DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 27, 2016

Microbial Eve – LUCA

This is cool stuff and great detective work.  Still some controversy about good old LUCA, but this certainly moves the debate along.

In the last few years, DNA analysis has allowed researchers to redraw the tree of life in incredible detail, but there’s always been a question mark at the base of the tree. While it’s unlikely that researchers will ever find the exact species that started it all, they recently came up with a pretty good description of LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all of Earth's creatures, sometimes referred to as microbial Eve.

After all those billions of years of change, LUCA’s fingerprints are still visible in the genes of modern organisms. That’s why William Martin, an evolutionary biologist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, set out to study LUCA's trail in the genes of bacteria and archaea, the two groups researchers believe became eukaryotes.

Inexpensive Sensor Technology

This type of sensor can perform remote data collection and transmission.  This means we can test water quality in real time.  The technology can be applied to air monitoring as well.  It’s not that complex a technology.

Currently, if the water quality of a lake, river, or body of wastewater needs to be tested, a sample is collected and taken back to a lab to test for things like nitrate levels, heavy metals or other pollutants. This process not only takes a lot of time, but is also very expensive when you're monitoring several bodies of water continuously. Researchers at University of Western Australia see a future where water quality data is instantly available and inexpensive, thanks to a new type of environmental sensor they've developed.

The team, led by Professor Giacinta Parish, is calling their new technology a new kind of sensor. It's made from gallium nitride, a material that can perform in extreme heat and at high power levels, unlike the materials silicon and gallium arsenide that are often used in sensor chips.

Neonicotinoids Impacting Bee Reproduction

The impact of insecticide on bee population decline has been contentious.  But, this is a real indictment of neonicotinoids.

A new study finds that a commonly used insecticide kills much of the sperm created by male drone honey bees, one reason why the bees are dwindling.

The class of insecticide called neonicotinoids didn't kill the drones. But bees that ate treated pollen produced 39 percent less live sperm than those that didn't, according to a controlled experiment by Swiss researchers published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It essentially acted as an accidental contraceptive on the drones, whose main job is to mate with the queen — but not one that prevented complete reproduction, just making it tougher, said Lars Straub, lead author of the study and a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Bern. Drones, which are the product of unfertilized eggs, don't gather nectar or pollen and don't sting; they die after mating.

NY Times Is So Very Wrong

The supposed “paper of record” apparently loves nuclear power and can’t admit that renewables can take the load in the next 30 years.  Confusing for such a high quality newspaper.

The New York Times article "suffers from the inaccurate assumption that existing expensive nuclear that is shut down will be replaced by natural gas. This is impossible in California, for example, since gas is currently 60 percent of electricity supply but state law requires non-large-hydro clean renewables to be 50 percent by 2030. This means that, with the shuttering of Diablo Canyon nuclear facility be 2025, gas can by no greater than 35-44 percent of California supply since clean renewables will be at least 50 percent (and probably much more) and large hydro will be 6-15 percent. As such, gas must go down no matter what. In fact, 100 percent of all new electric power in Europe in 2015 was clean, renewable energy with no new net gas, and 70 percent of all new energy in the U.S. was clean and renewable, so the fact is nuclear is not being replaced by gas but by clean, renewable energy.

"The notion that non-renewable power sources are necessary is questionable at best. Some scientists believe that, over the next few decades, renewables could provide all our power. One is Stanford Prof. Mark Jacobson. He has done modeling to show the U.S. could be entirely powered by renewables by 2050.

…the Times has been consistently pro-nuclear. Its slanted coverage has served as an industry bulwark for decades. A long-time atomic beat reporter, Matt Wald, went straight from the Times to a job with the Nuclear Energy Institute, the primary public relations front for the reactor industry. The Times has a long history as a cheerleader for nuclear power dating back to the atomic bomb era, when it consistently denied health problems from radioactive fallout. It also denied health problems resulting from radiation releases at Three Mile Island, and much more. Now it has taken a major role in defending the nuclear industry from the renewable energy revolution that is driving it to bankruptcy while bringing a tsunami of reactor shut downs. It's these shut downs that now seem to worry the paper.

Bear Cam - Brooks Falls, Alaska

View from the iconic site where Alaskan bears feast on migrating salmon.  It's live, so only interesting during day light (in Alaska) hours.

h/t Balloon Juice