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Mandalong Coal Mine
Pittwater Aussie Bird Count 2018: Lists Sent In And Birds Seen By Postcode
Bird lovers have spotted everything that flaps about in the water, soars above trees and scurries through the coastal range.This year's count via BirdLife Australia for our area:
2101Checklists submitted 62Species sighted 78 Birds sighted 1,453
2102Checklists submitted 24Species sighted 55Birds sighted 765
2103Checklists submitted 38Species sighted 49Birds sighted 1, 070
2104Checklists submitted 26Species sighted 29Birds sighted 443
2105Checklists submitted 13Species sighted 23Birds sighted 342
2106Checklists submitted 40 Species sighted 46Birds sighted 1, 005
2107Checklists submitted 72Species sighted 63Birds sighted 1, 474
2108Checklists submitted 11Species sighted 31Birds sighted 168
Seasonal Spring-Summer visitor the Channel-billed Cuckoo was a species counted among the Pittwater lists - A J Guesdon photo
Bird lovers have spotted everything that flaps about in the water, soars above trees and scurries through the coastal range.
This year's count via BirdLife Australia for our area:
2101
Checklists submitted 62
Species sighted 78
Birds sighted 1,453
2102
Checklists submitted 24
Species sighted 55
Birds sighted 765
2103
Checklists submitted 38
Species sighted 49
Birds sighted 1, 070
2104
Checklists submitted 26
Species sighted 29
Birds sighted 443
2105
Checklists submitted 13
Species sighted 23
Birds sighted 342
2106
Checklists submitted 40
Species sighted 46
Birds sighted 1, 005
2107
Checklists submitted 72
Species sighted 63
Birds sighted 1, 474
2108
Checklists submitted 11
Species sighted 31
Birds sighted 168
Seasonal Spring-Summer visitor the Channel-billed Cuckoo was a species counted among the Pittwater lists - A J Guesdon photo
Smashing Records
The Great Anti-Fracking Bus Trip 2018
The NT Govt has released half of the Territory for CSG - it's a toxic disaster!
We are helping to get pastoralists and indigenous owners on a bus trip to SE Qld. and the Pilliga to see first hand what fracking does to farmland, water and country, and to hear from land owners and farmers there what a disaster it is.
This Chuffed fundraiser is to help cover the cost of fuel and cabin accommodation for the 10 days they will be on the road. You can donate directly, and you can bid on stuff in some Facebook Auctions coming up. Any amount helps.
AND can you please invite your friends to the Facebook page HERE too. It's as much about raising awareness as it is about raising money. Tell everyone - NO FRACKING OUR LAND OR WATER!
Thanks, Dick & Bron Clarke
Donate at this Chuffed secure link:
The NT Govt has released half of the Territory for CSG - it's a toxic disaster!
We are helping to get pastoralists and indigenous owners on a bus trip to SE Qld. and the Pilliga to see first hand what fracking does to farmland, water and country, and to hear from land owners and farmers there what a disaster it is.
This Chuffed fundraiser is to help cover the cost of fuel and cabin accommodation for the 10 days they will be on the road. You can donate directly, and you can bid on stuff in some Facebook Auctions coming up. Any amount helps.
AND can you please invite your friends to the Facebook page HERE too. It's as much about raising awareness as it is about raising money. Tell everyone - NO FRACKING OUR LAND OR WATER!
Thanks,
Dick & Bron Clarke
Donate at this Chuffed secure link:
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Jair Bolsonaro Will Now Run Into Brazil’s Massive Grassroots Movements Of Resistance
November 1, 2018In his acceptance speech, Brazil’s president-elect Jair Bolsonaro said he will “change the destiny of Brazil”. He may be right. For the Amazon and its indigenous residents, things will get worse before they get better, but this election may also be a tipping point for change. The staunchly anti-environment Bolsonaro may sow the seeds for radical environmental politics both in Brazil and worldwide.
When the night comes, I wonder what might happen, who will be next, and hope that the dawn will come soon.
With these words, Kum'tum, a leader of the indigenous Gamela people in the heart of the Amazon, shared his fear of being an environmental defender in Brazil. His community had been trying to occupy a portion of their ancestral lands claimed by farmers but, in April this year, they were attacked by men armed with machetes and firearms. Some had their hands cut off. Others like Kum'tum were shot.
Indigenous groups have good reason to be scared. Over the past decade, Brazil has been the most dangerous country in the world to be a land or environmental defender and 57 of these people were murdered last year alone. According to the NGO Global Witness, this kind of violence stems from sections of the agribusiness sector, in particular parts of the Amazon’s cattle industry which is the largest single cause of deforestation globally. The Amazon and its indigenous residents may now be persecuted with even more ferocity, as Bolsonaro promises a new alliance between the security state, agricultural interests and far-right political power.
Fortunately, where there’s hegemony, there’s resistance. NYU sociologist and theorist Steven Lukes famously broke power itself down into “three faces”: decision-making power, non-decision-making power, and ideological power. The Amazon’s future and that of its residents will be fought across these three key battlegrounds.
Resistance beyond bordersFirst, Bolsonaro’s government will have to win the visible battles of decision-making processes shaping Brazil’s environmental governance. For instance, Bolsonaro would have to break free from present institutional and legal frameworks tying Brazil to its environmental commitments, such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. And that’s tricky because of the global backlash. Perhaps this is why Bolsonaro has now scrapped his pledge to quit Paris.
Indigenous protest over land rights in Brasilia, April 2018. Joedson Alves / EPA
Other challenges to Bolsonaro’s decision-making power will come from below. While Brazil’s balance of power has historically favoured big corporations like those in the agribusiness sector, the country also hosts massive grass roots movements of resistance. These include the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), with an informal membership of 1.5m people and, in the Amazon itself, the Cainquiama, a resistance coalition of tens of thousands of persecuted indigenous peoples and other communities.
Who sets the agenda?In this case, the “non-decision-making power” concerns Bolsonaro’s ability to set the development agenda. The country’s new leader wants to reverse green agreements and return to a form of violent pro-growth neoliberalism which is blind to both democracy and environmental concerns.
The planet breathing in and out. Al'fred / shutterstock
But the Amazon acts as the world’s lung and is a globally shared priority. The existential threats it faces would be met in a similar combative spirit as those facing the melting Arctic – by environmental defenders, pro-sustainable development governments, global institutions and civil society. Collectively, these actors have the moral power to set the agenda and pressure for legal, institutional and economic sanctions and limits to stop the predatory march of Brazilian agribusiness further into the forest. If they can manage to frame actions against the Amazon as crimes against humanity and the planet, they could even be effective.
Hearts and mindsThe third conflict is the invisible ideological battle to control Brazilian hearts and minds. By democratically electing a far-right candidate, Brazilians have sent a crystal clear message that they want radical change for the better. The problem is what people understand by “better” and what this “better” means for the environment.
The “Bolsonaro way” is ideologically powerful because it is ambiguous about what it is, but sharply clear on what it is not. Just like Trump, it is unashamedly pro-growth regardless of the collateral damage to the environment, but Bolsonaro’s vague development utopia lacks depth. It resurrects zombie ideas of dictatorship style governance and pro-growth violent neoliberalism, fuelled by popular disillusionment with corruption and a failure to lift people out of poverty.
Another ideological battle will concern the church, a powerful institution in the world’s largest Catholic country. In his 2015 encyclical message Laudato Si, Pope Francis attacked environmental degradation and climate change and called for “swift and unified” global action. That, and his later claim that to harm the environment is to sin, may prove a powerful ideological tool for environmental activism. The rising wave of Brazilian evangelicals may also question how Christian it would be to slay the Amazon and its people.
A final key ideological battle concerns the normalisation of indifference towards the environment. According to the World Values Survey and Latinobarometro, the largest opinion polls that have investigated what Brazilians value as important, the only topics ranking high in everyday life are corruption, the unstable political situation and the economy. The challenge is that too many Brazilians fail to see how crucial the environment, the Amazon and its indigenous inhabitants are to their own well-being and development.
by Carlos Salvador Zepeda CastilloResearch Associate in Development Studies, University of PortsmouthThis article first appeared in The Conversation
November 1, 2018
In his acceptance speech, Brazil’s president-elect Jair Bolsonaro said he will “change the destiny of Brazil”. He may be right. For the Amazon and its indigenous residents, things will get worse before they get better, but this election may also be a tipping point for change. The staunchly anti-environment Bolsonaro may sow the seeds for radical environmental politics both in Brazil and worldwide.
When the night comes, I wonder what might happen, who will be next, and hope that the dawn will come soon.
With these words, Kum'tum, a leader of the indigenous Gamela people in the heart of the Amazon, shared his fear of being an environmental defender in Brazil. His community had been trying to occupy a portion of their ancestral lands claimed by farmers but, in April this year, they were attacked by men armed with machetes and firearms. Some had their hands cut off. Others like Kum'tum were shot.
Indigenous groups have good reason to be scared. Over the past decade, Brazil has been the most dangerous country in the world to be a land or environmental defender and 57 of these people were murdered last year alone. According to the NGO Global Witness, this kind of violence stems from sections of the agribusiness sector, in particular parts of the Amazon’s cattle industry which is the largest single cause of deforestation globally. The Amazon and its indigenous residents may now be persecuted with even more ferocity, as Bolsonaro promises a new alliance between the security state, agricultural interests and far-right political power.
Fortunately, where there’s hegemony, there’s resistance. NYU sociologist and theorist Steven Lukes famously broke power itself down into “three faces”: decision-making power, non-decision-making power, and ideological power. The Amazon’s future and that of its residents will be fought across these three key battlegrounds.
Resistance beyond borders
First, Bolsonaro’s government will have to win the visible battles of decision-making processes shaping Brazil’s environmental governance. For instance, Bolsonaro would have to break free from present institutional and legal frameworks tying Brazil to its environmental commitments, such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. And that’s tricky because of the global backlash. Perhaps this is why Bolsonaro has now scrapped his pledge to quit Paris.
Indigenous protest over land rights in Brasilia, April 2018. Joedson Alves / EPA
Other challenges to Bolsonaro’s decision-making power will come from below. While Brazil’s balance of power has historically favoured big corporations like those in the agribusiness sector, the country also hosts massive grass roots movements of resistance. These include the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), with an informal membership of 1.5m people and, in the Amazon itself, the Cainquiama, a resistance coalition of tens of thousands of persecuted indigenous peoples and other communities.
Who sets the agenda?
In this case, the “non-decision-making power” concerns Bolsonaro’s ability to set the development agenda. The country’s new leader wants to reverse green agreements and return to a form of violent pro-growth neoliberalism which is blind to both democracy and environmental concerns.
The planet breathing in and out. Al'fred / shutterstock
But the Amazon acts as the world’s lung and is a globally shared priority. The existential threats it faces would be met in a similar combative spirit as those facing the melting Arctic – by environmental defenders, pro-sustainable development governments, global institutions and civil society. Collectively, these actors have the moral power to set the agenda and pressure for legal, institutional and economic sanctions and limits to stop the predatory march of Brazilian agribusiness further into the forest. If they can manage to frame actions against the Amazon as crimes against humanity and the planet, they could even be effective.
Hearts and minds
The third conflict is the invisible ideological battle to control Brazilian hearts and minds. By democratically electing a far-right candidate, Brazilians have sent a crystal clear message that they want radical change for the better. The problem is what people understand by “better” and what this “better” means for the environment.
The “Bolsonaro way” is ideologically powerful because it is ambiguous about what it is, but sharply clear on what it is not. Just like Trump, it is unashamedly pro-growth regardless of the collateral damage to the environment, but Bolsonaro’s vague development utopia lacks depth. It resurrects zombie ideas of dictatorship style governance and pro-growth violent neoliberalism, fuelled by popular disillusionment with corruption and a failure to lift people out of poverty.
Another ideological battle will concern the church, a powerful institution in the world’s largest Catholic country. In his 2015 encyclical message Laudato Si, Pope Francis attacked environmental degradation and climate change and called for “swift and unified” global action. That, and his later claim that to harm the environment is to sin, may prove a powerful ideological tool for environmental activism. The rising wave of Brazilian evangelicals may also question how Christian it would be to slay the Amazon and its people.
A final key ideological battle concerns the normalisation of indifference towards the environment. According to the World Values Survey and Latinobarometro, the largest opinion polls that have investigated what Brazilians value as important, the only topics ranking high in everyday life are corruption, the unstable political situation and the economy. The challenge is that too many Brazilians fail to see how crucial the environment, the Amazon and its indigenous inhabitants are to their own well-being and development.
by Carlos Salvador Zepeda Castillo
Research Associate in Development Studies, University of Portsmouth
This article first appeared in The Conversation
A Wilderness 'Horror Story'
World's Wilderness Is Going, Going ... Nearly Gone, New Paper Says
$434 Million For Redevelopment Of Shoalhaven Hospital
November 01, 2018: NSW Minister for Health
The NSW Government has announced Shoalhaven District Memorial Hospital will be redeveloped to significantly improve healthcare services for residents of the South Coast.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Member for South Coast Shelley Hancock and Member for Kiama Gareth Ward, made the announcement at the hospital today.
“This $434 million investment in Shoalhaven District Memorial Hospital is the result of the strong advocacy of local members Shelley and Gareth. I am proud to announce today that this record health investment for the region will now go-ahead,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“We have a record hospital rebuilding program where we are creating world class hospitals and creating thousands of construction jobs across NSW.
“This incredible investment is only possible because of the strong economic management of the NSW Liberals & Nationals.”
The redeveloped Shoalhaven Hospital will see significant community benefits which are likely to include:
- expanded elective surgery
- more surgical, acute medical and aged care beds
- expanded maternity services
- more operating theatres
- increased capacity in the Emergency Department
- expansion of outpatient and ambulatory care zones.
Mrs Hancock said the $434 million investment will deliver new and upgraded health facilities so residents on the South Coast no longer have to travel for some services.
“It’s very important that we continue to invest in our regional hospitals to ensure patients can receive high quality health care closer to where they live,” Mrs Hancock said.
Mr Ward added: “Shoalhaven Hospital is my local hospital. I make no apologies for fighting hard for the unprecedented investment for our patients, doctors, nurses and staff.
Shoalhaven Hospital is no longer a ‘cottage hospital’ and this investment will future-proof our region.”
Health Minister Brad Hazzard said planning for the new facility was announced in the recent budget, so the district is well advanced in determining the range of health services needed as part of the redevelopment.
“We want to ensure this facility and its staff can continue to deliver first-class care for patients well into the future.”
Minister for Mental Health Tanya Davies said the NSW Government is committed to providing better access to mental health care.
“It’s crucially important to see mental health services integrated into modern hospital developments as part of NSW Health’s core business, which is why I am so pleased as part of this $434 redevelopment, mental health facilities will be expanded,” Mrs Davies said.
The redevelopment of Shoalhaven Hospital is in addition to the NSW Government’s $251 million commitment to rebuild Shellharbour Hospital.
Researchers Recreate Ancient Climate From Neanderthal Teeth
November 1, 2018
Researchers from Griffith University and ANU have used the teeth of Neanderthal children from 250,000 years ago to reconstruct the ancient climate of southeast France, where the teeth were found.
The discovery - which involved an international team of biological anthropologists, archaeologists, earth scientists and public health specialists from Australia, North America and Europe - promises to open up a new field in the archaeological study of hominins.
ANU PhD scholar Hannah James, who was part of the study, said the teeth of the two Neanderthal children contained evidence of repeated exposure to high levels of lead, a metal known to have adverse effects on the development of the brain and nervous system.
"We have been able to show that the exposures took place in the coldest period of successive winters," said Ms James from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.
"We now have a method for relating environmental signals recorded in the chemical composition of hominin teeth - in this case 250,000 years old - to both the age of an individual and the time of year when the signal was recorded."
The two Neanderthal children either ingested or inhaled lead, representing the oldest documented lead exposure in any hominins. This occurred multiple times during the cooler seasons, potentially happening in caves as underground lead sources have been found within 25 kilometres of the archaeological site.
The team used the sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP SI) instrument at the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences to collect information on oxygen variation during three years of tooth growth in each child.
Co-researcher Professor Ian Williams from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences said the team showed that revealing a detailed seasonal signal in Neanderthal teeth was possible by measuring the oxygen isotopes in the teeth's successive growth layers.
"This has never been done before," he said.
Lead researcher Associate Professor Tanya Smith from Griffith University said using SHRIMP SI enabled the team to reveal that one Neanderthal was born in spring and weaned in the autumn 2.5 years later, and that both Neanderthal children were more likely to be sick during colder periods.
"At the time they grew up, 250,000 years ago, this region of southeast France was much cooler and more seasonal than it is today," Associate Professor Smith said.
Associate Professor Smith said the next step was to find out what the Neanderthals did in the depths of winter that resulted in exposing their children to high levels of toxic lead.
"This will give fresh insight into Neanderthal behaviour. Another step will be to push further back in time and study the teeth of hominins and early humans in the birthplace of the human species - Africa," she said.
The research is published in Science Advances.
Picture: First molar teeth from a 250, 000 year old Neanderthal child. Yellow dotted lines indicate the beginning and end of nursing. Red dotted line corresponds to an illness. Blue dotted lines indicate lead exposures. Credit Tanya M. Smith et al.
Integrated Quantum Chip Operations Possible, Tests Show
October 30, 2018: University of New South Wales
Quantum computers that are capable of solving complex problems, like drug design or machine learning, will require millions of quantum bits -- or qubits -- connected in an integrated way and designed to correct errors that inevitably occur in fragile quantum systems.
Now, an Australian research team has experimentally realised a crucial combination of these capabilities on a silicon chip, bringing the dream of a universal quantum computer closer to reality.
They have demonstrated an integrated silicon qubit platform that combines both single-spin addressability -- the ability to 'write' information on a single spin qubit without disturbing its neighbours -- and a qubit 'read-out' process that will be vital for quantum error correction.
Moreover, their new integrated design can be manufactured using well-established technology used in the existing computer industry.
The team is led by Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, a program leader at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) and Director of the NSW node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.
Last year, Dzurak and colleagues published a design for a novel chip architecture that could allow quantum calculations to be performed using silicon CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) components -- the basis of all modern computer chips.
In their new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, the team combine two fundamental quantum techniques for the first time, confirming the promise of their approach.
Dzurak's team had also previously shown that an integrated silicon qubit platform can operate with single-spin addressability -- the ability to rotate a single spin without disturbing its neighbours.
They have now shown that they can combine this with a special type of quantum readout process known as Pauli spin blockade, a key requirement for quantum error correcting codes that will be necessary to ensure accuracy in large spin-based quantum computers. This new combination of qubit readout and control techniques is a central feature of their quantum chip design.
"We've demonstrated the ability to do Pauli spin readout in our silicon qubit device but, for the first time, we've also combined it with spin resonance to control the spin," says Dzurak.
"This is an important milestone for us on the path to performing quantum error correction with spin qubits, which is going to be essential for any universal quantum computer."
"Quantum error correction is a key requirement in creating large-scale useful quantum computing because all qubits are fragile, and you need to correct for errors as they crop up," says lead author, Michael Fogarty, who performed the experiments as part of his PhD research with Professor Dzurak at UNSW.
"But this creates significant overhead in the number of physical qubits you need in order to make the system work," notes Fogarty.
Dzurak says, "By using silicon CMOS technology we have the ideal platform to scale to the millions of qubits we will need, and our recent results provide us with the tools to achieve spin qubit error-correction in the near future."
"It's another confirmation that we're on the right track. And it also shows that the architecture we've developed at UNSW has, so far, shown no roadblocks to the development of a working quantum computer chip."
"And, what's more, one that can be manufactured using well-established industry processes and components."
CQC2T'S Unique Approach Using Silicon
Working in silicon is important not just because the element is cheap and abundant, but because it has been at the heart of the global computer industry for almost 60 years. The properties of silicon are well understood and chips containing billions of conventional transistors are routinely manufactured in big production facilities.
Three years ago, Dzurak's team published in the journal Nature the first demonstration of quantum logic calculations in a real silicon device with the creation of a two-qubit logic gate -- the central building block of a quantum computer.
"Those were the first baby steps, the first demonstrations of how to turn this radical quantum computing concept into a practical device using components that underpin all modern computing," says Professor Mark Hoffman, UNSW's Dean of Engineering.
"Our team now has a blueprint for scaling that up dramatically.
"We've been testing elements of this design in the lab, with very positive results. We just need to keep building on that -- which is still a hell of a challenge, but the groundwork is there, and it's very encouraging.
"It will still take great engineering to bring quantum computing to commercial reality, but clearly the work we see from this extraordinary team at CQC2T puts Australia in the driver's seat," he added.
Other authors of the new Nature Communications paper are UNSW researchers Kok Wai Chan, Bas Hensen, Wister Huang, Tuomo Tanttu, Henry Yang, Arne Laucht, Fay Hudson and Andrea Morello, as well as Menno Veldhorst of QuTech and TU Delft, Thaddeus Ladd of HRL Laboratories and Kohei Itoh of Japan's Keio University.
Commercialising CQC2T'S Intellectual Property
In 2017, a consortium of Australian governments, industry and universities established Australia's first quantum computing company to commercialise CQC2T's world-leading intellectual property.
Operating out of new laboratories at UNSW, Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd (SQC) has the target of producing a 10-qubit demonstration device in silicon by 2022, as the forerunner to creating a silicon-based quantum computer.
The work of Dzurak and his team will be one component of SQC realising that ambition. UNSW scientists and engineers at CQC2T are developing parallel patented approaches using single atom and quantum dot qubits.
In May 2018, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) addressing a new collaboration between SQC and the world-leading French research and development organisation, Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA).
The MoU outlined plans to form a joint venture in silicon-CMOS quantum computing technology to accelerate and focus technology development, as well as to capture commercialisation opportunities -- bringing together French and Australian efforts to develop a quantum computer.
The proposed Australian-French joint venture would bring together Dzurak's team, located at UNSW, with a team led by Dr Maud Vinet from CEA, who are experts in advanced CMOS manufacturing technology, and who have also recently demonstrated a silicon qubit made using their industrial-scale prototyping facility in Grenoble.
It is estimated that industries comprising approximately 40% of Australia's current economy could be significantly impacted by quantum computing.
Possible applications include software design, machine learning, scheduling and logistical planning, financial analysis, stock market modelling, software and hardware verification, climate modelling, rapid drug design and testing, and early disease detection and prevention.
M. A. Fogarty, K. W. Chan, B. Hensen, W. Huang, T. Tanttu, C. H. Yang, A. Laucht, M. Veldhorst, F. E. Hudson, K. M. Itoh, D. Culcer, T. D. Ladd, A. Morello, A. S. Dzurak. Integrated silicon qubit platform with single-spin addressability, exchange control and single-shot singlet-triplet readout. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06039-x
This photo shows from left to right Dr. Bas Hensen, professor Dzurak, Dr. Kok Wai Chan, and former PhD student Michael Fogarty, who was lead author on the paper. Credit: Paul Henderson-Kelly
New Instrument Joins The Hunt For Earth-Like Planets
October 30: UNSW - written by Lucy Carroll
A ground-breaking $3.8 million instrument, used by astronomers to discover and study Earth-like planets, has been launched by a team from UNSW Sydney, The Australian National University (ANU) and Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) at Macquarie University.
The astronomical instrument, known as Veloce, has been built for the four-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), Australia’s largest on-shore optical telescope, which is located at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory, near Coonabarabran in north-western NSW.
“Veloce will allow us to detect the tiny velocity wobbles that planets produce in their host stars. It is the first Australian facility able to deliver the extraordinarily high velocity precision needed to detect very small planets,” said Professor Chris Tinney, from Exoplanetary Science at UNSW.
“These planets are important, because it’s on these small, rocky and potentially habitable planets that astronomers will one day search for signs of life,” said Professor Tinney.
Veloce can detect planets orbiting the small, faint and red dwarf stars known to astronomers as “M dwarfs”. These stars are so dim that a potentially habitable planet must huddle close to its star to stay warm enough to support life. This makes the velocity wobble of these planets easier to detect, so that Veloce (which focuses on light at red wavelengths) can measure masses for planets down to the size of the Earth.
The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) located at Siding Spring Observator, NSW. Photo: Angel Lopez-Sanchez
The launch comes just months after NASA’s planet-finder satellite, TESS, started a survey of the entire sky for planets that transit their host star, passing between the star and Earth and making the star get periodically dimmer.
In its first month of data, TESS has already uncovered 75 candidate planets. “There now is a global race on to be first to measure the masses of these planets, and to determine whether they are rocky like Earth, ice giants like Neptune, or gas giants like Jupiter. Or, even better, if they are something stranger,” said Professor Tinney.
“Veloce is one of just a handful of facilities available in the southern hemisphere that can transform those candidates into confirmed planets with measured masses. And it’s the only one working at the red wavelengths ideal for observing these faint, red, M-dwarf planet hosts.”
On its first night in operation, Veloce targeted an M dwarf that TESS had found to host a planet just 1.4 times the size of the Earth that is orbiting its star every 0.46 days.
“This is exactly the type of object we built Veloce for. Our scientific understanding of how life gets started is minimal. The only place we know that it did start was on Earth: a small, rocky planet orbiting its star at just the right distance that liquid water can exist on its surface. Finding small planets, orbiting where water is liquid, is crucial for finding planets that could host life like our own home.”
The instrument saw its first photon from an astronomical source in September and is expected to deliver initial test results within the next month or so.
“With Veloce our first target was a nearby star called Tau Ceti. We then immediately switched to science targets and over the next 10 nights observed new candidate planets from NASA’s TESS mission, as well as a handful of known planets from previous work and stars known not to have planets to measure instrumental stability,” said Professor Tinney.
Chris Lidman, Director of Siding Spring Observatory and Associate Professor at the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said Veloce is the first facility built specifically for this purpose in Australia.
“We have had the ability to do this sort of science for a long time and have used it to discover over 40 planets to date. Now, with Veloce, we can discover very small planets for the first time,” said Associate Professor Lidman.
“There are other purpose-built facilities in the south, based in Chile. But with Veloce we have a major point of difference - those facilities operate at yellow-green wavelengths, while Veloce operates in the red. Veloce is the only southern hemisphere facility optimised for the habitable planets that TESS is discovering.
“Veloce is a great example of how Australian scientists and engineers can work together to equip telescopes like the AAT, built in the 1970s, with instrumentation that enables ground-breaking scientific research,” said Associate Professor Lidman.
The Veloce project is being led by scientists from UNSW, with ANU designing and building the instrument, and fibre optics and software provided by AAO at Macquarie University. Other partners in the project are spread across the country, including the University of Southern Queensland, Macquarie University, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Sydney. The spectrograph was funded with a series of grants and funds from the partner universities and the Australian Research Council totalling $5.4 million.
October 31, 2018: Yale University
A new study says the colors found in modern birds' eggs did not evolve independently, as previously thought, but evolved instead from dinosaurs.
According to researchers at Yale, the American Museum of Natural History, and the University of Bonn, birds inherited their egg colour from non-avian dinosaur ancestors that laid eggs in fully or partially open nests. The researchers' findings appear Oct. 31 in the online edition of the journal Nature.
"This completely changes our understanding of how egg colours evolved," said the study's lead author, Yale palaeontologist Jasmina Wiemann. "For two centuries, ornithologists assumed that egg colour appeared in modern birds' eggs multiple times, independently."
The egg colours of birds reflect characteristic preferences in nesting environments and brooding behaviours. Modern birds use only two pigments, red and blue, to create all of the various egg colours, spots, and speckles.
Wiemann and her colleagues analysed 18 fossil dinosaur eggshell samples from around the world, using non-destructive laser microspectroscopy to test for the presence of the two eggshell pigments. They found them in eggshells belonging to Eumaniraptoran dinosaurs, which include small, carnivorous dinosaurs such as Velociraptor.
"We infer that egg colour co-evolved with open nesting habits in dinosaurs," Wiemann said. "Once dinosaurs started to build open nests, exposure of the eggs to visually hunting predators and even nesting parasites favoured the evolution of camouflaging egg colours, and individually recognisable patterns of spots and speckles."
Co-author Mark Norell, the Macaulay Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, noted that "Coloured eggs have been considered a unique bird characteristic for over a century. Like feathers and wishbones, we now know that egg colour evolved in their dinosaur predecessors long before birds appeared."
Jasmina Wiemann, Tzu-Ruei Yang, Mark A. Norell. Dinosaur egg colour had a single evolutionary origin. Nature, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0646-5
An assortment of paleognath and neognath bird eggs and a fossil theropod egg (on the right). Credit: Jasmina Wiemann/Yale University
New Species Of Swallowtail Butterfly Discovered In Fiji
October 30, 2018
A spectacular new butterfly species has been discovered on the Pacific Island of Vanua Levu in Fiji. The species, named last week as Papilio natewa after the Natewa Peninsula where it was found, is a remarkable discovery in a location where butterfly wildlife was thought to be well known.
The large Swallowtail was first photographed in 2017 by Australian ornithologist Greg Kerr, working with Operation Wallacea, an international organisation which supports school students in science projects.
The large Swallowtail, now named Papilio natewa, was first photographed in 2017 by Australian ornithologist Greg Kerr, working with Operation Wallacea. Credit: Greg Kerr
Specialists around the world were puzzled when Kerr's photograph was sent for identification. It was not until earlier this year, during a second field trip to Fiji, that it was confirmed as a species new to science by John Tennent, Honorary Associate at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Scientific Associate of the Natural History Museum, London.
"For such an unusual and large new butterfly to be discovered somewhere we thought was so well known is remarkable," said John Tennant, who is a Pacific butterfly specialist. The species was named by Tennant and colleagues in Fiji and Australia in a paper published this month in Entomologischer Verein Apollo.
Tennant has spent long periods in the Pacific, including the Solomon Islands and eastern Papua New Guinea and has found and named over a hundred new species and subspecies of butterflies in the last 25 years. But he describes the new Natewa Swallowtail as "easily the most spectacular." The find is especially remarkable because there are only two Swallowtail butterfly species previously known from this part of the Pacific, and only one from Fiji.
"Because they are large, conspicuous and often beautiful in appearance, Swallowtail butterflies have been intensively studied for over 150 years," says James Hogan, manager of butterfly (Lepidoptera) collections at Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
"To find a new species like this, not only in a small and reasonably well-studied area like Fiji, but also one which looks unlike any other Swallowtail is truly exceptional. For John Tennent, Greg Kerr and the rest of the team this really is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery."
The Natewa Swallowtail has remained undiscovered for so long perhaps due to its habits and the geological history of the islands. Unusually for a Swallowtail, it seems to be a true forest species, spending most of its life inside the forest at elevations above 250 metres, on land with restrict access rights.
"It does make you wonder what else awaits discovery in the world's wild places. The key to finding new and interesting things is simply to go and look," adds Tennant.
Materials provided by University of Oxford.