Why birds can fly over Mount Everest (2020)
lede-v2.nautil.us134 points by andsoitis 5 days ago
134 points by andsoitis 5 days ago
Yeah, nice article that makes me think the civilisation that wants to survive longer should rely on more fundamental energy sources, like solar radiation, rather than byproducts of evolution.
Solar energy output has exploded the past few years, it's not all bad news out there.
Written by Walter Murch?? Like, the guy who is considered maybe the best editor and sound designer of all time, who was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, and won 3??? (Editing perhaps second only to Thelma Schoonmaker.)
From the footer of TFA:
Walter Murch has been working in film for more than 50 years, as an editor, sound designer, writer, and director. He edited and sound-designed many films for Francis Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain). His interest in science can be seen in his editing of Mark Levinson’s film Particle Fever (2013), about the search for the Higgs Boson.
Yes, That Walter Murch.
In The Blink Of An Eye is on the bookshelf just behind the monitor I'm typing this on, with my headphones and BMD Speed Editor slightly blocking my view of it.
(2020). Previous submissions with comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23639294 (Jun 26, 2020 - 96 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28844872 (Oct 12, 2021 - 108 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34210508 (Jan 1, 2023 - 6 comments)
This submission is from 4 days ago, so it must've been placed into the second chance pool.
The part about coal coming from dead trees during a window of time before bacteria evolved lignin digestion is no longer the scientific consensus. Such bacteria existed earlier; not all coal is high lignin; and coal still formed later. Too bad; it was a lovely story!
That theory is not really disproven, even if it was not the only reason for the huge accumulations of coal during the Carboniferous.
Coal has been always forming later, even today, but never in such quantities, because later it required much luckier conditions for the wood to not be decomposed by fungi.
The climate and the position of the continents during the Carboniferous must have contributed to the accumulation of coal, i.e. it is likely that a much greater percentage of the surface of the Earth was covered by some kind of swamps with warm climate, where plants were abundant and dead wood could submerge and be protected from decomposition, but this still does not appear to be able to explain the so great discrepancy in the amount of accumulated coal.
The most likely explanation is that all factors must have contributed, the conformation of the continents, the climate and the low abundance or absence of wood-digesting fungi, or perhaps there already were wood-digesting fungi, but their enzymes were not as efficient yet as those of later fungi, so they could decompose only a small part of the wood before it was buried in sediments.
It's not bacteria. The only organisms that can digest lignin are fungi, and they do it by blasting lignin with peroxides.
As such, this works only in aerobic environments (not swamps).
And now I know why a variety of coal is called "Lignite". And why dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals were so big.
What an amazing story. It's been a while since I read something so interesting.
Ultimately, all energy on earth comes from the Sun, stored in the bonds between atoms or molecules. Plants are battery-manufacturing machines that create these bonds inside the organic compounds. Animals do the opposite - break the bonds to release the energy stored by trees. Animals also store energy within their own organic compounds such as fats and muscles and thus become part of the food pyramid.
> The difficult thing is that most old folks grew up thinking that oil, coal, and gas were great, and it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks.
Doesn't seem cynical enough to me. Some people make money on oil, coal, and gas, and it doesn't matter what they believe about the climate, they would do anything to continue enriching themselves. It is even worse, really, because they are not just some individuals, it is a big network of organizations. And some states too have their GDP dependent on a fossil fuel trade. You can probably talk a capitalist into surrendering their money-making practices, if they are damaging the Earth, but you can't convince an organization to dissolve or a state to go into a deep recession.
I agree about the incentives, but I wouldn't go as far as saying organizations can't change
But oil, gas and coal are indeed cool, you get some of the highest chemical energy density substances on Earth for the price of digging. It sucks that burning them reverts the atmosphere to something life isn't really adapted anymore, but the substances themselves are still pretty cool.
I still believe that in the future synthetic hydrocarbons will retain an important role for the long-term storage of energy, for which batteries are inappropriate, due to self-discharging, and also for aerospace applications.
Producing synthetic hydrocarbons is already old technology, which was used at large scale before the decreasing price of oil made that non-competitive.
Today the most inefficient part remains the capture of the diluted CO2 from air and its conversion into concentrated CO2, which is easy to process further, e.g. by electrolytic methods that are more efficient than the hydrocarbon synthesizing methods used in the past.
If only a small fraction of the money that has been spent for much more frivolous purposes, like AI investment, had been directed to goals like improving the methods for concentrating CO2, we would have been in a much better situation today.
The hero image is titled Murch_HERO. Big publishers get lazy with their titling too!
Too much teleology.
I was surprised that some birds can fly even higher. There is a record of Rüppell's vulture at 11+ kilometers altitude.
Sadly this wonder of nature was deduced from the 5 feathers that were all that remained after the noble creature was ingested by a turbofan engine of an airliner.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7...
Interesting article and thank you a lot for this education!
> at 43 percent a lightning strike will cause the entire atmosphere to ignite since it is so high in flammable oxygen
Good article except oxygen is not flammable. Oxygen is the stuff that makes other stuff flammable.
Right, oxygen is an oxidizer, not a fuel. A world with 43% oxygen would have some pretty terrifying wildfires, but the sky wouldn't just burst into flames
A beautiful article. Thanks for sharing!