Group items tagged

About 70% of agricultural methane comes from enteric fermentation – chemical reactions in the stomachs of cows and other grazing animals as they break down plants. The animals burp out most of this methane and pass the rest as flatulence.

A 2015 study suggested that using seaweed as an additive to cattle’s normal feed could reduce methane production, but this research was done in a laboratory, not in live animals.

If these findings can be scaled up and commercialized, they could transform cattle production into a more economically and environmentally sustainable industry.

Democrats have turned to an obscure procedural tool in an attempt to undo the Trump administration’s rollback of an Obama-era regulation on methane, a potent greenhouse gas released by oil and gas operations.

“Methane standards are one of the most important ways to address an important source of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute significantly to climate change, and the Trump administration’s weakening of those standards was a dagger in the heart of efforts to address the climate crisis,”

The Congressional Review Act is a 1996 law that gives Congress the power to nullify any major regulation finalized within the final 60 legislative days of a president’s term.

SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.

Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.

for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.

There's a great Louis C.K. routine in which he describes getting flustered by his daughter's incessant question—"why?—to everything he says. "You don't even know who the fuck you are at the end of the conversation," he joked. That's basically what psychologists at the University of Illinois discovered in their research on political convictions. They found that if you just ask a highly partisan person "why" three times, hoping to clarify their stances, they tend to drift into politically moderate territory. "We used the ground zero mosque as a particularly polarizing issue," says University of Illinois professor Jesse Preston. "People feel strongly about it generally one way or the other." But they felt much less strongly about the proposed mosque near grounds zero when asked why they held such strong beliefs three times.

We observed that liberals and conservatives became more moderate in their attitudes. After this very brief task that just put them in this abstract mindset, they were more willing to consider the point of view of the opposition." [University of Illinois at Urbana Champaig

Astronomers recently announced that there could be an astonishing 20 billion Earthlike planets in the Milky Way

How abundant life actually is, however, hinges on one crucial factor: given the right conditions and the right raw materials,

what is the mathematical likelihood that life will actually would arise?

the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.

Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.

Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.

On the night before Halloween in 1938, a strange story crackled over radios across the United States. An announcer interrupted the evening’s regular programming for a “special bulletin,” which went on to describe an alien invasion in a field in New Jersey, complete with panicked eyewitness accounts and sounds of gunfire. The story was, of course, fake, a dramatization of The War of The Worlds, the science-fiction novel published by H. G. Wells in 1898. But not all listeners knew that. The intro to the segment was quite vague, and those who tuned in a few minutes into the show found no suggestion that what they were hearing wasn’t true.

The exact nature of the reaction of these unlucky listeners has been debated in the decades since the broadcast. Some say thousands of people dashed out of their homes and into the streets in terror, convinced the country was under attack by Martians. Others say there was no such mass panic. Regardless of the actual scale of the reaction, the event helped cement an understanding that would later be perpetuated in science-fiction television shows and films: Humans, if and when they encounter aliens, probably aren’t going to react well.

But what if the extraterrestrial life we confronted wasn’t nightmarish and intelligent, as it’s commonly depicted, but rather microscopic and clueless?

A bizarre tentacled microbe discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean may help explain the origins of complex life on this planet and solve one of the deepest mysteries in biology, scientists reported on Wednesday.Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn how it happened.

The new species, called Prometheoarchaeum, turns out to be just such a transitional form, helping to explain the origins of all animals, plants, fungi — and, of course, humans. The research was reported in the journal Nature.

Species that share these complex cells are known as eukaryotes, and they all descend from a common ancestor that lived an estimated two billion years ago.Before then, the world was home only to bacteria and a group of small, simple organisms called archaea. Bacteria and archaea have no nuclei, lysosomes, mitochondria or skeletons