T. McGrath

Do you even bother to read what you write? You are both talking about speculation and suspicion and yet have the audacity to claim it has something to do with science. Do either of you even know what science is about? Science is not about speculation or suspicion.

I've read the second paper you posted on the management of the wild tigers. It was a good paper. Specifically because they did not attempt to associate any behavior to the tigers. They simply mapped the movements of the tigers, their surrounding terrain and vegetation, and based their recommendations on those findings only. The paper does not attempt to attribute any human behaviors to the tigers.

You have two separate links in your prior post, but they are to the same URL. The URL regarding the study of wild tiger movements did not make it into that post. If you post it, I will take a look at it. When attempting to understand what motivates an animal I try to understand the animal first. "End behavior" is a misnomer since you are not referring to humans, it should be "end actions" instead. Simply looking at the end action, or "end behavior," tells you nothing about the motivation of the animal. If a bear mauls a hiker, for example, your "end behavior" would be that the bear was aggressive. When the reality may have been that the bear was surprised or acting in what the bear may have perceived as self-defense. We simply have no idea, and nobody should be claiming that they do. Which is where that special couching of the language comes in handy. EDIT: Check that, I found your post with the tiger study. I just didn't scroll far enough up. I'm reading it now.

Yes, all behaviors are human behaviors. We often apply them to other animals, but the fact remains that we have absolutely no clue what motivates any other species other than our own. As I said, I read the original paper. However, I have not read the other paper you posted on the behavior of bats. No doubt it will be similar to all the other behavioral studies where they create a controlled environment, observe the behavior of the animal, and then draw some conclusions about the behavior of the animal based upon the statistics of their observations. I do agree that the paper needs to use "carefully couched language." In the case of the original paper "seems to..." is a perfectly acceptable way of not really drawing any conclusion whatsoever. "Seems to..." is purely subjective. So anyone can infer anything they like.

I've read the paper. If you scroll up, you will see that I provided the URL. It can be claimed that all the animals north of the Arctic Circle "trend toward nocturnality" after every Summer Solstice. "Nocturnal" is very much determined by where you are on the planet and the time of year. All behavior is human behavior, they are just attempting to apply human behavior to non-humans and that is why it will always fail. It is pure BS. It should be easy to understand that animal brains do not function the same way as human brains. Animals with an extremely good sense of smell, for example, are going to be more driven by that sense than humans could ever be. So to impose any kind of human trait or behavior on anything other than human is silly. When they attempt to pass it off as science, then it becomes stupid and offensive. Because this is not what science is about.

So where is this evidence? You only think the effects of humans on the ecosystems are well known. There is no evidence of that either. Science is about producing evidence. If you want indoctrination instead of science there is always the public school system. So where is this supposed data? At what latitude and time of the year did they make these observations, and for how long? You know, actual evidence? Making up some BS about how a chimpmunk refuses to cross a man-made road then drawing the conclusion that it MUST be because of the impact of humanity doesn't cut it as far as evidence is concerned. Anecdotes do not qualify as evidence either. Animal behavior can be observed, but to attempt to draw any conclusions based upon those observations is completely invalid. There is absolutely no way any observer can determine what another animal is thinking, why they behave a particular way, or what is influencing their behavior. It is entirely conjuncture and anthropomorphism. To use your example, if you take away the hunters deer become over-populated and are forced to resort to inhabit golf courses and housing developments in order to find food. That is equally as invalid of a conclusion as you assuming they are becoming suddenly very friendly. The reality is that we do not know what is influencing their behavior. Yea, it is called reading the paper. You might try it sometime. Here is the link: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6394/1232

First you have to have actual evidence. All they have are supposition and conjecture, and they know it. Which is why their so-called conclusions begins with "seems to..." This is nothing more than anthropomorphism, attempting to impose human characteristics and behaviors into animals they observe. It is total BS.

Total bunk. A great example of really bad pseudo-science.

The actual paper should be the reference to this thread, not the Guardian. Radar Evidence of Subglacial Liquid Water on Mars - Science, July 25, 2018, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar7268 Furthermore, "discovered" is not the correct term. "Interpreted" would be more accurate. Based upon the radar information in a 20 km wide, 100 km long area they are interpreting the data to mean that liquid water may be present at a depth of ~1.5 km. There is something a bit odd, however. All the data collected and every reference made is dated 2015 or earlier. Why did it take three years to publish the paper?

What is wrong with these people? Are they stuck in the 1960s? Blazars and quasars are what the ignorant call Active Galactic Nuclei. Blazar and quasar were merely placeholders for something we had no idea how to describe at the time. There was only a brief period (between 1963 and 1969) when we had no idea what these objects were. By the 1970s they knew the source were active galaxies, and thus began calling them Active Galactic Nuclei. Then we have the above paper, which is a throw back to 50 years ago.

In December 2016 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/71/90, declaring 30 June "International Asteroid Day" in order to "observe each year at the international level the anniversary of the Tunguska impact over Siberia, Russian Federation, on 30 June 1908, and to raise public awareness about the asteroid impact hazard." Since then it really has become an International Asteroid Awareness Week, with events planned in numerous countries beginning June 25th and extending until June 30th.

There were actually two missions to Mercury. The 1973 launch of Mariner 10 made its closest approach to Mercury in 1975 as it flew by. Then there was the MESSENGER (MErcury Space, Surface ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe, launched in August 2004 and made its first flyby of Mercury in 2008. The MESSENGER probe made a total of three flybys of Mercury, two flybys of Venus, and a flyby of Earth between 2008 and 2011 before settling into orbit around Mercury. The spacecraft remained in orbit around Mercury between 2011 and 2015, before it ran out of fuel and crashed into Mercury in 2015. See also Mercury's Secrets Revealed by Soon-to-Crash Spacecraft

According to the Standard Model of particle physics neutrinos are supposed to be massless. If you start giving mass to neutrinos then explaining how neutrinos are able to travel at the speed of light becomes problematic.

Isn't a wormhole a black hole at either end, with a conjoined singularity? How could a wormhole not have an event horizon? If black holes don't exist, what was that accretion disc orbiting in Cygnus X-1? I'm willing to discuss the possibility that we may not know precisely what happens after the matter collapses beyond its Schwarzschild radius, but the fact that matter does indeed collapse at least to that point is irrefutable. We have witnessed too many core collapse supernovae and measured stars orbiting extremely massive, yet invisible, objects to simply dismiss black holes out of hand.

Since they are talking about hot ionized gas, shouldn't they be calling it plasma? I suppose I should be happy they are referring to it as an "active galactic nuclei" and not a "quasar" or "blazar" from the 1960s, before we knew what they were. Which many still do. I was very surprised by the outflow being measured at only a few thousands of kilometers per second. That close to the event horizon I was expecting much faster relativistic speeds. I was expecting closer to supernovae speeds (10,000 km/s), or even faster since the plasma is only a few light-days away from the event horizon. They made some really nice observations. Thanks for sharing.

The discovery of those "hot Jupiters" was certainly the impetus behind the theory that our gas giants also moved inward initially. I do not recall seeing anything on the subject until after 1995. The theory would explain many things, such as the small size of Mars and of course the asteroid belt. If the theory is valid, then we were very fortunate. Those other "hot Jupiters" did not have a Saturn to pull them back out again. They suggest that Jupiter initially formed somewhere beyond the frost line, > ~3 AU, and then migrated inward until it got to about where Mars is now (~1.5 AU). When Saturn got into a certain orbital resonance with Jupiter it managed to pull Jupiter back out to its current location of 5.2 AU. This would also cause Uranus and Neptune to first move inward, and then outward. How all this planetary movement effected the creation and orbits of the Galilean satellites and other "natural" satellites (as opposed to captured) I don't think will ever be known, but it is certainly interesting to speculate.

Well said. I would like to add that having good reference material to support one's assertions also helps. New ideas are always more palatable when others have had similar ideas that can be referenced. At the very least the reference material may demonstrate where this new theory originates or whether it has merit or is fundamentally flawed. One's references can either strengthen or weaken a theory.

I would not say that the limits established by Chandrasekhar and Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff were "wrong." Just not complete. I have absolutely no doubt that the maximum mass of a non-rotating, non-magnetic white dwarf is precisely as Chandrasekhar calculated it to be. Chandrasekhar did not take into consideration a rapidly rotating or a highly magnetic white dwarf when calculating the maximum mass of a white dwarf. Therefore, his answer is not "wrong," it just does not include all the possibilities. Compared to its red giant companion, any neutron star or white dwarf in an ~83-day orbit will be virtually invisible to us. We can obviously detect the mass of the object from its gravitational effects on its companion, which is what they did, but there is no way we would be able to "see" it.

All they know for certain is that the red giant is being orbited by an unseen companion with a mass between 2.5 − 5.8 M☉. They are simply guessing that this object may be a black-hole. This unseen mass is within the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, although it has been recently suggested that the maximum mass for a neutron star can only be 2.16 M☉. Another possibility that they have not considered is that this unseen mass may be a rapidly rotating and/or highly magnetic white dwarf. Recent discoveries have placed the maximum mass of white dwarfs well beyond Chandrasekhar limit of 1.44 M☉. New estimates of rapidly rotating and/or highly magnetic white dwarfs places their maximum mass between 2.3 and 2.8 M☉. Sources: Using Gravitational-Wave Observations and Quasi-Universal Relations to Constrain the Maximum Mass of Neutron Stars - The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 852, Number 2, January 2018. (free preprint) Nearby Supernova Factory Observation of SN 2007if: First Total Mass Measurement of a Super-Chandrasekhar-Mass Progenitor - The Astrophyisical Journal, Volume 713, Number 2, March 2010 (free issue) Significantly Super-Chandrasekhar Limiting Mass White Dwarfs as Progenitors for Peculiar Over-Luminous Type Ia Supernovae - arXiv : 1509.09008, September 2015

Anyone who wasn't a Roman was considered a "barbarian" by the Romans. The meaning of the word "barbarian" today is very different from what it meant then. If their language and/or culture was different from Rome, then they are considered "barbarians" by the Romans. It doesn't mean that they were technologically inferior to Rome. The Romans also lost between 15,000 and 20,000 in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (which isn't very far east from that bog in Denmark) 2,009 years ago, where Varus lost three Roman legions to those German "barbarians."

The last half of the first paragraph of the introduction of the paper says it all: Direct collapse would appear to be the only way you can get a 20 billion solar mass super massive black hole in under a billion years, but they have yet to explain the mechanism behind the super-Eddington collapse rates.

It is not a spoof. The language being spoken in the video is Hmong, which would suggest the cave is located in southeast Asia. There are other examples of caves that have very different atmospheres than can be found on the surface. For example, the Movile Cave in Romania. That cave only has a concentration of oxygen between 7% and 10%, and carbon dioxide levels that are 100 times surface levels. The cave in Romania also has high concentrations of methane and hydrogen sulfide. Which may explain why you do not see anyone in your video actually entering the cave without protection.

Whenever discussing stars we also need to take into consideration all the other "stuff" that formed in addition to the star. I have no doubt that the first Population III stars would have had planets, asteroids, comets, and everything else we find in solar systems. However, it has been suggested that these first stars would have been massive, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 solar masses. If that is true then these first stars would have had very short lives indeed. Perhaps just a few million years. While that may be sufficient time to produce the first 26 elements on the Periodic Table, it is far too short a time for life to develop. At best life would just be getting started, only to be wiped out by the resulting hypernova when the Pop III star dies. I think life has its best shot beginning with Pop II stars. The metal-poor stars in the halo of our Milky Way, for example, have been dated to 12+ billion years. Since we only have one example to go by, it is rather difficult to say with any certainty how long it takes to evolve beyond primordial life. I would imagine that it very much depends on the conditions. On Earth it took just over 700 million years before life first appeared, and then another 3.3+ billion years before we get to the Cambrian. That is a long time for a planet to remain relatively stable. Too long for any star with greater than just a couple of solar masses. Given that Pop. III stars would have been short lived, the Pop. II stars would have formed shortly after the Pop. III stars. Certainly within the first billion years after the Big Bang. Therefore, I would not rule out the possibility of life being 12.8+ billion years old. Source: The Formation of First Stars. I. The Primordial Star-forming Cloud - The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 564, Number 1, 2002 (free preprint)

It has been suggested that we may experience a Tunguska-sized event every 300 years. Considering the NEOs that we have discovered, then lost, only to be rediscovered again just a few days to a few weeks before it passes Earth, I would have to say our mitigation choices are going to be rather limited. I think we should give up on the gravity tractor, solar sails, or any other long-term mitigation scheme and focus on what can be done in a matter of days - other than evacuating the effected area. Source: Earth in the Cosmic Shooting Gallery - The Observatory, Volume 125, 2005