got a single exposure to a massive collection of diseases, all of them new to them, and with a population that was going to be more or less homogenous, so a vunerability would be present in many people to any disease.

Then add to this a deliberate spreading of disease by the settlers and governments later on, to get rid of what they regarded as a pest, and you can see why the native North American polulations were wiped out. Remember it is still less than a century ago that there was a payment for scalps on the statute books in a lot of places in the USA, and people claiming them as well.

Are you suggesting no diseases abounded in the Americas?

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 23/06/2022 00:11:52 »

Whilst the gene pool theory is plausible, i do not know whether it is credible. Gengis kahn is alleged to be the y chromosone of 1 in  200 men so if such practices occoured in the Americas over millennium, I suppose the gene pool could be problematic.

Neither of these answers state why a similar  effect did not occour though from native American diseases to the Afro eurasian world.

 

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New Theories / Are the arms of the T Rex small to help it run?

« on: 22/06/2022 23:56:44 »

Now I am not a dinosaur scientist (NON AVIAN BEFORE A HELPFUL SOLE FEELS THE NECESSITY TO HIGHLIGHT THE FACT THAT DINOSAUR ILK DID SURVIVE THE YUKATAN PENINSULA IMPACTOR EVENT AND SUBSEQUENT EXTINCTION PROCESS AS AVIAN DINOSAURS OR "BIRDS" AS THEY ARE CALLED IN COMMON SPEAK)  but the tyrannosaurus Rex has long been mocked for having diddy arms and many theories to why have abounded as to why, such as the theory it is to prevent injury.

It is my theory that the T Rex and his peers developed small arms due to smaller arms facilitating higher speeds when in locomotion, thus natural selection breeding a small limbed machine the retained clawed upper  limbs for grasping prey.

The spinosaurus was known for having large arms, but being an aquatic creature it is known to have had diddy legs and a paddle like tail, having a similar appearance to a duck crocodile, but with arms. It would not have needed to run fast as it was an aquatic creature. The T Rex and friends would have needed to hunt on land, other  creatures, probably quick creatures.

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Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Monkeypox: Could it be similar to cowpox, and just a mild variant of smallpox?

« on: 22/06/2022 23:41:44 »

Bored chemist, I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes there is no deliberate drive in any direction, all changes arise from random transcription errors and a couple of base changes could alter characteristics dramatically. What I am saying is that over time the characteristics that include high infectivity+minimal host damage will be most favoured from simple evolutionary principles. A small number of our common cold viruses are corona viruses and it is thought that these may have been similar to covid originally and have evolved to be less pathogenic. However I am just saying what I think is probable, it could still all go pear-shaped .

Mutations have largely been touted as toward the more transmissible less lethal end of the spectrum. I am no expert but that is statistically the progress they make. As for the evolutionary path they take the lethality is not a factor I would think is most divisive, as seen with monkey pox a disease that does not cripple the host or have visible symptoms spreads better than one where the victim is a sickly invilid with repulsive pustules on their face. As to why they evolve to less lethal, I am unsure, smallpox aids etc do not seem to have followed this path.