Media Today

[Rick Plant]

'Fort Myers Beach is gone': Waterfront workers recount Hurricane Ian devastation
https://www.news-press.com/story/weather/hurricane/2022/09/29/fort-myers-beach-hurricane-ian-devastation-sees-significant-damage/8127319001/

[Rick Plant]

'Hundreds of bodies': Lee County man says the sheriff is finding many dead Floridians after late evacuations



On Sunday, a Lee County man was working on clearing debris from his home when CNN's Jim Acosta approached him to ask how they fared through Hurricane Ian.

The man showed Acosta the damage to the home, the most significant parts were at the back of the home because the house is on a canal.

But it was the comments that the man made about deaths in the area that was the most shocking.

"Four doors down, their son's best friend is a Lee County sheriff, and they're finding hundreds of bodies now," the man told CNN. Acosta noted it's the same information that they are hearing too. "It is not like 20s. It is hundreds of bodies that they're getting in and looking."

Thus far, the death toll is 74 people and Acosta noted that the numbers are expected to increase dramatically. CNN also asked the Lee County Sheriff at a briefing about the death count and they dismissed the accusations that the evacuations of Ft. Meyers and Lee County didn't happen soon enough.

See the video below:

[Rick Plant]

Venus and Jupiter take centerstage in the night sky this month

https://www.kxan.com/weather-traffic-qas/venus-and-jupiter-take-centerstage-in-the-night-sky-this-month/

[Rick Plant]

Fox News lawyers won't be able to use key defense arguments when jury hears Dominion case

Speaking with MSNBC host Katie Phang on Sunday, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times stated that lawyers for Fox will enter the courtroom where the Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit will be heard with their key defense points already made unavailable.

Reacting to a ruling on Friday that the case will be heard by a jury over Fox's protestations, host Phang stated, "Judge Eric Davis on Friday decimated much of Fox's potential trial defenses, ruling that Fox cannot invoke the neutral report privilege because the evidence does not support that Fox conducted good faith reporting. The judge also blocking Fox from using the fair reporting privilege because the statements made by Fox and its guests were not related to official proceedings."

Asked to explain what it means for the Fox lawyers, Peters replied, "When the jury gets the case several of Fox's key arguments will not be available for its lawyers to make."

"Several of these will have already been decided in Dominion''s favor because of the judge's decision on Friday," he explained. "So what this does is it significantly limits Fox's ability to mount a defense and leaves for the jury the key question of whether or not there is enough evidence to show that Fox hosts, producers and executives knew what they were putting on the air was false or at least recklessly disregarded information showing that it was false."

"That is how you get to potentially significant and sizeable judgment against Fox News," he added. "Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion and appears that, unless this settles, which I think it's highly unlikely at this point, and has already been highly unlikely because Fox appears to be preserving its options for appeal here, this is going to head to the jury and it will be one of the most significant and far-reaching defamation suits against a major media company that we have seen in decades."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Meet the next four people headed to the Moon – how the diverse crew of Artemis II shows NASA’s plan for the future of space exploration

https://theconversation.com/meet-the-next-four-people-headed-to-the-moon-how-the-diverse-crew-of-artemis-ii-shows-nasas-plan-for-the-future-of-space-exploration-203214

[Rick Plant]

Rings around Uranus! James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning image of ice giant (photo, video)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured an amazing image of Uranus, showing in great detail the ice giant's ring system, its brightest moons and its dynamic atmosphere.

The new observation, made on Feb. 6, follows a similarly stunning photo JWST captured recently of the solar system's other ice giant, Neptune.

The new Uranus image shows 11 of the planet's 13 known rings, some of which are so bright that they blend together somewhat. What will really astound astronomers, however, is the fact that JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument is sensitive enough to have captured the innermost two of Uranus' dusty rings.

These faint rings have only been glimpsed by two other astronomical eyes — those of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Uranus in 1986, and more recently by the advanced adaptive optics of the Keck Observatory.

When Voyager 2 imaged Uranus during its 1986 flyby, it saw the planet as little more than an inert blue marble lacking distinct features. This new JWST photo is a stark contrast, painting a picture of a dynamic and changing world.

The JWST image was made by combining data from two filters, which can be seen as the blue coloration and orange highlights, respectively. The representative-color image shows the dense icy fluid of water, methane, and ammonia above a small rocky core that comprises Uranus, which looks like a light blue snowball.



Uranus has a unique orbit in the solar system, with the ice giant rotating on its side, tilted at a roughly 90-degree angle respective to its path around the sun. This tilt causes Uranus to experience extreme seasons, with each pole exposed to constant sunlight for many years before being plunged into darkness for an equally long time.

Currently, it is spring at the northern pole of Uranus. This can be seen in the image, with the right side of the ice giant brightening at its north polar ice cap, which is facing toward the sun. This is the first time scientists have seen this aspect of the polar cap; it's missing from even the advanced images captured by Keck.

At the edge of the polar cap lies a bright cloud with some fainter extended features just about visible. This includes a second very bright cloud at the left limb of Uranus. Clouds like these are typical for Uranus and can be seen at infrared wavelengths; they are theorized to be connected to storm activity across the ice giant, JWST team members said. The northern pole of Uranus will experience its summer season beginning in 2028.

Watch Video: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-uranus-rings-photo

[Rick Plant]

Sea urchin die-off threatens reefs from Florida to Caribbean. Scientists hope to revive them



MIAMI — These days, long-spined sea urchins are known as the gardeners of the sea. They tend the algae on the coral reefs they call home, making sure it never overwhelms their hosts. Spotting one on the Florida reef tract is a good sign that nearby corals are doing OK.

Decades ago, their reputation was a little different. They were viewed as damaging nuisances — to divers and to reefs.

The first time marine scientist Don Levitan saw the reefs near the U.S. Virgin Islands, they were blanketed in black — the coral covered by thousands of urchins spiked with sharp, poisonous spines.

“It was so dense it looked like a reef of sea urchins,” said Levitan, a professor at Florida State University. “You couldn’t even walk into the water.”

That was in 1983, six months before a mysterious disease all but wiped out the population that reached throughout the Caribbean, including Florida’s reef tract. The average mortality rate across the Caribbean, he said, was 95%. In the following years, it would become clear that too few urchins would turn out to be worse for reefs than too many of them.

Now, after decades of gradual recovery, the population of this specific type of sea urchin, known formally as Diadema antillarum, has dramatically declined again. A recent paper led by Levitan, published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that a die-off that began in early 2022 was equally devastating: 98% of the Diadema population was wiped out, once again.

That looms as another blow to struggling coral reefs across the entire region, including Florida.

Diadema are known as the “billy goats of the sea.” Their favorite food is the macroalgae that can clump along coral, cutting off the oxygen it needs to survive. Diadema are prolific grazers, and if there are enough of them around, they create little algae-free zones— also called halos — around coral that help them survive.

The corals also give back to the urchins. They provide nooks and crannies to hide from hungry predators like triggerfish or hogfish.

But Florida’s corals aren’t in great shape these days. Climate change has made ocean water hotter and more acidic, causing coral bleaching. The widespread and devastating stony coral tissue loss disease has weakened scores of once-strong reefs. And plumes of pollution from leaky septic tanks and sewage spills are choking out coral with too many nutrients.

That’s why, Levitan said, they need all the help they can get from Diadema. But unlike other spots in the Caribbean, Florida saw some of the slowest recovery between the first die-off in the 1980s and the second recent one, so the natural population is nearly nonexistent.

“Places like Florida, if you went diving or snorkeling in the Florida Keys between these two mortality events you just didn’t see many Diadema at all,” he said.

A collaboration of Florida scientists has been working to change that. It’s been a long, slow process without much success or funding, scientists say, but some recent wins have given new hope to the mission of reviving this species.

Diadema nursery

The first hurdle is trying to get the darn things to reproduce — and grow up — in an aquarium.

“Some of the best aquaculturists I know have been dabbling with these things for years,” said Ken Nedimeyer, technical director of Reef Rescue USA. “Most other urchins are easy to breed and raise, so easy, but Diadema are so hard.”

And the first few attempts to release those painstakingly raised Diadema into the wild didn’t exactly go well. Nedimeyer remembers one try 20 years ago where researchers loosed the urchins on a patch of restored reef. Within 24 hours, they were all gone.

It’s taken scientists a while to figure out exactly what went wrong there, but the biggest culprit was likely the other neighbors on the reefs.

“They’re kind of like chocolate-covered peanuts. Everybody likes to eat them on the reef. Fish like em, crabs like em,” Nedimeyer said. “They just can’t seem to get past the gauntlet of all the fish mouths trying to eat them.”

Scientists have tried all sorts of things to fix that, including providing urchins with tiny undersea houses made of concrete or turned-over terracotta pots. In one experiment, researchers even tied fishing lines to the released urchins to track whether having a hiding spot nearby helped them avoid predators. (It did.)

After watching several ill-fated releases, scientists like Nedimeyer realized there was another factor at play. The urchins raised in captivity didn’t behave like their wild cousins, and they were less equipped to survive.

“In the aquarium, they feed them squishy algae, like romaine lettuce for a manatee. We have to teach them to chew,” Nedimeyer said. “In the process of chewing the algae off the rock, they consume some calcium carbonate from the rock that strengthens their spines.”

Nedimeyer’s lab is currently working on that part of the equation, using a batch of aquarium-raised Diadema from Joshua Patterson, a University Florida researcher based at the Florida Aquarium who leads the state in raising the urchins. Reef Rescue is trying to turn the pea-sized urchins into “reef competent” juveniles it can one day release into the wild.

“These are one of the most important critters out there. They’re critical for the Caribbean,” Nedimeyer said.

At last, success

Some of the most recent advances are happening in Miami’s backyard, at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science. Inside, rows of lit aquarium tanks hold dozens of baby urchins, their black spines waving in the current.

Diego Lirman, an associate professor within UM’s marine biology and fisheries division, said his team has released two batches of lab-spawned Diadema from Patterson’s lab to test sites near Miami Beach, with a third release planned for the summer.

Scientists are tracking the urchins to see if they stay on the reefs and survive, or if they’re gobbled up by hungry predators instead.

While those results won’t be ready for some time, Lirman said he’s heartened by the results of the latest paper he worked on, which was published recently in the journal of the International Coral Reef Society. In it, a team of researchers showed that their efforts to drop adult Diadema on five reef spots near Key Biscayne were successful.

Those sites saw a nearly 30% drop in algae cover after three months, and after nine months, about 40 of the original 200 urchins transplanted from Port Everglades and Government Cut remained at the Key Biscayne reefs.

“We’ve shown that they will stay for us, which is promising,” Lirman said.

However, the eventual goal is not to just move the urchins around but grow them in tanks and release them wherever they’re needed. At this point, Lirman said, scientists are just trying to use Diadema to help the struggling reefs. They’re not attempting to resurrect the species.

“The goal is not to get them to spawn, the goal is to get them to stay and clean the reef so our coral restoration can be successful,” he said. “At some point it would be nice to dump millions of competent larvae — that’s a pipe dream right now.”

https://www.rawstory.com/sea-urchin-die-off-threatens-reefs-from-florida-to-caribbean-scientists-hope-to-revive-them/