Aheat wave gripping parts of the nation added an exclamation point to a series of announcements this week about the world’s warming climate.
A city water park in Grand Island, Nebraska, doesn’t open for another two weeks, but residents could have used it Thursday when the temperature reached 96, 21 degrees above normal for that date.
In Shreveport, Louisiana, on Thursday, the high of 94 tied a 148-year-old record. That was one of more than 110temperature records broken or tiedacross 21states this week. In Texas,Galveston sweltered, setting or tying records three out of four days.
LISTEN NOW:Neil deGrasse Tyson joins Audacy’s Klein & Ally
AstrophysicistNeil deGrasse Tysonjoined Audacy’sKlein & Allyon KROQ for a wide ranging conversation that began with a tweet that caused a bit of a stir. It began on Twitter when deGrasse Tyson said that lunar eclipses aren’t rare. When asked if he’d liked to walk back his comments or double down, he chose the latter.
“The thing lasts three hours,” he said. “You can start the eclipse, go in, have a midnight snack, come back out and it’s still going on. Anyone who is angry has never seen a solar eclipse. Those are spectacular! It’s by contrast, that’s all.”
It’s fair to say that our relationships in life require mental presence and a willingness to connect in order to thrive. Well, the same goes for your relationship with your dog.
In a busy world of daily distractions (social media being a prime example), what happens when we spend too much time on our phones — do our pets notice? Is your phone making your dog depressed?
Dr. Iain Booth, a veterinary surgeon in the United Kingdom, made this assertion more than four years ago. We’ve decided to revisit the topic because during the pandemic, many people became pet parents while simultaneously spending more time on their phones.
We spoke with Colleen Safford, a dog trainer, behavior expert and owner of Far Fetched Acres, for more insight on our relationship with our pets and what dogs might be thinking when we’re on our phones.
Is your phone making your dog depressed?
While no two relationships are the same, each benefits from communication and attention. When it comes to the friendship between humans and dogs, we should try and understand their wants and needs so every pet can live their best life. While we rely on our dogs for love and companionship, they rely on us for, well, everything.
“While I hesitate to ever say that humans can fully understand exactly what is going on in the brain of man’s best friend, dogs by their very nature are deeply dependent on humans,” Safford told The Dodo. “We control every resource in their life, including food, exercise, affection, guidance and support. By their very nature, dogs are codependents in the world of domestic living! Simply put, we are their everything.”
While the larger issue of our dependence on phones is worth countless studies, a few things are clear: Too much screen time can lead to depression and anxiety in humans, among other issues. And it can isolate us from anyone in our presence — including our dogs.
“In relationship to dog depression, if an owner has thumbs too busy to provide petting, eyes too distracted to see that their dog is trying to play fetch, and a brain too busy to provide all those verbal ‘good boys,’ it is easy to understand why phone use can impact a dog’s overall health,” Safford said. “By not supplying our dogs with exercise, verbal attention or physical contact, we are ignoring their needs and increasing the chances of behavior issues and anxiety.”
As Booth said in his interview (in reference to ignoring your dog in favor of your phone), “You do that consistently for weeks, months and years on end, and you’re going to get some real behavioral issues.” So some dogs may even start misbehaving to get your attention.
While wholly dependent on the individual dog, this is something that every dog parent should be aware of, especially considering current events — as mentioned above, during the pandemic, dog adoptions went up as did smartphone usage.
Putting the phone down is step one
“Humans and dogs both release oxytocin from petting and affection, and release endorphins during exercises,” Safford said. “No petting or affection — no love hormone. No movement — no feel-good hormones. It’s as simple as that.”
Physical activity is necessary to maintain a bond with your dog. “Grab a ball and leash, and nurture and deepen that bond. Give your dog all those words of affirmation,” Safford said.
A new study links sea ice decline with increasing wildfire weather in the Western U.S.
Full Transcript
Emily Schwing: This is Scientific American’s 60 Second Science. I’m Emily Schwing.
Oil and water. Apples and oranges. Fire and Ice…none of these things really seem like they have much to do with one another…or do they?
Hailong Wang: We found that more fire-favorable weather associated with declines in the Arctic sea ice during summer can increase autumn wildfires over the western United States.
Schwing: Hailong Wang is an Earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state.
Wang: So we analyzed a few decades of observations of how wildfire incidents, sea ice cover and weather conditions to identify a relationship between Arctic sea ice decline and the wildfire risks. We called it a teleconnection.
Schwing: Wang says this idea of a fire and ice “tele-connection?” … It’s not new. It’s a lot like the so-called “butterfly effect” – a term coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960’s to explain chaos theory. The idea can be summarized like this: if a butterfly flaps its wings in one location, that could displace enough air to cause a tornado or some other large scale atmospheric storm elsewhere.
Wang: Certainly didn’t invent this concept, but it has been in the atmospheric sciences for a long time. So, because of the connections within the Earth system, especially in the atmosphere, one small change in one region could affect other regions through the atmospheric circulations.
Schwing: Connections between declining sea ice and wildfire weather have been made before. Wang says previous findings have relied heavily on statistical relationships.
Wang: For example, they find that they found that maybe Arctic sea ice are declining in many years, and they also found the increase in extreme weather like wildfires in the western U.S. They can only identify the relationship, but there’s no mechanism to explain which which one is the cause? Which one is the effect?
Schwing: [possible VO:
Those relationships found a link between a decrease in sea ice and an increase in wildfires in the WEstern US, but they could not explain the cause and effect. ]
So Wang and colleagues took those known statistical relationships a step further. The team applied them to a state of the art climate model with wildfire prediction capabilities.
Wang: In that way, we were able to identify the response of the climate system, including the fire weather over the western U.S. and other responses to the Arctic sea ice.
Schwing: What they found is “a tale of two vortices.”
Wang: So when the summer sea ice is much reduced, ocean can absorb and store more heat from sunlight. Less sea ice cover over the Arctic will allow more heat to be also to be released from the ocean to the atmosphere in the following autumn and early winter. Otherwise, the sea ice can insulate the heat from the ocean to the air.
Schwing: So, more heat is released to the atmosphere as the sea ice declines.
Wang: The anomalous heat in the Arctic can form rising air from the surface, and that can strengthen the low pressure system, which is one of the the spinning vortex. It’s counter-clockwise.
Schwing: This forms a low pressure system and Wang says when it moves south, it pushes the polar jet stream off its normal course and forms a second vortex.
Wang: So this shift also facilitate[s] the formation of a high pressure system over the western U.S. This high-pressure system is a clockwise spinning vortex. This drives dry and hot hot air to descend to the ground—from the upper air to the ground. Normally it comes with clear skies and no precipitation. So those are all favorable weather conditions for wildfire hazards.
Wang: The arctic changes could also be connected to extreme cold weather.
Schwing: Like the infamous 2021 Texas ice and snow storm that knocked out power to millions and caused billions of dollars in damage. Wang says looking for more “teleconnections’ is where his research will go next.
Wang: Moving forward, we would like to explore more connections of Arctic changes to weather, extreme weather, climate change over other regions of the entire globe.
Schwing: If wildfires and sea ice could be this climatically entwined, surely there are other climate surprises just waiting to be unraveled.
At least, he tries to draw attention to global issues which he considers urgent to tackle.
For some time, the richest man in the world, with a net worth on paper estimated at $210 billion on May 18 by Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has been sounding the alarm about the decline of the population.
He started by worrying about the largest historical drop in inhabitants in Japan in 2021.
Then, instead of marveling at the beauty and history of Venice, Musk preferred to shine the spotlight on the fact that the Eternal City’s population has continued to decline for years.
For the mogul, this does not bode well for the future of Venice.
A few days after these first warning signals, Musk has just made an even more worrying announcement. The serial entrepreneur believes that it is urgent to deal with the decline in the birth rate which particularly affects rich countries and the West.
The Tesla CEO made that much clear in recent comments during a virtual appearance at the recent All-In Conference held in Miami on May 16.
The billionaire was asked about what could be done in terms of energy production to make electricity cheaper for everyone around the world. Basically, can the electricity needs of the world’s population be met at an affordable price?
“Because of just generally low birth rates almost worldwide, civilization is not headed to have a population that is an order of magnitude better than where we were kind of,” Musk responded. “We’re currently headed towards a population decline. And this is almost everywhere in well in the world.”
Musk, who pushed the auto industry to convert to electrification in order to lessen its impact on the environment, rejects preconceived and often widely held ideas that having a child is expensive or that making the choice not to have children is because we want to save the environment.
Related video: Musk still wants to get the deal done but at a lower price, says analyst (CNBC)
If it’s 5% seven percent, 10% that was no secret that that that that
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Musk still wants to get the deal done but at a lower price, says analystUnmute
“It basically seems as though as soon as you have like, urbanization and education beyond a certain level and income beyond a certain level, birth rates plummet. And so as countries get wealthier, their birth rates plummet,” the tech tycoon said.
“It’s somewhat counterintuitive, because people will say, like, well, ‘it’s too expensive to have a baby’. No. The wealthier they are, the fewer kids you have; the more educated you are the fewer kids you have,” said the father or seven — Y, X, Griffin, Xavier, Kai, Saxon and Damian.
The Annual Growth Rate of World Population Is Going Down
He therefore argues that there are enough resources for all.
“So I’m not sure who [is going] to use all that energy unless there’s a significant change in the birth rate,” Musk, 50, said. “Or we have a very robot oriented economy. So that’s also possible if we’ve got a lot of four wheeled robots in cars, humanoid robots, then you could suddenly see that there’d be perhaps a need for an order of magnitude more energy.”
“But it’s not coming from the humans unless something major changes on the human birth rate level. But this, by the way, is, I think, the biggest single threat to civilization right now,” Musk added.
A recent study projects that the world’s population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064, before decreasing to 8.8 billion in 2100. But, if we followed the curve of the growth rate of world population, say demographers, would begin to decline around 2060.
The annual growth rate of world population was 2.1% in the 1970s. Today, this rate is only around 1%. And it should go down to 0 between 2060 and 2070, demographers say.
In her provocative book “8 Billion and Counting”, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba says the twenty-first century is “a story about differential growth—marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries.”
She anticipates Europe’s population will shrink from about 521 million to about 482 million by mid-century.
‘We Can’t Have Civilization Just Dwindling’
In Asia, in addition to Japan, China also has the same birth rate problem.
Last January, the National Bureau of Statistics of China announced that 10.6 million children were born in 2021, down from with 12 million in 2020, despite the end of the one-child policy. This was the fifth year of decline in a row.
“Some people are thinking like having fewer kids is like better for the environment. It’s just total nonsense,” Musk said. “We’re going to be fine even if we doubled the size of the humans. I know a lot about environmental stuff. We can’t have civilization just dwindling to nothing.”
“A lot of people just think that having kids is somehow bad for the environment. I want to be clear it’s not. It’s essential for maintaining civilization. We don’t necessarily need to grow dramatically, but at least let’s not gradually dwindle away until civilization ends with us all in adult diapers and in a whimper.”
The world’s richest man concluded by saying that he’s heard many times people saying: “How can I bring a child into this terrible world?”
And his response: “Have you read history? Because let me tell you it was way worse back then.”This article was originally published by TheStreet.
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DARLINGTON, Md. —
A number of cases of avian flu, or bird flu, have been detected in Harford County, the Maryland Department of Agriculture reported.
Bird flu was discovered after more than 100 black vultures were found dead at Fisherman’s Park near Conowingo Dam, according to the U.S. and Maryland departments of agriculture.
After a February outbreak of bird flu in Delaware, there is now evidence the disease has made its way to Maryland, most likely spreading through migratory birds and poultry.
“Raptors, vultures, migratory waterfowl and poultry seem to be the species that are carriers for the disease,” Deputy Maryland Agriculture Secretary Steve Connelly said.
The MDA said poultry farmers on the Eastern Shore have noticed sick birds since March. Bird flu is currently in 35 states and has infected more than 38 million birds.
The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore became concerned when the vultures were found dead in Harford County.
“It’s scary because our No. 1 priority for us is our bird collection safety,” said Jen Kottyan, curator of birds at The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.
Constellation, which runs the park, closed a number of trails to the public in an effort to curb the spread.
For the first time, zoo officials are enacting bird flu protocols.
“We’re trying to keep any of the wild birds away from the collection of birds, so you’ll notice that some of the exhibits have empty pools or they have shade cloth or limited access, or even in the case of our penguins, no access. We’re just going exhibit to exhibit and trying to assess what the risks are,” Kottyan said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s rare for humans to contract bird flu, but it can happen.
Agriculture officials provided what’s perhaps some promising news, saying a majority of migratory birds have already flown north and warmer weather could make things better.
“The temperature is warm, up for prolonged periods of time — warm or hot weather — but that will help decrease the viral load that’s out in the wild birds,” Connelly said.
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Imagine your worst day of deer hunting ever. Maybe the weather turned awful, or the deer just seemed to conspire against you. Well, no matter how bad it was, Wisconsin whitetail hunter—or I should say, poacher—Richard C. Harris can probably top it.
Earlier this year, we covered the basic details of Harris’ill-fated January hunt, when a buck he’d shot with a crossbow apparently turned on him as Harris followed the blood trail. The buck gored Harris in the…
We all know a few of those lucky people who, somehow, have managed to avoid ever catching COVID. Perhaps you’re one of them. Is this a Marvel-esque superpower? Is there any scientific reason why a person might be resistant to becoming infected, when the virus seems to be everywhere? Or is it simply luck?
More than60% of peoplein the UK have tested positive for COVID at least once. However…
A new Kansas law requires meat alternative products to include disclaimers showing they are made from plants, not animals. Dylan Lysen / Kansas News Service
The power of the Kansas cattle industry means grocery shoppers in the state won’t be buying anything called sausage or burger unless it’s made of animal parts.
Gov. Laura Kelly recently signed a bill into law requiring meat substitutes to be sold with labeling that makes clear they come from plants, not livestock.
It’s part of a national effort from the meat industry to stave off competition from a range of products cutting into its market share. The Kansas Livestock Associationpushed for the law for years, arguing it will spare consumers from confusion.
“It became pretty clear they were using deceptive labels to market their products,” KLA lobbyist Aaron Popekla said…
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