Severe flooding occurred in Thailand during the 2011 summer season, which resulted in more than 800 deaths and affected 13.6 million people. The unprecedented nature of this flood in the Chao Phraya River Basin (CPRB) was examined and compared with historical flood years. Climate diagnostics were conducted to understand the meteorological conditions and climate forcing that lead to the magnitude and duration of this flood. Neither the monsoon rainfall nor the tropical cyclone frequency anomalies alone was sufficient to cause the 2011 flooding event. Instead, a series of abnormal conditions collectively contributed to the intensity of the 2011 flood: anomalously high rainfall in the pre-monsoon season especially during March; record-high soil moisture content thorough the year; elevated sea level height in the Gulf of Thailand which constrained drainage, as well as other water management factors. In the context of climate change, the substantially increased pre-monsoon rainfall in CPRB after 1980 and the continual sea level rise in the river outlet have both played a role. The rainfall increase is associated with a strengthening of the pre-monsoon northeasterly winds that come from East Asia. Attribution analysis using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 historical experiments pointed to the anthropogenic greenhouse gases as the main external climate forcing leading to the rainfall increase. Together, these findings suggest increasing odds for potential flooding similar to the 2011 flood intensity.
Apple has more than $205bn of cash in the bank, the company revealed on Tuesday as its chief executive Tim Cook said the firm had made more than $234bn in 2015, making it its “most successful year ever”.I'm not sure their doing anything really useful with their money, though, apart from throwing it in the air and letting it fall on their head, McDuck style. I suggest establishing a private air force with which to blow up coal mines or their train lines. (Useful and would annoy Bill Gates, too!)
The California company now has more money in the bank than the Czech Republic, Peru and New Zealand make in gross domestic product (GDP) a year, according to World Bank statistics. Apple’s cash balances increased by $2.8bn in the last three months alone.
This is going to be pretty hard for some of you to get your heads around, so I guess I better just tell it to you straight:
So, about that Margaret Thatcher lecture that Tony Abbott is delivering in London on Tuesday night – you know, the privately funded trip which, according to the former PM's office, he's being accompanied on with his wife, Margie Abbott?
If only the travelling party was really so conventional. See, there's also a villa in France, where, following the big speech, Abbott will be retiring for a period of convalescence with his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, his C-bombing advancer, Richard Dowdy, (aptly named) and his mysterious press office veteran, Nicole Chant.
And you thought Credlin joining the then PM (sans wife Margie, but avec daughter Frances Abbott) skiing at Perisher in July was a little unusual!
We wonder if Margie will be joining the French party or steering well clear? If we're all still talking about Ainsley Gotto nearly 50 years after she ran John Gorton's PMO, Abbott's Last Tango Near Paris will certainly be one for the history books.
A human body may be able to adapt to extremes of dry-bulb temperature (commonly referred to as simply temperature) through perspiration and associated evaporative cooling provided that the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess’) remains below a threshold of 35 °C. (ref. 1). This threshold defines a limit of survivability for a fit human under well-ventilated outdoor conditions and is lower for most people. We project using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations. Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.* OK, without airconditioning. Although, it's actually pretty incredible to me that people lived there at all before airconditioning. Here's the summary from phys.org:
It would still be rare, and cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha wouldn't quite be uninhabitable, thanks to air conditioning. But for people living and working outside or those with no air conditioning, it would be intolerable, said Eltahir and Pal. While Mecca won't be quite as hot, the heat will likely still cause many deaths during the annual hajj pilgrimage, Eltahir said.
In latent infection, HIV integrates its genetic material into the DNA of the patient and becomes “silent”.
A brilliant added tool is the use of a long-lived critical cell of the immune system, the resting T cell, as its preferred hiding site. These latently infected resting T cells can slowly divide and, given HIV is now part of the patient’s DNA, the HIV is passed down to the daughter cells too.
HIV usually replicates in activated T cells and can efficiently kill those cells in several ways. First, the virus directly damages the outer membrane of the cell. This membrane usually keeps the cell intact.
Following infection of a cell, bits of the virus are quickly revealed to the immune system which, once activated, can zoom in and eliminate the infected cell.As the article also notes, people who go off the antiviral drugs quickly get high viral counts - within weeks.
However, if the virus manages to get inside a resting cell, in contrast to an activated T cell, all the machinery needed to produce new viruses is not available and the virus life cycle essentially shuts down.
If things shut down after the virus has already entered the patient’s DNA it gets stuck there – forever.
The young pilot had been flying for almost four hours when he heard a dull thump, the aircraft lurched forward, and there was a bright orange flash from a nearby surface-to-air missile. The plane’s right wing began to droop and the nose started to go down. Powers tried to correct it, but the plane continued its downward trajectory. Powers was uncertain if the control cable had been severed or if the tail was gone. He was certain, however, that he no longer had control of the plane.Maybe not exactly as portrayed in the movie, but pretty close.
Powers initial reaction was to pull the destruct switches, but he decided he’d better secure an exit plan for himself first. This, however, was proving difficult as the g forces had hurled him to the nose of the plane, which was spinning tail first towards the earth. Powers thought of ejecting but realized, in his current position, he likely would have had both off his legs cut off while trying to escape the plane.
On the verge of panic, Powers decided he would climb out of the plane. The whirling aircraft had passed thirty-four thousand feet when he removed the canopy. He took off his seat-belt, which sent him flying halfway out of the aircraft. His face plate frosted over rendering him visionless. Powers tried to get to the destruct switches twice but, realizing time was running out, he began kicking frantically and miraculously the oxygen hoses that were holding him hostage in the U-2 broke and freed him from the spiraling plane.
Suddenly, all was silent, except for the rustling of material as the chute opened and settled in the wind. Powers hung in the air desperately trying to comprehend what had just happened and trying to assess his current situation. He was fifteen thousand feet above the Soviet Union and the ground was growing ever closer. As he clutched the straps of his chute, he saw a piece of the plane float down past him.
A paper published this week in Nature challenges this finding. The authors—Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang and Edward Miguel—suspected that economists had been looking for the wrong thing: a linear relationship between temperature and growth. Instead, they looked for an optimal temperature, on the assumption that excessive cold could harm growth as much as punishing heat. That is exactly what they found: hotter-than-usual years benefit countries, rich and poor alike, up to an average annual temperature of 13°C, after which hotter weather begins to sear growth. That allowed them to draw inferences about the likely effect of climate change: for Brazil, for example, an increase in temperature of 3°C will lead to a fall in output of 3% (see chart).David Appel shares my skepticism of (as he puts it) an economic model atop a climate model, but his post extracting some of the material from the paper is worth reading too. (I added a comment to his post along the lines of what I said here.)
The apparent heat resistance of rich countries, it turns out, is simply because some of them, such as Germany and France, lie on the colder side of the optimum, so grow faster in hotter years, whereas others, such as America and Australia, lie on the hotter side, and so wilt as temperatures rise. Within individual counties in America, for instance, every hot day (with an average temperature over 24 hours of 24-27°C) lowers the average income per person that day by 20%, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Mr Hsiang and Tatyana Deryugina. Very hot days (over 30°C) lower income per person by 28%. Looking at the average impact of rising temperatures in rich countries as a group had obscured such strong responses.
Mr Abbott's preferred topics include advice on leadership, negotiation, election forecast and analysis, current events and Asia.
It occurs in people who lose the sense of smell. People with phantosmia imagine smells which can be odd, unnatural, unpleasant or even euphoric. It is a rare condition which can occur in relation to brain injuries, strokes, seizures, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.From a recent episode of the Science Show. You can read more in the transcript that is at the link on this page.
