Daniel Salzler No. 1158
EnviroInsight.org Six Items July 15, 2022
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- Predictions From Your Toilet Bowl. Did you know that you can predict the weather just by taking a quick glimpse into your toilet bowl. Teach your children this, too!
Flush your toilet. The bowl refills with nice clean water. Note the fill line. With a high barometric
pressure, you will observe the water in the bowl is lower than “normal”. The high pressure is pushing down on the water in the bowl. This translates to dry, sunny skies.
If the water in the bowl fills higher than “normal”, you will know there is a low barometric pressure. Less pressure pushing down on the water means a higher fill level. This translates to a weather pattern that may include wind, dust, and rain.
Keep written records and see how accurate this actually can be. Source: Editor
2. Birds Warned Of Food Shortages By Neighbor Birds Change Physiology And Behavior To Prepare
Date:July 5, 2022
Source:n Oregon State University
Summary:Songbirds learning from nearby birds that food supplies might be growing short respond by changing their physiology as well as their behavior, research shows.
If you have a bird feeder, this is not news to you!
Songbirds learning from nearby birds that food supplies might be growing short respond by changing their physiology as well as their behavior, research by the Oregon State University College of Science shows.
After receiving social information from food-restricted neighbors for three days, the red crossbills in the study raised their pace of consumption, increased their gut mass and maintained the size of the muscle responsible for flight when their own eating opportunities were subsequently limited to two short feeding periods per day.
Findings of the study by OSU’s Jamie Cornelius, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that birds can use social information about food shortages to effect an adaptive advantage for survival.
“This is an entirely new form of physiological plasticity in birds and builds on prior work showing that social cues during stress can actually change how the brain processes stressors,” said Cornelius, assistant professor of integrative biology.
Cornelius, an ecophysiologist, looks at the mechanisms that wild animals,particularly songbirds, use as they cope with unpredictable and extreme events in their environment, including fluctuations in food availability. Her research combines natural history, endocrinology and biotelemetry to probe for a better understanding of what limits an animal’s fitness under difficult conditions
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“Animals have all kinds of strategies for dealing with challenging environments, ranging from seasonal avoidance strategies like hibernation or migration to behaviors like caching or altered foraging activity,” she said. “Physiological adjustments in metabolic rate, digestive capacity and energy reserves can sometimes accompany behavioral changes, but those things can take time to execute. That means unpredictable environmental conditions are particularly challenging for many animals.”
Cornelius showed in earlier research that a red crossbill with a food-restricted neighbor will secrete higher than usual levels of the stress hormone corticosterone during its own food-stress periods and also undergo brain activity changes that prepare the bird to respond more strongly to the challenge.
Cornelius, an ecophysiologist, looks at the mechanisms that wild animals,particularly songbirds, use as they cope with unpredictable and extreme events in their environment, including fluctuations in food availability. Her research combines natural history, endocrinology and biotelemetry to probe for a better understanding of what limits an animal’s fitness under difficult conditions.
“Animals have all kinds of strategies for dealing with challenging environments, ranging from seasonal avoidance strategies like hibernation or migration to behaviors like caching or altered foraging activity,” she said. “Physiological adjustments in metabolic rate, digestive capacity and energy reserves can sometimes accompany behavioral changes, but those things can take time to execute. That means unpredictable environmental conditions are particularly challenging for many animals.”
Cornelius showed in earlier research that a red crossbill with a food-restricted neighbor will secrete higher than usual levels of the stress hormone corticosterone during its own food-stress periods and also undergo brain activity changes that prepare the bird to respond more strongly to the challenge.
In this research, which involved crossbills in captivity, some of the birds received three days of social information from food-deprived birds prior to their own food limitations; other birds received three days of social information from food-deprived birds at the same time as their own food deprivation.
“The birds did better at maintaining body mass during food restriction if the social information was predictive of the decline in food resources,” she said. “Social information is important to animals in many different contexts, and this study demonstrates a novel benefit: Advance warning about declining food can lead to better outcomes during times of scarcity.”
Story Source:Oregon State University. Original written by Steve Lundeberg.
3. Science Coverage Of Climate Change Can Change Minds. Accurate beliefs fade quickly, especially if challenged.
Science reporting on climate change does lead Americans to adopt more accurate beliefs and support government action on the issue — but these gains are fragile, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that these accurate beliefs fade quickly and can erode when people are exposed to coverage skeptical of climate change.
“It is not the case that the American public does not respond to scientifically informed reporting when they are exposed to it,” said Thomas Wood, associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University.
“But even factually accurate science reporting recedes from people’s frame of reference very quickly.”
The study published June 24, 2022 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wood conducted the study with Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College and Ethan Porter of George Washington University.
Results showed that accurate science reporting didn’t persuade only Democrats — Republicans and people who initially rejected human-caused climate change also had their opinions shifted by reading accurate articles.
The study involved 2,898 online participants who participated in four waves of the experiment during the fall of 2020.
In the first wave, they all read authentic articles in the popular media that provided information reflecting the scientific consensus on climate change.
In the second and third waves of the experiment, they read either another scientific article, an opinion article that was skeptical of climate science, an article that discussed the partisan debate over climate change, or an article on an unrelated subject.
In the fourth wave, the participants simply were asked their beliefs about the science of climate change and their policy attitudes.
To rate participants’ scientific understanding, the researchers asked after each wave if they believed (correctly) that climate change is happening and has a human cause. To measure their attitudes, researchers asked participants if they favored government action on climate change and if they favored renewable energy.
Wood said it was significant that accurate reporting had positive effects on all groups, including Republicans and those who originally rejected climate change. But it was even more encouraging that it affected attitudes.
“Not only did science reporting change people’s factual understanding, it also moved their political preferences,” he said.\
“It made them think that climate change was a pressing government concern that government should do more about.”
But the positive effects on people’s beliefs were short-lived, results showed. These effects largely disappeared in later waves of the study.
In addition, opinion stories that were skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change reversed the accuracy gains generated by science coverage.|
Overall, the results suggest that the media play a key role in Americans’ beliefs and attitudes about scientific issues like climate change.
“It was striking to us how amenable the subjects in our study were to what they read about climate change in our study. But what they learned faded very quickly,” Wood said.
4. Checking Your Vehicle Fuel Efficiency. The fuel efficiency of your vehicle will determine how much money is left in your wallet at the end of the month. The editor calculated the efficiency of his vehicle on July 13, 2022.
Previous fill up of gas…………………….April 26, 2022, paid $4.18 per gallon of gas
Fill up today ………………………………… July 13, 2022 paid $4.30 per gallon of gas or $47.65 per fill-up
This averages out to cost for the operation of my vehicle over 79 days was $0.142 per mile over a three month period. How does your vehicle match up? Not bragging, just asking., Editor
5. Trump-Era Changes To Endangered Species Act Tossed By Court. One change had allowed economic factors to be considered on whether to list a species as threatened or endangered.}
A Grey Wolf in New Mexico, a Trump administration move had it more difficult to give protection to species threatened by anticipate future events.}
A federal judge in California threw out Trump-era changes to the Endangered Species Act, including one that allowed economic factors to be considered on whether to list a species as threatened or endangered.
The ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar in Oakland, Calif., also voids regulations that made it more difficult to give protections to species threatened by anticipated future events, such as the impacts of climate change.
The ruling came in a lawsuit that Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and other environmental nonprofits filed in 2019 to challenge the Trump era changes, which they said in court papers “undermine[s] protection of imperiled species or their habitat.”
“The Court spoke for species desperately in need of comprehensive federal protections without compromise,” said Kristen Boyles, attorney at Earthjustice. “Threatened and endangered species do not have the luxury of waiting under rules that do not protect them.”
Several industry groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Home Builders, had said in the lawsuit that it would be “an abuse of discretion” for the judge to void the rules.
The American Farm Bureau had “long advocated for improvements that modernized” the Endangered Species Act, and that carefully considered changes made during the Trump administration “were vacated by a single judge.”
In the lawsuit, the nonprofits said the two federal agencies that made the changes, the U.S. Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, “failed to provide a reasoned basis” for the changes and violated federal law by not conducting an environmental review of the changes.
The judge’s ruling voids the changes made in 2019 and allows the agencies—now under the Biden administration—to begin rule-making that would formally undo the changes.
The Trump-era rules were also challenged in court by California and more than a dozen other states, which contended that regulators improperly injected economic considerations into the 1973 law’s “science-driven, species-focused analyses,” restricted the circumstances under which species can be listed as threatened and limited how unoccupied critical habitat would be designated.
That lawsuit was later combined with the one filed by environmental groups.
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“Uncertainty and possible confusion work against effective implementation of the [Endangered Species Act] and therefore could harm endangered and threatened species,” lawyers for the agencies said in court papers.|
Judge Tigar, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, rejected that argument, noting that the federal agencies “themselves concede that they ‘have substantial concerns’ ” with the 2019 changes.
An Interior Department spokesman said the agency is reviewing the decision. A representative from the Commerce Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Among other rules the Trump administration eliminated was one that automatically prohibited killing, hunting or harming animals and plants once they became designated as “threatened.” Under the Trump-era restrictions, the prohibition only applied to “endangered” species at a higher level of risk.
Mike Leahy, senior director of wildlife, hunting and fishing policy for the National Wildlife Federation said that, while threatened species protections don’t need to be as strong as those for endangered species, failure to protect threatened species will lead them to become endangered.
Soure: Katy Stech Ferek at katherine.stech@wsj.com. WSJ.com July 5, 2022
6. Thoughts On Voting. WhenTrying To Decide Who To Vote For, RememberThis: Since Governor Symington expresses his intent to run the government of Arizona as a business, political analyst have stated in so many words that those who think they will run the government as a business, tend toward failure. Time has shown that government cannot be run successfully as a business. The two are very separate issues. Please vote thoughtfully! Source: Editor
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