Science Daily News | 11 Jul 2023
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Manx wildlife charity's efforts to reduce biodiversity decline
Creating a wildflower reserve and an ash tree orchard are among 10 Manx projects being backed.
A charity has launched a plan to back a series of 10 projects designed to halt the decline of biodiversity.
The Manx Wildlife Trust's (MWT) said its mission had been elevated during the its 50th anniversary year.
A spokesman for the charity said projects in the Action for Wildlife programme were ready to "start delivering real results".
"Reversing biodiversity loss needs to be immediate and effective, before it is too late," he said.
Among the active projects underway was a three-acre habitat for 20 rare wildflower species and a project on the Calf of Man to bring back a puffin colony.
Those efforts began in 2016 when 100 decoy birds were spread around the small island, and is expected to take another five years to see success.
Elsewhere, a number juniper bushes, which had been extinct on the island for 70 years, have been reintroduced along the Mountain Mile.
As well as that, the creation of an orchard of ash trees at Crossags near Ramsey in the north aims to produce a grove of disease resistant trees.
Similarly, the new MWT three-acre nature reserve created at Billown Quarries, will support the rare wildflower species in the south of the island.
Chief executive Leigh Morris said the projects gave them "a clear and stronger focus for our conservation work".
He said: "Our hope and aim is that the whole island gets behind this project and helps us make a real positive difference for these important priority Manx species and habitats.
"This will ensure future generations inherit an Island just as rich in wildlife, which is the greatest legacy we can leave."
The programme has been supported by the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture, which said the initiative would help meet the goals of the island's biodiversity strategy.
Covid lockdowns had little impact on deer collisions
A new report suggests the incidents continued because freight was unaffected by restrictions.
Travel restrictions and lockdowns during the Covid pandemic had little impact on the numbers of deer killed on Scotland's roads, says a new report.
NatureScot, which monitors collisions between traffic and deer, said this was likely to be because freight was allowed to continued almost as normal.
The highest number of collisions occur in the Highlands.
Between 2008 and 2021 there were 555 incidents involving vehicles and deer on Highland roads.
Argyll and Bute has the second highest figure - 369 - followed by Dumfries and Galloway with 161.
NatureScot said its most up-to-date figures showed a decrease in collisions in the Highland, likely due to culls of deer to protect woodlands.
Collisions are reported by public and organisations such as Police Scotland and Scottish SPCA.
The peak months for the road hazard are May and June when young deer are looking for their own territories.
Triple-digits temperatures expected across U.S. Southwest as global heat shows no signs of easing
With global temperatures rising, the Southwestern U.S. is facing triple-digit, record-breaking heat as states race to keep up with energy demand.
Another week, another scorcher.
Phoenix and much of south-central Arizona has been baking under hotter-than-normal temperatures for a second straight week, with little relief in sight in the coming days.
The stifling conditions are being caused by a high-pressure heat dome that remains parked over the region.
Studies have shown that climate change is making heat waves more frequent and more severe. Extreme heat events are also expected to last longer in a warming world.
El Niño, which occurs when waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become warmer than usual, can have far-ranging effects on global temperatures and can drive extreme weather and climate anomalies around the world.
This week in the U.S., heat is expected to build across the southern portion of the country, with hot and humid conditions hitting Texas and Florida, in particular, according to the NWS.
Heat index values, or what conditions “feel like” when humidity and air temperatures are combined, could top 110 degrees F this week in parts of southern Florida, South Texas and across the desert regions of California, Arizona and New Mexico, the agency said.
“Dangerous conditions are possible if citizens are unable to find relief in air conditioned buildings,” the NWS said Monday.
“Oppressive” heat and high humidity are also expected through the central Plains, with the heat index spiking above 100 degrees F in places, according to the agency.
Authorities in Japan on Monday issued the year’s first heat stroke alert for Tokyo as temperatures hit 95 degrees F in the capital.
Parts of northern Africa are suffering through a brutal heat wave, with temperatures well over 110 degrees F in Algeria, Niger and Morocco in recent days.
Parts of southern Europe are also bracing for sweltering conditions this week, as a heat wave envelops countries such as Spain, France, Italy and Greece. Spain’s state meteorological office said Monday that certain regions of the country could experience temperatures ranging from 104 degrees to 111 degrees F.
While temperatures spike over land, the world’s oceans have also been significantly warmer than usual.
Brian McNoldy, a climatologist and senior research associate at the University of Miami, said the waters around the Sunshine State are far hotter than normal for this time of year.
The staggering water temperatures off the coast of Florida have numerous implications, since warm water is a key ingredient to fuel strong hurricanes. Record warmth in coastal waters can also affect the health of marine ecosystems and coral reefs.
See the Red Planet Mars shine beside the blue star Regulus tonight
Look to the western skies on Monday evening (July 10) to see the Red Planet, Mars, shining steadily above the twinkling blueish star Regulus.
The night sky makes for an interesting pairing of targets this evening (July 10).
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Editor's Note: If you snap an image of Mars near Regulus and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
Pick-your-own strawberry growers warn of disappointing year
One farmer says customers are being left to play 'hunt the strawberry' in his fields.
British strawberry growers are reporting a "disappointing" season due to weather conditions.
Pat Wilson, owner of Scalby Grange, a pick-your-own farm in Gilberdyke, East Yorkshire, said a cold spring had stunted growth.
Customers were now playing "hunt the strawberry" during what should be a peak period, he said.
British Berry Growers, which promotes the industry, agreed it had been "a late start" to the strawberry season.
Mr Wilson, who has been farming for 45 years, said only 2007, when summer floods devastated crops, was worse for yield.
He said: "It's been really disappointing and frustrating not just for us, but also for our customers who come expecting to find lots of strawberries to pick."
Mr Wilson said strawberries were the farm's main crop. Usually, his field yields five or six tonnes of the summer delicacy each year.
However, this year it is likely to be only a fraction of that, with Mr Wilson blaming the late arrival of warmer temperatures. Other berries, including raspberries, are in plentiful supply, however.
Mr Wilson said: "It was mid to late April before we saw some decent temperatures. You need temperatures up to the mid teens [degrees Celsius] for strawberry plants to get going. For a long time, it was lower than that, with night-time temperatures around zero."
A late frost in early May also killed a large number of plants, he said.
Mr Wilson said the problem has been seen at pick-your-own farms across the country, where strawberries are not usually grown under cover, unlike supermarket suppliers which use heated poly tunnels.
Anticipating problems, Mr Wilson and his wife brought forward plans to establish another field, planting 30,000 strawberry plants in May. Some have now ripened but more sunny weather is needed, Mr Wilson said.
He explained that while new strawberry plants will soon bear fruit, the yield is poor in the first year because runners - long vines containing one or more other plants at the ends - need time to establish.
Mr Wilson called strawberry-picking a "great British summer tradition", adding: "There's nothing better than seeing happy children with strawberry juice running down their faces."
"Unfortunately, it's a case of 'hunt the strawberry' at the moment," he said.
The BBC met Eddie Dempsey, along with wife Anna, and their children, aged three and two, as they struggled to fill a punnet.
Mr Dempsey, 39, said: "It's taking us much longer to fill a punnet this year, and they're also a lot smaller. They're still flavoursome though."
A similar picture was reported in Lincolnshire, with Blain Fair, manager of Brader's pick-you-own farm in Louth, revealing sales were significantly down as a result of poor yields.
"We've got the customers, just not the strawberries," he said. "You're lucky if you find the odd big strawberry this year. Last year, we were making £3,000 on a Saturday or Sunday. We're making half that this year."
Nick Marston, chairman of British Berry Growers, said: "It's been a late start to strawberry season this year. The chilly spring weather meant British strawberries came into season a month later than in 2022.
"However, this year's crop was worth the wait. Brits can enjoy bigger and juicier strawberries to the resulting longer ripening period."
Mr Marston said commercial strawberry growers were not reporting any shortages, with "advances in growing techniques", such as poly tunnels, meaning the UK would continue to be self-sufficient in strawberries until October.
Is the puzzling star Betelgeuse going to explode in our lifetime after all?
A new unpublished study is making waves on the internet, claiming that one of the brightest stars in the night sky might die in a spectacular explosion within our lifetime.
A new unpublished study is making waves on the internet by claiming that one of the brightest stars in the night sky might die in a spectacular explosion within our lifetime.
In the new controversial study, a team of astronomers led by Hideyuki Saio from the Tohoku University in Japan suggests that Betelgeuse is larger than what most researchers believe. This could be possible as Betelgeuse is known to pulsate — expand and shrink, dim and brighten up — at regular intervals. Most obviously, Betelgeuse's brightness swings up and down every 420 days. Astronomers attribute this brightening to the periodical expansion of the star's envelope, or roughly spherical outer region, in a phenomenon known as the fundamental mode.
There are other quirks in Betelgeuse's behavior, also appearing on a regular basis, which astronomers attribute to additional turbulent processes taking place inside the dying star. One of those additional variations takes place on a 2,200-day cycle, and astronomers have no explanation for it. The team led by Saio therefore proposed that this 2,200-day oscillation could, in fact, represent Betelgeuse's main pulsation mode while the 420-day brightness variation could be a secondary quirk.
Such a scenario, however, requires Betelgeuse to be up to one third wider for these models of its evolution to work, Saio told Space.com in an email.
"To explain the 2,200-day period as fundamental mode requires a much larger radius than the case of fitting the 420-day [period] with fundamental mode," Saio wrote in an email. "A larger radius with a range of observed surface temperature means the intrinsic brightness of Betelgeuse to be higher than previously thought."
But for Betelgeuse to be as wide as the models require, it would also have to be in a later stage of its life, already done burning helium and instead running on carbon, which arose from the previous fusion of helium atoms. Whether a red giant star is burning helium or carbon makes a big difference in terms of how much life it has left. The helium-burning phase of a red giant star's life lasts tens of thousands of years. When carbon-burning switches on, the end is nigh, at least in cosmic terms, and might come within a few thousand years.
"Although we cannot determine exactly how much carbon remains right now, our evolution models suggest that the carbon exhaustion would occur in less than 300 years," Saio wrote. "After the carbon exhaustion, fusions of further heavier elements would occur in probably a few tens of years, and after that the central part would collapse and a supernova explosion would occur."
But the question remains: What else is there but models to make Saio and his colleagues think that Betelgeuse is larger than what other astronomers think?
In their paper, the researchers point out two measurements of Betelgeuse's size to support their theory. But this is exactly where the paper has drawn criticism from other astronomers.
László Molnár, an astronomy research fellow at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, who also published several papers on Betelgeuse said that the measurements picked by Saio and his colleagues to support their theory were likely influenced by clouds of dust and gas around the star that make Betelgeuse appear bigger.
"If we look at the sun, we see a well-defined surface with a very crisp edge," Molnár told Space.com in an email. "But Betelgeuse being a red supergiant, is extremely fluffy and puffy, and the photosphere, what we would call its 'surface,' is hidden beneath multiple layers of molecular gas and clouds of dust."
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Molnár and his team made their own measurements of Betelgeuse's size, which are more aligned with what most scientists think.
The release of Saio's paper coincides with an unusual brightening of Betelgeuse that led some enthusiasts to speculate that the star might be about to explode. But neither Molnár nor Montargès are convinced. Betelgeuse, Montargès said, is actually too bright to be in its death throes due to the fact that expulsions of material typically make older red giants gradually dim. Betelgeuse, on the contrary, despite its regular pulsations, has been a fixture in the top ten brightest stars of our sky for at least the past 100 years.
The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed and published, so some of its shortcomings might get addressed before it gets officially released.
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