by The Associated PressTuesday, April 12th 2022

https://komonews.com/news/local/officials-limit-consumption-of-sturgeon-from-lower-columbia

Officials: Limit consumption of sturgeon from lower Columbia (KOMO News)

SEATTLE — State health officials in Washington and Oregon are recommending the public limit their consumption of sturgeon caught from the lower Columbia River.

The Seattle Times reports a health advisory comes from the Washington Department of Health as fish tissue data shows contaminant levels of polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs — at levels above Washington state’s screening values. In Washington, the advisory applies to any fish caught in the Columbia River between the Bonneville Dam and the mouth of the Columbia.

Officials recommend that most adults should not eat more than eight meals of sturgeon a month, and no more than seven for pregnant women, nursing mothers and children.

Moral hierarchy giving different value to different animals is learned during adolescence, survey suggests

Steven Morris

@stevenmorris20Mon 11 Apr 2022 09.00 EDT

Children think farm animals deserve to be treated as well as human beings but lose this belief in adolescence, a groundbreaking study has found.

Researchers from the universities of Exeter and Oxford asked a group of British children aged nine to 11, young adults aged 18 to 21 and older men and women about their attitudes to different sorts of animals.

In general, the children said farm animals and human beings should be treated the same and found eating animals less morally acceptable than both sets of adults. The findings suggest that “speciesism” – a moral hierarchy that gives different value to different animals – is learned during adolescence, according to the study.

“Humans’ relationship with animals is full of ethical double standards,” said the lead author, Luke McGuire, a lecturer at the University of Exeter who specialises in social and moral development. “Some animals are beloved household companions, while others are kept in factory farms for economic benefit. Judgments seem to largely depend on the species of the animal in question: dogs are our friends, pigs are food.”

https://4102207f0450281f2d8f2fb39057ab82.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The report says an important aspect of the human mind is “moral acrobatics”: people can hold ethical values that contradict each other and employ moral double standards. But the origins of moral acrobatics relating to animals is poorly understood and the researchers say this new study provides some of the first evidence examining the differences in how children and adults think about animal treatment.

Among other tasks, participants in the study were presented with pictures including a farm animal and companion animals and asked to categorise them as “food”, “pet” or “object”. They were asked how animals were treated, and how they should be treated.

Children did not judge all animals to be equal. They concluded, in fact, that dogs ought to be treated better than pigs – but also that pigs ought not to be treated differently from humans.

The two sets of adult groups said pigs ought to be treated less well than dogs, while humans and dogs ought to be treated the same.

McGuire said the study suggests that while children think farm animals and humans ought to be treated equally well, by adulthood people believe that companion animals and humans ought to be treated better. He said children rated eating animals as significantly less permissible than young adults and adults did.

“Something seems to happen in adolescence, where that early love for animals becomes more complicated and we develop more speciesism,” said McGuire. “It’s important to note that even adults in our study thought eating meat was less morally acceptable than eating animal products like milk. So aversion to animals – including farm animals – being harmed does not disappear entirely.”

McGuire said that while adjusting attitudes was a natural part of growing up, the “moral intelligence of children” could be valuable.

He said: “If we want people to move towards more plant-based diets for environmental reasons, we have to disrupt the current system somewhere. For example, if children ate more plant-based food in schools, that might be more in line with their moral values, and might reduce the normalisation towards adult values that we identify in this study.”

The paper, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, is titled “The development of speciesism: age-related differences in the moral view of animals”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/11/farm-animals-and-humans-should-be-treated-the-same-children-say

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The forecast on planet Neptune is chilly – and getting colder

Planet Neptune photographed by NASA spacecraft Voyager 2

https://news.yahoo.com/forecast-planet-neptune-chilly-getting-140907423.html

Will Dunham

Mon, April 11, 2022, 7:09 AM·3 min read

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Frigid and far-flung Neptune, our solar system’s outermost planet, is adding to its reputation as an enigmatic world, with astronomers puzzled by a surprising drop in its atmospheric temperatures during the past two decades.

Focusing upon Neptune’s stratosphere – the atmosphere’s relatively stable region above the turbulent weather layer – the researchers had expected to find rising temperatures in the part of the planet visible from Earth with the onset of its southern hemisphere summer, a season lasting four decades. Instead, they found temperatures declining significantly.

The study was based on more than 95 thermal-infrared images – every one ever taken – spanning 2003 to 2020 using ground-based telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, mostly the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date of Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures.

“The atmosphere appears more complicated than we had naively assumed, which, unsurprisingly, seems to be a general lesson that nature teaches scientists again and again,” said Michael Roman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leicester in England and lead author of the study published on Monday in the Planetary Science Journal.

Neptune’s stratosphere temperature fell as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) to minus 179 F (minus 117 C) over the 17 years studied. In contrast, temperatures in Neptune’s troposphere – the even-colder weather layer – showed no significant variability while reaching as low as minus 370 F (minus 223 C).

More to read:

• Scientists shocked by unexpected and dramatic changes in Neptune’s temperature

Neptune is among the least explored of the solar system’s eight planets, with its great distance making it difficult to study from Earth. NASA’s Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have made a close-up visit, flying past Neptune in 1989.

“I think Neptune is very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it,” Roman said.

Its temperature changes were unevenly distributed, with regional variations. The southern tropics cooled, then warmed, then cooled again. Mid-latitudes temperatures initially remained constant before falling gradually. South pole temperatures initially dropped only slightly before warming dramatically between 2018 and 2020.

“I suspect the overall temperature drop may most likely be due to changes in the atmospheric chemistry, which responds to changing seasonal sunlight and, in turn, alters how effectively the atmosphere cools,” Roman said.

Neptune’s average diameter is about 30,600 miles (49,250 km), making it four times wider than Earth. It orbits more than 30 times as far away from the sun as Earth at an average distance of about 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km), needing about 165 Earth years to complete a single orbit around the sun – a Neptunian year.

The dwarf planet Pluto most of the time orbits even further away but its oval-shaped orbit sometimes brings it closer to the sun than Neptune.

Neptune and neighboring Uranus are classified as ice giants, as opposed to the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Neptune, which like those other planets lacks a solid surface, possesses an extremely dynamic atmosphere mainly of hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane, atop a mantle mostly of slushy ammonia and water and a solid core. Neptune boasts the strongest winds of any planet.

Neptune may offer lessons about planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, said study co-author Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The close relationship that Neptune may share with a large segment of the population of exoplanets,” Orton said, “means that it may be ‘an exoplanet in our backyard’ – probably on the colder end of that spectrum, but still a model for the things we might expect to see in the meteorology of various exoplanets.”