Kate Rauner's Blog, page 39
April 10, 2019
Once Thought to Be Impossible, Then Thought Impossible to See – here it! #physics #astronomy #blackholeis
Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)/National Science Foundation/Handout via Reuters
First ever photo of a black hole!
More precisely, the glowing matter and energy ringing a black hole – not as fancy as CGI yet, but this is real!
It’s size & shape match predictions of general relativity.
This international effort, years in development, was announced in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo. Reported by Reuters and others.
I’m starting to believe astronomers will eventually be able to image anything that emits energies that reach our little world.
April 6, 2019
Poetry and Warning! #sciku #poem #poetry #health
Check out this screen shot of the poem:
[image error]Poetry captures reality, how a drug’s side effects can flatten you!
April 1, 2019
You Think the Internet is Full of It Most Days? Today is April Fool’s Day! Time to pick from your spaghetti tree #WasFooledBy #AprilFools #Hoax
From 1957 BBC April Fool hoax, a woman harvests spaghetti from a tree. “The biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled”
Just a quick warning – today is the perfect day to exercise your BS detectors. Given the internet’s ability to pass a hoax on and on… today’s articles that are intended to be funny will be presented as fact tomorrow and the next day and so on and so on. Let the viewer beware.
March 30, 2019
You Know About Cow Farts, but How About Tree Farts? #nature #biology #climatechange #forest #trees
Over 100 years ago, a chemist in Kansas documented that cottonwood sap contained methane bubbles. He could light escaping gas and watch a blue flame flicker.
Not only cottonwoods. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and today, thanks to global warming, we need to understand the ins and outs of methane in the atmosphere. New studies show:
Many instances in which trees produce their own methane—sometimes from microbes in the heartwood or other tissues and in other cases from a remarkable direct photochemical reaction thought to be driven by the ultraviolet wavelengths in sunlight. NatGeo
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Measuring methane and CO2 emisisons from arctic tundra
Life writes its name in methane, which is why methane on Mars is so exciting. On Earth, methane is released from fossil fuels, microbes in soggy soil like bogs and rice paddies, and (as you know) cattle. Human activities accelerate emissions – sometimes, we do in a year what nature does in centuries.
Methanotroph microbes also break down methane. The life expectancy of an average methane molecule is a few decades.
Trees emit methane and break it down by hosting the wily microbes and also on their own. The balance depends on the tree and soil conditions, but there are “forests where similar trees in similar soils have been measured with a fiftyfold difference in methane emissions… [Forests] in wet soils uniformly were net emitters of methane but those in drier conditions in some regions actually were net absorbers of the gas.”
One scientists said that what we know today is “a third grader’s cartoon drawing of a forest.”
None of this means trees are bad! Trees good. Forests good. But learning more about Earth’s methane cycle will improve our models and, if we’re smart enough, help us hand a beautiful world to our progeny.
March 26, 2019
Welcome to the Star Shepard BLOG HOP TOUR #scifi #sciencefiction #book #ebook
[image error]Please get yourself comfortable as we take a daily tour through these fabulous blogs, listed below.
Each blog you visit will entertain you with exclusive articles and excerpts from this fantastic new book. Get an insight into the character’s head with interviews and profile images.
Then hunt down the mystery word inthis post to get you one step closer to the $10 Amazon Gift Card. Hurry! Only one day left to enter!
You are here to celebrate the release of Star Shepard, book one of the space western series, Shepherd of Light, by R.R.Virdi.
Star Shepherd knows a raw deal when he sees one. And he’s got the worst one in the galaxy: to deliver a mysterious package to a rebellion to change the scales of power in favor of the common man. As he meets with an old friend to seek much-needed help, he draws the attention of a genocidal admiral willing to destroy entire worlds if it means catching Star Shepherd.
Will Star survive the chase and bring hope to the rebellion, or deliver a gift into the hands of a worse power, tipping the galaxy into further chaos? amazon.com/Star-Shepherd
R.R. Virdi is the two time Dragon Award–Nominated author. Once, for his series The Grave Report, a paranormal investigator series set in the great state of New York. The second nomination coming for Dangerous Ways, book one of The Books of Winter, an epic urban fantasy series set in the same overall universe as his Grave Report novels. He has worked in the automotive industry as a mechanic, retail, and in the custom gaming computer world. He’s an avid car nut with a special love for American Ship classics.
The hardest challenge for him up to this point has been fooling most of society into believing he’s a completely sane member of the general public.
Follow him on his website. http://rrvirdi.com/
Or twitter: @rrvirdi or https://twitter.com/rrvirdi
Don’t forget to visit all the blogs and collect the 10 hidden words for your chance to win a $10 Amazon Gift Card.
Send your completed word list to kkantasauthorassist@gmail.com today! Only one day left to enter!
Starting on this date – but don’t worry – still available!
Tuesday 19th – https://rrvirdi.com
Wednesday 20th –http://indiescififantasy.com
Thursday 21st – https://readcommendations.com
Friday 22nd – https://mmcquillen44.wixsite.com/themadhouse
Saturday 23rd – https://www.authorerikamszabo.com/my-thinking-board
Sunday 24th – https://rainne15.wordpress.com
Monday 25th – https://www.maryrwoldering.com
Tuesday 26th – https://karensbookbuzz.wordpress.com
Wednesday 27th – https://katerauner.wordpress.com/
Thursday 28th – https://celthric.com
Blog Hop Tour organized by Author Assist
I’ve never hosted a blog hop before – what do you think? Is it fun? Do you like the givewaway with a word hunt? Did you figure out what the mystery word is? If people like this, I’ll do more. Thanks!
March 20, 2019
Spring is Here! The Vultures Have Returned #nature #birding #springday
A little fuzzy – I’m not the best photographer! But, here’s a vulture flying above my home.
I spotted the first turkey vulture. That’s how I know spring has come to my ridge-top home. I don’t count vultures in town, which is at a lower elevation. I wait until… Are you frowning? Skeptical? Spring is about cute little tweety birds, so why do I mark its arrival with a vulture?
The timing fits perfectly. Like most birds, vultures migrate seasonally. This can mean the northern population moves to where the southern population spent the summer, and depending on your location, looking out your window, you’d never know anything changed.
But for me, in the Gila Forest of New Mexico USA, turkey vultures disappear in fall and return right around the equinox. Our dry, windy season is starting too, and a few brave spring flowers poke through the dry grasses left from last year. Or cling to the ground – I mentioned the wind.
[image error]On April 1st I’ll put out my hummingbird feeder, ready to welcome the next major migration. Ah, you say. Cute, colorful, little hummers. That’s a bird for spring. But if you’ve ever watched them you know they are ferocious warriors. The vultures are a more even-tempered sign of spring.
March 18, 2019
2019 March Equinox #space #solarsystem #springequinox in Northern Hemisphere
It’s so cool to watch the cosmos right at your feet – here’s someone who did just that. Go to 2019 March Equinox for the excellent slide show and watch the equinox arrive.
Wednesday March 20th is an equinox day… we spent the day at a Museum on the equator, Mitad del Mundo. I brought along my over-sized protractor knowing in advance that we would be at the museum. So at mid-day I had my wife stand on the equator (yellow line) and hold a string to the top of her head while Cathy, a sister of our exchange student, held the protractor. bobs-spaces.net
March 17, 2019
You Could Fly Like a Bird – Is That a Reason to Colonize a Frozen Moon? #NASA #planet #Saturn #moon
Titan’s a great place for science fiction, like my latest release. A cult thinks their colony will become paradise, but not if things keep going like this!
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has an atmosphere so dense and gravity so low, you could strap wings to your arms and fly like a bird.
That atmosphere will protect you from cosmic radiation too, and so from resulting cancer and brain damage, but you can’t breathe it. There’s no oxygen. But even if there was, one breath would freeze your lungs. There is water ice, so if you had enough power you could electrolyze (electrolysize?) yourself some oxygen.
Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of lakes and seas on its surface. These liquids are made of methane but, armed with the right kind of protective gear, one could theoretically be able to swim without harm! NASA’s Janelle Wellons futurism.com
Hmm… if you used oxygen to burn a stream of liquid methane from the plentiful lakes, could you generate enough electrical power to keep the cycle going and still produce heat and light for your habitat? Other chemical reactions might work better, like hydrogen/acetylene, or maybe turbines running on tides in the larger lakes. Saturn is so far from the sun that solar panels aren’t efficient, but there is sunlight. A sort of perpetual sunset – orange, thanks to the hydrocarbon haze.
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True color image of atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan
For a research station, perhaps you could carry everything you need with you, but for a colony you’ll need resources. There’s plenty of hydrocarbon feed so expect everything possible to be made of plastic, but what about minerals and metals? Titan may have a rocky core, but it’s buried under ice hundreds of kilometers thick. Saturn’s not hopeful either. Its outer layers are hydrogen and helium, and if you dive very deep you’ll never get out again. Maybe you’ll find meteors and asteroids captured in the rings.
March 9, 2019
Life Always Surprises, Won’t Stay in Your Categories #biology #genetics #poem #poetry
The Yoruba have the highest twinning rate in the world, as reflected in this art, but still no sesquizygotic twins as far as western science knows.
Sesqui – zygotic
Makes babies most exotic.
Rarest people you could meet,
Their genes are quite quixotic.
Buckets you put words in
Are only there as stand-ins.
Cling to them
and fool yourself,
The word is not the thing.
Nature’s not confined
By what is in your mind.
When shadows dance in Plato’s cave,
Escape the chains that bind.
You’ll never force reality
Into the form you want to see.
The world is bigger,
stranger,
more
Than claimed by you and me.
Kate Rauner
We humans are so invested in language, we sometimes forget that words are imperfect representations of reality. Like the words “male” and “female.”
The twins in Australia are 4 years old now… the second known case [of] ‘sesquizygotic twins’: not identical, but not fraternal either. They’re somewhere in between.
The twins are actually chimeras, meaning they both have a mix of XX and XY cells in their body, but in different proportions. The one who looks like a boy has an XX:XY mix of 47:53; the girl has a mix of 90:10. In the 2007 case [the first reported occurence], one of the twins actually had ambiguous genitalia, which is what tipped doctors off to something previously unknown about the twins. The Atlantic
March 5, 2019
Great eBook Deals – All Genres – Hurry – This Week Only (thru March 9, 2019) #ebook #ebooks #amreading
[image error]It’s Read an eBook Week at Smashwords – load your reader now with great deals in all genres and read all summer 
![[image error]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Childrens_Museum_of_Indianapolis_-_Female_ere_ibeji_twin_figure_pair.jpg){kind=link}