Non-IT News Thread
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Bird populations in US and Canada down 3bn in 50 years
Bird populations in Asia and the US are "in crisis", according to two major studies.
The first concludes there are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada today compared to 1970 - a loss of 29% of North America's birds. The second outlines a tipping point in "the Asian songbird crisis": on the island of Java, Indonesia, more birds may now live in cages than in the wild. Scientists hope the findings will serve as a wake-up call. The two studies are published in the journals Science and Biological Conservation.Wow - that's kinda scary...
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Bird populations in US and Canada down 3bn in 50 years
Bird populations in Asia and the US are "in crisis", according to two major studies.
The first concludes there are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada today compared to 1970 - a loss of 29% of North America's birds. The second outlines a tipping point in "the Asian songbird crisis": on the island of Java, Indonesia, more birds may now live in cages than in the wild. Scientists hope the findings will serve as a wake-up call. The two studies are published in the journals Science and Biological Conservation.Heard about that on WSB this morning.
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SLS: Nasa's giant 'Moon rocket' takes shape
Nasa has finished assembling the main structural components for its largest rocket since the Apollo-era Saturn V.
Engineers at the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans connected the last of five sections that make up the core of the Space Launch System (SLS). The rocket will be used to send an uncrewed Orion craft to the Moon, in a flight expected to launch in 2021. This will pave the way for crewed missions, with a landing in 2024. The last piece of the SLS' 64m (212ft) -tall core stage was the complicated engine section. This will serve as the attachment point for the four powerful RS-25 engines, which are capable of producing two million pounds of thrust (9 meganewtons). The RS-25 engines, built by Sacramento, California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne, are the same ones that powered the now-retired space shuttle orbiter. -
BBC News - Why Greeks question this role model's credentials
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49753214 -
Climate change: Impacts 'accelerating' as leaders gather for UN talks
The signs and impacts of global warming are speeding up, the latest science on climate change, published ahead of key UN talks in New York, says.
The data, compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), says the five-year period from 2014 to 2019 is the warmest on record. Sea-level rise has accelerated significantly over the same period, as CO2 emissions have hit new highs. The WMO says carbon-cutting efforts have to be intensified immediately. The climate statement is a pull-together of the latest science on the causes and growing impacts of unprecedented levels of warming seen in recent years. Recognising that global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees C since 1850, the paper notes they have gone up by 0.2C between 2011 and 2015. -
@mlnews speaking of... central Transylvania which is traditionally a super mild climate, hit 32F on the last day of summer! Totally unheard of there.
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Satellite will gain hi-res view of greenhouse effect
Europe will launch a satellite to obtain a high-resolution view of Earth's greenhouse effect.
The Forum mission will carry a spectrometer to sense the far-infrared radiation coming up off the Earth. It's in this long wavelength portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb energy very efficiently, warming the planet in the process. Remarkably, it's not a region that has been mapped extensively before. This means scientists are missing a number of key features in their climate models, including the detailed workings of some of the feedbacks in the planet's atmosphere that amplify or mitigate warming. These omissions would include the behaviour of certain types of cloud. -
Prehistoric babies fed animal milk in bottles
Prehistoric babies were bottle-fed with animal milk more than 3,000 years ago, according to new evidence.
Archaeologists found traces of animal fats inside ancient clay vessels, giving a rare insight into the diets of Bronze and Iron Age infants.The discovery suggests milk was given to infants to supplement breast feeding and could have contributed to a baby boom.The type of milk is unknown, but goats or cows are likely suspects.This is the first direct evidence for how prehistoric infants were fed, said Dr Julie Dunne of the University of Bristol, adding that the practice could have boosted fertility. "It's so nice to have that window on the past and think about how mothers and how families were dealing with bringing up children several thousand years ago," she told BBC News. -
Giant planet around tiny star 'should not exist'
Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories.
The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form. The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science. "It's exciting because we've wondered for long a time whether giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn can form around such small stars," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study. "I think the general impression had been that these planets just didn't exist, but we couldn't be sure because small stars are very faint, which makes them difficult to study, even though they are much more common than stars like the Sun," he told BBC News. -
Elon Musk upbeat on Starship test flights
The American entrepreneur Elon Musk has given a further update on his Starship and Super Heavy rocket system.
He plans to use the new vehicles to send people to the Moon and Mars, and also to move them swiftly around the Earth. The SpaceX CEO is in the process of building prototypes and plans to start flying them in the coming months. The Mk1 version of his Starship would begin high-altitude tests in the next one to two months, he said. "This is the most inspiring thing I've ever seen," the entrepreneur told an audience gathered at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, facility where the prototype has been assembled. "So this thing is going to take off, fly to 65,000ft, about 20km, and come back and land. So that giant thing, it's really going be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back." -
https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-tv-comes-to-amazon-fire-tv/
Google's live TV streaming service, YouTube TV, is finally available on Amazon Fire devices, effectively ending years of feuding between the two tech giants.
YouTube TV will now be available on Fire TV devices including the second-gen Fire TV Stick, Fire TV Stick 4K, Fire TV Cube, Toshiba and Insignia Fire TV Edition smart TVs, and more.
YouTube TV is a premium live TV streaming service that offers over 70 live channels including locals and an "unlimited" DVR. It's also a winner of CNET's Editors' Choice award.
The addition of YouTube TV on Fire TV follows the YouTube app's inclusion on the service in July of this year. (It was previously subject to a workaround.) Prime Video arrived on Google Chromecast at the same time.
Sure for how long?
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Island reveals rising tide of plastic waste
A remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean has helped reveal the scale of the problem of plastic waste facing our seas.
Some 75% of bottles washed ashore on Inaccessible Island, in the South Atlantic, were found to be from Asia - with most made in China. The researchers said most of the bottles were made recently, suggesting they were being discarded by ships. An estimated 12.7 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans each year. But this figure just covers land-based sources. The team from South Africa and Canada, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said that it had been assumed that most of the debris found at sea was coming from the land. -
BBC News - China anniversary: Hong Kong protester shot by live round
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-49891403 -
BBC News - Russian alcohol consumption down 43%, WHO report says
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49892339 -
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BBC News - Man gored by bison sees date undergo same fate months later
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49898709Some serious dumbassery here.
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Hack strikes Words with Friends and Draw Something, amid claims 218 million players’ details breached
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Former Yahoo engineer admits using his access to steal users’ sexual images
The 34-year-old man targeted accounts of younger women, including friends and colleagues.
A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into thousands of users’ accounts in search of sexually explicit images and videos and other types of private data.
Reyes Daniel Ruiz on Monday admitted to using his access as a Yahoo engineer to compromise about 6,000 user accounts, federal prosecutors said. The engineer, now 34, cracked user passwords and accessed internal Yahoo systems to access the accounts. He told prosecutors he targeted accounts belonging to younger women, including personal friends and work colleagues.
He used his access to the Yahoo accounts to compromise victims’ accounts on other services, including iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, and Dropbox, in search of additional private images and videos. After a former employer observed suspicious account activity, Ruiz admitted to destroying the computer and hard drive he used to store the private data, prosecutors said.
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Mysterious fireball that crashed and burned wasn't a meteor
Something bright came in hot enough to spark several fires in Chile recently, and it looks like it wasn't natural.
Last week, bright, flaming objects were spotted in the sky over the island of Chiloe in southern Chile before reportedly crashing to the ground and starting a series of small fires. Now, after a preliminary investigation, officials from Chile's National Service of Geology and Mining say they've ruled out a disintegrating meteorite as the cause after failing to find any evidence of space rock at seven points where fires were started. So, what are we dealing with here? Just some super-heated space junk reentering the atmosphere or is someone testing their space lasers on Chilean scrub? Technically, we're talking about unidentified flying objects. Yes, UFOs. Although nothing big or well-piloted enough to reopen The X-Files for, it would seem. -
BBC News - How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48859333
