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People have asked me why I quit writing about Florida, specifically, and stupid things people do in red states in general. Most seem to assume that the idiocy has been tamped down to levels seen everywhere else. Most would be horribly wrong. In Florida, alone, the amount of people doing stupid things has risen to such epic levels that the South Central Sun-Sentinel has been forced to hire staff just to keep tabs on them and, for a while, even offered the content as pay-per-view. Oddly enough people weren’t stupid enough to pay to read about stupid people, so they just increased their ad rates and now everybody’s happy. But, quite honestly, I’d be writing about them day and night and still not cover it all. Consider me officially whelmed on that topic. I moved on. Besides, I have to admit, it’s kind of draining. No human should ever read a sentence containing the words “naked” “meth-lab” “strip-club” “infant” and “gun used as dildo” which is delivered without irony. I have read such sentences numerous times. So I don’t do that to myself anymore.

I’ve got a few things in que for you today, so let’s start with aliens. By now most of you have heard of the star KIC 8462852 a/k/a Tabby’s Star, named after Tabetha Boyajian, the woman who led the team that discovered its behavior, it was supposed to have an alien megastructure around it. Like a Dyson Swarm, an array that would collect all the sun’s energy and distribute it evenly across the system for the inhabitants to use. Cool idea, but there was no evidence of transmitted energy. Others, such as yours truly, posited that it could be a swarm of comets. Many smart people said “Yep, that makes sense” and went back to reading Dilbert. Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, says one dude said “oorrrrr, maybe not.” And here’s where the weird turn pro.

But still, the star is weird. And we just found out it’s even weirder than we thought.

Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Louisiana State University. He’s a clever fellow and has a habit of thinking outside the box when it comes to astronomical mysteries. When it came to Tabby’s Star, Schaefer realized there might be older observations of it that could help inform its study.

He found that Tabby’s Star has been photographed more than 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 and 1989. Using two different methods, he examined those observations and measured the star’s brightness over time.

Graph from Schaefer, 2016

What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!

That’s … bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period.

The long-term fading isn’t constant, either. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen.

So what’s causing this? Well, think Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best place to start, and in this case that means one thing is probably behind all this weird behavior. Schaefer looks into this in his paper and concludes that the comet family idea doesn’t explain all the behavior. It might explain the short-term dips (maybe, kinda) but are hugely unlikely to be behind the long-term fading. You’d need truly vast numbers of comets, and they’d have to be huge, much larger than reasonable. And they’d have to be slamming into each other just as we happen to be looking.

So, yeah. Unlikely.

Phil goes on with a list of other, logical, things which could account for the known facts. All of them have been dismissed or deemed highly unlikely. Just for giggles, I posted on a NASA blog what I thought it could be. A ringworld. I expected to get laughed out of the room. Larry Niven’s flight of fancy, a single structure to replace all the planets in a system, has very little practical value.

Except …. it kind of fits. If you were building something like that there would be periods of massive dimming and periods of increased brightness. Also, since the structure would only be capturing solar energy, there would be no transmissions to track. Plus, once completed the dimming would be constant. So my stupid suggestion got added to the list of possibilities. I’ll keep you posted.

A little closer to home Pluto’s still a dwarf planet, but that’s okay. Scientists now know it’s got lots of company out there so it’s not some lonely little wanderer. The problem is that its wanderings, and the wanderings of its buddies, are a little off. As in, off enough that something must be disturbing them. Something big.

Irene Klotz, over at Discovery, says that something is a planet as big as Neptune.

The astronomer who helped kick Pluto out of the planet club believes a much larger body may be lurking in the outskirts of the solar system.

If it exists, the solar system’s ninth planet is estimated to be a gas world about 10 times bigger than Earth, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown wrote in this week’s Astronomical Journal.

Brown and colleague Konstantin Batygin, also at Caltech, used mathematical models and computer simulations to deduce the planet’s existence, but they also have some observational evidence to support their claim. Several small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune have quirks in their orbits that may be explained by the gravitational influence of a larger, more distant planetary cousin.

Scientists then realized that six of those bodies follow elliptical paths pointing toward the same direction in space.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” Brown said in a press release, adding that the odds of that happening are about one-in-100.

The orbits also are tilted in the same direction, roughly 30 degrees downward relative to the orbital plane of the solar system’s other eight planets.

“We thought something else must be shaping these orbits,” Brown said.

After checking if a batch of other Kuiper Belt objects might be responsible, the scientists started doing computer simulations that included a distant outer planet in various orbits.

They found an unusual match: a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, which is an orbit in which the planet’s closest approach to the sun is 180 degrees across from the closest approach of the objects and known planets in the solar system.

“I was very skeptical,” Batygin said in the release. “I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics.”

Besides accounting for peculiarities in some Kuiper Belt objects’ orbits, the predicted rogue planet, located at least 200 times farther away from the sun than Earth, also would pin other Kuiper Belt bodies into orbits perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the planets.

“I realized there are objects like that,” Brown said. “We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly.”

If true, and all signs point to it being so, a planet like that should have moons. And, as we’ve discovered, many moons have water. That could easily become a staging area for extra-solar exploration.

But first we need to find it.

Even closer to home, the nice folks at the Irish Examiner have noted that aliens may already live among us and, even odder, I may have eaten some of them.

Not to send you into a meltdown or anything but octopuses are basically ‘aliens’ – according to scientists.

Researchers have found a new map of the octopus genetic code that is so strange that it could be actually be an “alien”.

The first whole cephalopod genome sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human.

Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in a pack – containing numerous so-called “jumping genes” that can leap around the genome.

“The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities,” said US researcher Dr Clifton Ragsdale, from the University of Chicago.

“The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.”

The scientists sequenced the genome of the California two-spot octopus in a study published in the journal Nature.

They discovered unique genetic traits that are likely to have played a key role in the evolution of characteristics such as the complex nervous system and adaptive camouflage.

Analysis of 12 different tissues revealed hundreds of octopus-specific genes found in no other animal, many of them highly active in structures such as the brain, skin and suckers.

The scientists estimate that the two-spot octopus genome contains 2.7 billion base pairs – the chemical units of DNA – with long stretches of repeated sequences.

And although the genome is slightly smaller than a human’s, it is packed with more genes.

Reshuffling was a key characteristic of the creature’s genetic make-up. In most species, cohorts of certain genes tend to be close together on the double-helix DNA molecule.

A gene is a region of DNA that contains the coded instructions for making a protein.

In the octopus, however, there are no such groupings of genes with related functions. For instance, Hox genes – which control body plan development – cluster together in almost all animals but are scattered throughout the octopus genome.

It was as if the octopus genome had been “put into a blender and mixed”, said co-author Caroline Albertin, also from the University of Chicago.

Okay, breathe, relax, calm down. Their genes are ordered different than ours, they aren’t actually different than ours. All the parts are there, just like in us, they just never came together like ours did.

Just in case you, for some reason, think we’re the most advanced beings on the planet, I’ll remind you that, in 2016, Louisiana banned oral sex, or any form of sodomy, but kept necrophilia legal.

Now you know why I don’t write about them any more.

Toadies : Summer of the Strange (NSFW) from Kirtland Records on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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When I was a kid my grandmother, a devout Catholic, had an interesting phrase she used to say. “Nature takes its own.” It was her, slightly pagan, take on the whole “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing from Genesis. It also served as a reminder of her second favorite phrase, “The bible says the world is without end. It says nothing of man.” While her theology might have been a little skewed it worked for her. One thing she did harp on is that we were supposed to be custodians of the Earth. Being top of the food chain meant we had a great responsibility to all around us. I can honestly think of worse philosophies. She kept a garden, raised flowers, bred dogs and, with my grandfather, fed and kept squirrels and bees. Because of them I never grew up with a fear of nature. That had its good points and bad.

Let’s start by taking a look at a few of the bad things that man is doing right now. There is an unsubtle irony that rising waters are going to render NASA, the home of climate research, useless in a few decades if the trend isn’t reversed. The walls that some are trying to have built around Miami and other places in Florida are short term stop gaps, at best.

But, as my granny would say, God does have a sense of humor. Which is why, the home of the constant obfuscation and denial when it comes to climate change, Washington D.C., is sinking.

John Johnson tells us all about it.

It sounds like a metaphor but is geological reality: Washington, DC, is sinking. In fact, researchers led by a team at the University of Vermont predict that the ground will drop another six inches by the end of the century, reports UPI. The cause isn’t man-made: It’s the result of an age-old geologic process that will continue to unfold for thousands of years. But it’s presenting the DC region with a dangerous double-whammy—the ground is sinking at the same time that sea levels are rising because of warming temperatures, say the UV researchers. The study confirms a long-held theory on why sea levels around DC are rising faster than any other stretch along the coast, reports the Washington Post.

“Right now is the time to start making preparations,” says lead study author Ben DeJong. “Six extra inches of water really matters in this part of the world.” He and his team drilled dozens of boreholes around the Chesapeake Bay to figure out what’s happening. The culprit is an ancient ice sheet that covered much of North America, then retreated, and the land is oh-so-slowly settling back into place. DC was actually in an area just outside the sheet and “bulged upward,” as the Post puts it. “It’s a bit like sitting on one side of a water bed filled with very thick honey,” says DeJong. “Then the other side goes up. But when you stand, the bulge comes down again.”

At least that one’s not our fault. Just bad planning. Although rising water levels due to warming could exacerbate the problem in unforeseen ways. Swimming at the Smithsonian anyone?

But one that is our fault is happening in the wonderfully backwards state of Arizona. Rob Quinn says that the state is literally fracking Phoenix into a pit.

Researchers say that while there’s no need for residents of Phoenix to panic, parts of their city are slowly and unstoppably sinking into the ground. Land subsidence caused by the extraction of huge quantities of groundwater over the decades is to blame, and the Arizona State University researchers say it’s causing some parts of the metropolitan area to sink by roughly 0.75 inches a year, Sonoran News reports. Residents may not notice much change year to year, the researchers say, but over time, the problem will affect things like canals, utility lines, and sewers and, eventually, the foundations of buildings. The depletion of groundwater has changed the sediment under the area, so the drop is irreversible.

The lead researcher tells the Arizona Republic that the subsidence has “the potential to cause costly structural damages, and is something to keep an eye on.” The sinking is happening at an uneven rate—with some areas actually rising a little—meaning floodwaters could cause major problems in affected areas. Another problem, the lead researcher warns, is that the sediment changes have left the ground unable to store as much water as it used to. “We live in a desert, and our underground canteen is getting smaller,” she tells the News. The Republic notes that the problem is widespread across the US, with Denver, parts of California, and the New Jersey coast among the many areas starting to sink.

Just FYI, in case the above wasn’t clear, fracking uses a ton of groundwater.

Also, as noted above, the constant mining of subsurface water is also to blame. And, while not sinking at the moment, Oklahoma has seen a meteoric rise in the number of Earthquakes in ares where fracking is practiced. That leads to weakened infrastructures such as sewer lines, roads (which require stable beds) and pretty much anything you thought was built on solid ground.

Things like businesses and homes and stuff. Maybe they don’t need those in Oklahoma.

So, where is the good news? East of here. As in the Far East.

In countries where they don’t use harmful methods of energy extraction or have come around to the fact that maybe, just maybe, we might not want to kill the planet, they are taking measures to reduce the human imprint. And they are using some creative methods to accomplish that goal.

Dan Lewis reports that China is surrounding the Gobi Desert with billions of trees to stop dust storms and encroachment. He also reports its working.

One Chinese news agency, citing the State Forest Administration, reported in 2007 that “more than 20 percent of the lands affected by desertification in the project areas have been harnessed and soil erosion has been put under control in over 40 percent of the areas that used to suffer soil erosion in the past.”

And in 2014, the Daily Mail echoed these results, reporting that “a study says the measures are working, despite previous criticism.”

There are still problems. Trees tend to wither and die in desert conditions. So they are having to reroute water to stabilize the environment. The good news is that, as China clamps down on pollutants around the country, they have more fresh water to work with than ever before.

But, because China is still China, one of the methods they are using to save and reroute water, the Three Gorges Dam, is so large it will alter the rotation of the Earth.

Raising 39 trillion kilograms of water 175 meters above sea level will increase the Earth’s moment of inertia and thus slow its rotation. However, the effect would extremely small. NASA scientists calculated that shift of such as mass would increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and flat on the top. It would shift the pole position by about two centimeters (0.8 inch). Note that a shift in any object’s mass on the Earth relative to its axis of rotation will change its moment of inertia, although most shifts are too small to be measured (but they can be calculated).

Just remember this when someone tells you that man can’t alter anything on Earth.

Speaking of trees, and here altering the Earth in a good way, Amanda Froelich reports that Milan Italy is building the world’s largest vertical forest.

In an age where harmonious innovation is becoming more celebrated, sustainable designs to preserve the Earth and contribute to wellbeing are being implemented at a rapid rate. One such innovation to recently be accepted for development is a vertical forest designed by Stefan Boeri Architects.

The first ever vertical forest will soon be the greenest building in Milan. Because the average household in a city produces approximately 25-30 tons of CO2 per year, implementing greener architecture in highly populated areas cannot come soon enough.

This stunning development is part of a vision presented by BioMilano which promises to incorporate 60 abandoned farms into a greenbelt surrounding the city. Part of the mission is to create a vertical forest building which boasts a stunning green façade planted with dense forest systems to provide microclimate and to filter out polluting dust particles. According to Inhabit, there are two buildings currently under construction.

The greener architecture will help absorb CO2, oxygenate the air, moderate extreme temperatures, and lower noise pollution. The bio-canopy is not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but it helps lower living costs.

So it saves money, makes living in a city healthier and helps the earth be a better place to live. Bonus? It’s pretty too. Here’s a pic.

But how do you put all of those ideas together? How do you stop erosion while simultaneously upgrading the planet?

Amy Frearson says that one answer is to build a really fucking cool school and that Vo Trong Nghia is doing just that.

According to Vo Trong Nghia Architects, the structure is intended to promote sustainable development in Vietnam, in response to rapid industrialisation that causes frequent power shortages, increasing temperatures, high levels of pollution and reduced green space.

“It is our goal to create a green university building that counters these problems as well as instils sustainable practices to these future generations,” said the design team.

Creating 11,000 square metres of floor space, the seven-storey facility will feature a prefabricated modular concrete structure that can flexibly accommodate different uses, while also keeping construction costs to a minimum.

The building is orientated to face the prevailing wind, allowing for efficient cross ventilation, and large trees positioned in front of every window will help to lower the temperature of the air flow through the interior.

A shallow plan will also allow daylight to permeate each storey, reducing the need for artificial lighting.

Vo Trong Nghia Architects – whose previous projects include a naturally ventilated school and a thatched bamboo bar – says the structure provides an alternative to the air-conditioning-reliant buildings that dominate South-East Asia.

That’s important because not only does it reduce waste created by artificial air systems it reduces, dramatically, the amount of power needed for people to live.

Bonus? It’s pretty damn pretty too. Here’s a rendering from the architect.

Look at it this way, if monkeys and other primates really are evolving to full sentience (spoiler alert: they are) at least we’ll leave them a nice place to live.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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