Even Wasps make trade deals, say scientists

Written by University of Sussex

This is a picture of helper wasps used in the study.
Credit: T. Pennell
Wasps have trading partners and compete for the ‘best trade deals’ — according to scientists from the University of Sussex.

In the study, the team from the University’s School of Life Sciences, looked at how the economic rule of ‘supply and demand’ applies to populations of paper wasps — in which ‘helper wasps’ raise the offspring of dominant breeders in small social groups in return for belonging in the nest.

During the study, which was carried out in southern Spain over a period of three months, the team marked and genotyped 1500 wasps and recorded social behaviour within 43 separate nests along a cactus hedge.

By increasing the number of nest spots and nesting partners available around the hedge, the scientists discovered the helper wasps provide less help to their own ‘bosses’ (the dominant breeders) when alternative nesting options are available. The dominant wasps then compete to give the helper wasps the ‘best deal’, by allowing them to work less hard, to ensure they stay in their particular nest.

The scientists state this shows for the first-time that supply and demand theory can be used to understand helping behaviour in social insects. Traditionally scientists thought that factors within social groups, such as number of helpers and genetic relatedness, are what predominantly influences helping behaviour. However the new findings from the University of Sussex researchers show that market forces in the whole population, such as the supply of outside options, can be used to predict insect behaviour.

Dr Lena Grinsted, from the University of Sussex, said: “It is remarkable to discover that simply changing the wasps’ surrounding social environment has a clear effect on cooperative behaviour within groups.

“Our findings reveal intriguing parallels between wasp populations and our own business world: a bad deal is better than no deal, so when competition increases so does the risk that you have to accept a lower price for what you offer.

“Market forces can clearly affect trade agreements in nature, as they can in human markets: with a larger number of trading partners available, you can negotiate better trade deals.”


Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Sussex. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Lena Grinsted, Jeremy Field. Market forces influence helping behaviour in cooperatively breeding paper wasps. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 13750 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13750

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2017: Arctic Sea Ice Extent Largest in Three Years

Written by Tony Heller

Desperate to keep their fraudulently obtained funding coming in, climate experts continue to insist that the Arctic is hot and rapidly melting.

The exact opposite is occurring. Arctic sea ice is growing very fast, and is now higher than 2015 and 2016.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

The ice edge is close to the 1981-2010 mean.

‎nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent.png

Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain this winter, having gained nearly 450 billion tons of ice since September 1.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Global warming is the biggest scam in science history.

Read more at realclimatescience.com

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New Paper: 14 Scientists Affirm the Sun, Not CO2, is ‘Dominant Control’ of Recent Climate Change

Written by Kenneth Richard

One of the oft-stated “truths” for advocates of the position that humans are predominantly responsible for climate changes is that the Sun could not have played more than a negligible role in the global warming of the last few centuries. Indeed, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report theorizes that the long-term solar contribution to climate change has been slightly above zero.

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New Study: CO2 emissions reduced risk of flooding in Africa

Written by Hannah R Parker, Fraser C Lott et al.

Abstract: In 2012, heavy rainfall resulted in flooding and devastating impacts across West Africa. With many people highly vulnerable to such events in this region, this study investigates whether anthropogenic climate change has influenced such heavy precipitation events.

We use a probabilistic event attribution approach to assess the contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, by comparing the probability of such an event occurring in climate model simulations with all known climate forcings to those where natural forcings only are simulated.

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Cosmic Radiation ‘Clouds’ Penetrating as low as Commercial Flight Altitudes

Written by Tony Phillips

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather reports the discovery of radiation “clouds” at aviation altitudes. When airplanes fly through these clouds, dose rates of cosmic radiation normally absorbed by air travelers can double or more.

“We have flown radiation sensors onboard 264 research flights at altitudes as high as 17.3 km (56,700 ft) from 2013 to 2017,” says Kent Tobiska, lead author of the paper and PI of the NASA-supported program Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS). “On at least six occasions, our sensors have recorded surges in ionizing radiation that we interpret as analogous to localized clouds.”

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Worldwide: Wind Turbines Combusting & Collapsing

Written by stopthesethings.com

The number of cases involving turbines collapsing, self immolating or throwing their blades to the four winds (aka “component liberation”) has become so common that, if we were a tad cynical, we would go so far to suggest the possibility of some kind of pattern, along the lines proffered by Mr Bond’s nemesis, Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times it’s enemy action”.

This collection of stories from the US, UK, Germany and Canada suggests either enemy action or a product with a thoroughly hopeless design.

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Study: Solar Activity ‘Key’ to China Climate Change for last 2,200 Years

Written by Jianyong Lia, John Dodson et.

Highlights: New study shows solar activity is key in a high-resolution dataset for precipitation and temperature over the last 2200 years in monsoonal northern China. A fine-grained numerical dataset for 17 Chinese historical proxy records during the pre-industrial era. Precipitation has been more important than temperature in causing geopolitical shifts in monsoonal northern China.

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Moon Older than Scientists Thought

Written by University of California - Los Angeles

A UCLA-led research team reports that the moon is at least 4.51 billion years old, or 40 million to 140 million years older than scientists previously thought.

The findings — based on an analysis of minerals from the moon called zircons that were brought back to Earth by the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 — are published Jan. 11 in the journal Science Advances. The moon’s age has been a hotly debated topic, even though scientists have tried to settle the question over many years and using a wide range of scientific techniques.

“We have finally pinned down a minimum age for the moon; it’s time we knew its age and now we do,” said Mélanie Barboni, the study’s lead author and a research geochemist in UCLA’s Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. 

The moon was formed by a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a “planetary embryo” called Theia, a UCLA-led team of geochemists and colleagues reported in 2016.

The newest research would mean that the moon formed “only” about 60 million years after the birth of the solar system — an important point because it would provide critical information for astronomers and planetary scientists who seek to understand the early evolution of the Earth and our solar system.

That has been a difficult task, Barboni said, because “whatever was there before the giant impact has been erased.” While scientists cannot know what occurred before the collision with Theia, these findings are important because they will help scientists continue to piece together major events that followed it.

It’s usually difficult to determine the age of moon rocks because most of them contain a patchwork of fragments of multiple other rocks. But Barboni was able to analyze eight zircons in pristine condition. Specifically, she examined how the uranium they contained had decayed to lead (in a lab at Princeton University) and how the lutetium they contained had decayed to an element called hafnium (using a mass spectrometer at UCLA). The researchers analyzed those elements together to determine the moon’s age.

“Zircons are nature’s best clocks,” said Kevin McKeegan, a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry, and a co-author of the study. “They are the best mineral in preserving geological history and revealing where they originated.”

The Earth’s collision with Theia created a liquefied moon, which then solidified. Scientists believe most of the moon’s surface was covered with magma right after its formation. The uranium-lead measurements reveal when the zircons first appeared in the moon’s initial magma ocean, which later cooled down and formed the moon’s mantle and crust; the lutetium-hafnium measurements reveal when its magma formed, which happened earlier.

“Mélanie was very clever in figuring out the moon’s real age dates back to its pre-history before it solidified, not to its solidification,” said Edward Young, a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry and a co-author of the study.

Previous studies concluded the moon’s age based on moon rocks that had been contaminated by multiple collisions. McKeegan said those rocks indicated the date of some other events, “but not the age of the moon.”

The UCLA researchers are continuing to study zircons brought back by the Apollo astronauts to study the early history of the moon.

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3D bio-printer to create human skin

Written by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Bioprinter prototype.
Credit: Image courtesy of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid – Oficina de Información Científica
 Scientists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), CIEMAT (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research), Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, in collaboration with the firm BioDan Group, have presented a prototype for a 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin. This skin is adequate for transplanting to patients or for use in research or the testing of cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical products.

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Carbon Dioxide: The future for a Cooler World

Written by John O'Sullivan

Will your next car have carbon dioxide air conditioning? For the last 30 years American academics and climate ‘experts’ have gotten away with telling us that carbon dioxide is a dangerous warming gas, a hazard to life. But in the real world engineers and applied scientists use carbon dioxide every day to keep us cool, grow better crops and refrigerate products. Indeed, CO2 is nature’s best cooling gas! Ask Mercedes Benz!

Thankfully, the voice of the sanity is getting heard – the truth is coming out and anti-science groups are furious. For instance, groupthink academics who claim that carbon dioxide is a global warming gas seem oblivious to the fact conventional refrigerants i.e. hydrofluorocarbons cause about 1,400 times more ‘global warming potential’ than the same quantity of cooling carbon dioxide.

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Study: Last Interglacial Era had higher Sea levels & Temperatures than today

Written by Jeremy S. Hoffman, Peter U. Clark et al.

Understanding how warm intervals affected sea level in the past is vital for projecting how human activities will affect it in the future. Hoffman et al. compiled estimates of sea surface temperatures during the last interglacial period, which lasted from about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago.

The global mean annual values were ∼0.5°C warmer than they were 150 years ago and indistinguishable from the 1995–2014 mean. This is a sobering point, because sea levels during the last interglacial period were 6 to 9 m higher than they are now.

Science, this issue p. 276

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Time For NASA To Terminate Gavin Schmidt

Written by Tony Heller

The New York Times is going off-chart with their climate lies, egged on by top climate fraudster Gavin Schmidt of NASA. They say the Arctic is hot and global warming is making people starve in Africa.

Exact opposite of Gavin’s Arctic claims, Alaska is seeing near record cold, as is Greenland and much of Russia.

Alaska Climate Research Center

Greenland Summit Camp

Africa is not burning up, rather they are seeing record snow.

Snow Sahara

Forty years ago, the New York Times blamed African drought and famine on global cooling. Now they blame global warming.

TimesMachine: December 29, 1974 – NYTimes.com

Gavin’s temperatures are fake. They don’t even vaguely match much more accurate satellite temperatures.

NASA Vs. Satellites

Gavin has massively tampered with his own data, to produce meaningless propaganda.

RSS   NASA 2000 and 2016

The New York Times blames 124 degree weather on global warming.  In 1913, it was 134 degrees during one of NASA’s coldest years on record.

California 1913

Sane policy will never occur while Gavin Schmidt continues to lie to the New York Times, and the New York Times continues to lie to their readers. President Trump should send these fraudsters packing.

Read more at realclimatescience.com

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Shock horror: Arctic Sea Ice 2017 matches 2006

Written by polarbearscience.com

 

masie_all_zoom_4km-2017-jan-18

Sea ice charts for 18 January from NSIDC Masie show exactly as much sea ice in 2017 as there was back in 2006 – 13.4 mkm2. Masie image below from 2006 (enlarged and cropped from archived version and label re-inserted) shows the distribution of ice was slightly different than this year (less in Baffin Bay/Davis Strait/Labrador Sea, more in the Barents and Bering Seas):

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Study: East Asian Monsoons Change Due to ‘Orbital Forcing’

Written by An, SI., Kim et al.

Orbital forcing influences climate phenomena by changing incoming solar radiation in season and latitude.

Here, changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)’s impact on the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) due to orbital forcing, especially for three selected time periods in each of two interglacial periods, the Eemian (126, 122, 115 ka) and Holocene (9, 6, 0 ka), are investigated.

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First humans in North America Lot Earlier than believed

Written by University of Montreal

The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years.

This has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt by Ariane Burke, a professor in Université de Montréal’s Department of Anthropology, and her doctoral student Lauriane Bourgeon, with the contribution of Dr. Thomas Higham, Deputy Director of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

The earliest settlement date of North America, until now estimated at 14,000 years Before Present (BP) according to the earliest dated archaeological sites, is now estimated at 24,000 BP, at the height of the last ice age or Last Glacial Maximum.

The researchers made their discovery using artifacts from the Bluefish Caves, located on the banks of the Bluefish River in northern Yukon near the Alaska border. The site was excavated by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 1977 and 1987. Based on radiocarbon dating of animal bones, the researcher made the bold hypothesis that human settlement in the region dated as far back as 30,000 BP.

In the absence of other sites of similar age, Cinq-Mars’ hypothesis remained highly controversial in the scientific community. Moreover, there was no evidence that the presence of horse, mammoth, bison and caribou bones in the Bluefish Caves was due to human activity.

To set the record straight, Bourgeon examined the approximate 36,000 bone fragments culled from the site and preserved at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau — an enormous undertaking that took her two years to complete. Comprehensive analysis of certain pieces at UdeM’s Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory revealed undeniable traces of human activity in 15 bones. Around 20 other fragments also showed probable traces of the same type of activity.

“Series of straight, V-shaped lines on the surface of the bones were made by stone tools used to skin animals,” said Burke. “These are indisputable cut-marks created by humans.”

Bourgeon submitted the bones to further radiocarbon dating. The oldest fragment, a horse mandible showing the marks of a stone tool apparently used to remove the tongue, was radiocarbon-dated at 19,650 years, which is equivalent to between 23,000 and 24,000 cal BP (calibrated years Before Present).

“Our discovery confirms previous analyses and demonstrates that this is the earliest known site of human settlement in Canada,” said Burke. It shows that Eastern Beringia was inhabited during the last ice age.”

Beringia is a vast region stretching from the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories to the Lena River in Russia. According to Burke, studies in population genetics have shown that a group of a few thousand individuals lived in isolation from the rest of the world in Beringia 15,000 to 24,000 years ago.

“Our discovery confirms the ‘Beringian standstill [or genetic isolation] hypothesis,'” she said, “Genetic isolation would have corresponded to geographical isolation. During the Last Glacial Maximum, Beringia was isolated from the rest of North America by glaciers and steppes too inhospitable for human occupation to the West. It was potentially a place of refuge.”

The Beringians of Bluefish Caves were therefore among the ancestors of people who, at the end of the last ice age, colonized the entire continent along the coast to South America.

The results of Lauriane Bourgeon’s doctoral research were published in the January 6 edition of PLoS One under the title “Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada.” The article is co-authored by Professor Burke and by Dr. Thomas Higham of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, in the U.K.

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Heat from Earth’s core drives plate tectonics

Written by University of Chicago

For decades, scientists have theorized that the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates is driven largely by negative buoyancy created as they cool. New research, however, shows plate dynamics are driven significantly by the additional force of heat drawn from the Earth’s core.

The new findings also challenge the theory that underwater mountain ranges known as mid-ocean ridges are passive boundaries between moving plates. The findings show the East Pacific Rise, the Earth’s dominant mid-ocean ridge, is dynamic as heat is transferred.

David B. Rowley, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and fellow researchers came to the conclusions by combining observations of the East Pacific Rise with insights from modeling of the mantle flow there. The findings were published Dec. 23 in Science Advances.

“We see strong support for significant deep mantle contributions of heat-to-plate dynamics in the Pacific hemisphere,” said Rowley, lead author of the paper. “Heat from the base of the mantle contributes significantly to the strength of the flow of heat in the mantle and to the resultant plate tectonics.”

The researchers estimate up to approximately 50 percent of plate dynamics are driven by heat from the Earth’s core and as much as 20 terawatts of heat flow between the core and the mantle.

Unlike most other mid-ocean ridges, the East Pacific Rise as a whole has not moved east-west for 50 to 80 million years, even as parts of it have been spreading asymmetrically. These dynamics cannot be explained solely by the subduction — a process whereby one plate moves under another or sinks. Researchers in the new findings attribute the phenomena to buoyancy created by heat arising from deep in the Earth’s interior.

“The East Pacific Rise is stable because the flow arising from the deep mantle has captured it,” Rowley said. “This stability is directly linked to and controlled by mantle upwelling,” or the release of heat from Earth’s core through the mantle to the surface.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, particularly in the South Atlantic, also may have direct coupling with deep mantle flow, he added.

“The consequences of this research are very important for all scientists working on the dynamics of the Earth, including plate tectonics, seismic activity and volcanism,” said Jean Braun of the German Research Centre for Geosciences, who was not involved in the research.

The forces at work

Convection, or the flow of mantle material transporting heat, drives plate tectonics. As envisioned in the current research, heating at the base of the mantle reduces the density of the material, giving it buoyancy and causing it to rise through the mantle and couple with the overlying plates adjacent to the East Pacific Rise. The deep mantle-derived buoyancy, together with plate cooling at the surface, creates negative buoyancy that together explain the observations along the East Pacific Rise and surrounding Pacific subduction zones.

A debate about the origin of the driving forces of plate tectonics dates back to the early 1970s. Scientists have asked: Does the buoyancy that drives plates primarily derive from plate cooling at the surface, analogous with cooling and overturning of lakes in the winter? Or, is there also a source of positive buoyancy arising from heat at the base of the mantle associated with heat extracted from the core and, if so, how much does it contribute to plate motions? The latter theory is analogous to cooking oatmeal: Heat at the bottom causes the oatmeal to rise, and heat loss along the top surface cools the oatmeal, causing it to sink.

Until now, most assessments have favored the first scenario, with little or no contribution from buoyancy arising from heat at the base. The new findings suggest that the second scenario is required to account for the observations, and that there is an approximately equal contribution from both sources of the buoyancy driving the plates, at least in the Pacific basin.

“Based on our models of mantle convection, the mantle may be removing as much as half of Earth’s total convective heat budget from the core,” Rowley said. Much work has been performed over the past four decades to represent mantle convection by computer simulation. Now the models will have to be revised to account for mantle upwelling, according to the researchers.

“The implication of our work is that textbooks will need to be rewritten,” Rowley said.

The research could have broader implications for understanding the formation of the Earth, Braun said. “It has important consequences for the thermal budget of the Earth and the so-called ‘secular cooling’ of the core. If heat coming from the core is more important than we thought, this implies that the total heat originally stored in the core is much larger than we thought.

“Also, the magnetic field of the Earth is generated by flow in the liquid core, so the findings of Rowley and co-authors are likely to have implications for our understanding of the existence, character and amplitude of the Earth’s magnetic field and its evolution through geological time,” Braun added.

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