The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

That was the rebound year from Covid. It's a statistical anomaly, and chosen by a lot of news reports to highlight the severity of whatever point they're making.

Comparing today's employment against, for example, 2019 is also difficult due to the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants that entered under the Biden administration. For example, today there is about 4.3% unemployment, the average is 5.7%, so we're doing pretty good on that front.

Statistics can lie. Our 4.3% represents 7.4 million unemployed workers, while the 2019 3.5% rate represents 5.8 million unemployed. When you bring in 10 million undocumented people, it's easy to see how 5.8 million unemployed can swell to 7.4 million.

Statistics lie by comparing our employment to a year that had record values because of an anomaly, or compare the number of unemployed by number to a year before we closed the Southern border.

You're assuming that having a healthy life is the primary goal, but it's not. It's secondary.

A healthy life is one of several secondary goals that you have in order to achieve your primary goals, whatever they may be.

For example, having a family/children is the goal of many people. Do you want to see your grandkids grow up? Have a healthy life.

Having enough money for retirement so you can travel (or just have fun) is another goal many people have. Want to enjoy your retirement? Have a healthy life.

Goals go hand-in-hand with motivations, and one way to increase your motivation for doing something is to identify how it contributes to one of your life goals.

So for example, that college course you're taking to get your MBA - are you doing that just for something to do, or does it contribute to where you want to be in 10 years?

It turns out that doing something "just for money" is not, by itself, a motivational goal. Doing something "for the money" that you will need to eventually start your own business, though... that's a motivational goal.

So no, living a healthy miserable life doesn't make much sense if being healthy is the goal.

Living a healthy miserable life *does* make sense if it lets you see your grandkids grow up.

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump's 2017 travel ban from nations that didn't have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that's not thought to be beyond the court's jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there's an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don't have to worry about it.

I looked up the figures a few days ago - but having since driven to the other end of the country, I've forgotten the precise details. IIRC it was something like Goofy having a higher aphelion - so most of the time (and length of orbital arc) it is going to be further out than Pluto (by a few %, but it also has higher eccentricity, so it's aphelion is lower than Pluto's (and indeed, Neptune's ; which is also true for Pluto). Since orbiting objects travel faster at aphelion than perihelion, that makes the average orbital period of Pluto and Goofy the same (or their year the same, or their semi-major axis the same ; these all mean the same thing) despite Goofy travelling further per orbit than Pluto, with a faster arc near perihelion.

You see the same sort of thing with, say, Uranus, Neptune, and 1P/Halley ; Halley and Uranus have quite similar orbital periods, but Halley's aphelion is well out beyond Neptune's orbit. the long period it spends out there is counterbalanced by the 3 year long Sun-dive it does form (approximately) Saturn's orbit, to the Sun, and back out to Saturn's orbit.50-odd% of it's orbital path followed in about 5% of it's orbital period.

Just because Newton's laws are quite simple, doesn't mean that their consequences are simple. Just ask (if you can get his bones to talk) one J. Kepler, who had to work out the orbits from raw observational data, unsullied by Newton's theoretical framework.

(It still sometimes astonishes me that there is no simple way to calculate the length of an arc of an ellipse or it's total perimeter - you have to do a really complicated, progressive approximation calculation for each specific shape of ellipse. Which, when you realise that Kepler would have had to make hundreds (thousands?) of such approximations while reducing Brahe's data, explains why Kepler came up with at least one relatively good approximation to the length of an ellipse's perimeter.)

hey combine hydrogen from with carbon dioxide,

Hydrogen from what or where?
If, like almost all *industrial* hydrogen, it comes from cracking natural gas, that's as something pure magenta (whatever the complimentary colour to green is).
(Our "analytical grade" hydrogen was probably sourced from electrolysis - certainly when we made it on site, it was ; but that was substantial cost of equipment and maintenance time. Our systems really cared about contaminants at the part-per-million level.)

A propos not a lot - my BOINC installation of "Asteroids@Home" has just started kicking through computations for the first time in ages. (BOINC is an indirect descendent of the SETI@Home project, generalised for a variety of distributable computation projects ; Asteroids@Home is a project that "uses power of volunteers' computers to solve the lightcurve inversion problem for many asteroids." Lightcurves are brightness versus time ; once you correct for distance asteroid to Sun and asteroid to Earth, the cross-section illuminated and rotation speed drop out - after considerable maths.

Probably someone has posted a new batch of data on something's light curve, and the rotation speed and/ or shape model is being re-analysed.

It's a small contribution.

I just find it absurd to demote Pluto to a non planet and then classify other climbs as Plutino, is pretty inconsistent.

IIRC, the term "plutino" was being used *before* the 2006 (?) IAU definition. Cart and horse sequence race condition.

But then again: you could call them Neptino, or something, or? And Pluto would be a Neptino,too.

There are bodies in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune. And other bodies in a 5:3 resonance (while 6:3 or 3:1 resonances are relatively empty : see "Kirkwood gaps" in the asteroid belt - same physics, different dominant body (Jupiter) and swarm of "test particles". And other bodies in 7:2 resonances. I can't remember the name of such a body (and can't be bothered to research it) so in keeping with other cartoon dogs, let's consider this to have a largest member "Scooby" and call these "scoobinos" (it's a class, not a proper noun, so no capitalisation).

By your naming convention, these too would be called "neptinos" (no capital), with no distinction from the 3:2 "peptinos" generally known as "plutinos". By the naming convention I describe, and which is actually being used, "plutinos" are a distinct (if related) class to "scoobinos".

It's a nomenclature - it's intended to describe meaningful (to a certain class of people, KBO astronmers, for example) differences in a compact, memorable manner.

The previous posts were about periods. You seemed to shift to considering orbital velocities (or speeds ; it's not precisely clear), which is a different thing.

Yes, the tie to the period of Neptune's orbit should also constrain the period of the Plutinos over a suitable averaging period. But when you get to things like "tadpole" and "horseshoe" orbits, that can have significant variations of order-of a percent in period, resulting in the longitude of perihelion (direction of perihelion of the orbit, measured from the Sun) of the Plutino oscillating around the longitude of aphelion (parallel meaning) of Neptune's orbit, and tracing out a "horseshoe" shape (when projected in a co-moving frame with Neptune's orbit) or a tadpole shape. Which means variations in the orbital speed of up to a percent or so and the Plutino moving ahead in it's orbit compared to Neptune, then falling behind. Over some hundreds of orbits (10s of thousands of terrestrial years) the orbital speeds will average out, but there are enough wrinkles to be interesting.

I learned about these wrinkles in orbital mechanics in the mid-90s, when I got a phone line and dial-up internet access, and heard about an object called Cruithne (good grief - it's a 4-digit UID ; I feel old). Just because the physics are simple, doesn't mean the results are simple.

it should take longer than Pluto to complete an orbit but instead it takes a year or two less.

That would be about a 0.5% variation. The perihelion of (I've forgotten the object's name ; doesn't matter ; let's call it "Goofy" because it's not Pluto) the orbit will be reached sooner than Pluto's perihelion, which also means that Neptune's aphelion (they're in a 3:2 relationship, remember) is relatively close to Goofy. Which means there will be a decelerating force on Goofy's orbit (Neptune is the dog, not the tail. Billions of fold difference in in momentum.) reducing it's orbital speed in comparison to Pluto's orbital speed. Which will mean that Goofy starts to fall back in it's orbit compared to Pluto. Yes, that's cyclic. And no, there probably aren't enough counteracting torques for other objects to damp down the motion. (In the Earth - (3753)Cruithne system, all involved bodies experience torques form Venus, Mars and Jupiter of roughly similar magnitudes, which will damp the motion eventually. Or result in an orbital interaction which will put (3753)Cruithne into an Earth-crossing, Venus-crossing, or Mars-crossing orbit, when bad things become much more likely.

Yeah, it gives me a headache too. You remind me, I was trying to help a guy who runs an orbital simulator code set to write a manual for it. It is very headache-inducing. And I don't understand it well either.

What is Tony's tool called ? Orbit Simulator (though the internal scars on the software say it was "Gravity Simulator" in an earlier life.) - which s interesting to play with. But the help files aren't great. It's a complex tool for simulating a complex system.

Did you miss the phrase "reproductively isolated"? I specifically typed and spell-checked those letters so that you could ignore them and their import. I'm glad to see that you did, indeed, ignore a vitally important part of the point I was making.

Your citation that there are several other strains to be found in our genomes also means by definition that these strains were not reproductively isolated from our (strain, species, lumpy splits or splitty lumps?) of apes.

My training was in considering "species" as a morphological concept ("genetics was for the Zoology department on a different campus, not for Geology students), but even then, in the mid-80s, we were well aware that we could be splitting (for example) a sexually dimorphic species into two, and also had to pay attention to "provincialism" (morphological variations between members of the same species in different regions) as a possibility when considering whether to "lump" two specimens into one species, or split them into two. An introductory lab exercise was "Here are boxes each containing a couple of hundred fossils per group of 4 - divide yourselves appropriately - all from the same bed in the same quarry. (Mid-Jurassic, for what it's worth.) Without consulting your text books, and without discussing between groups, assess the number of species in each collection." Which is applying the morphological species concept in a laboratory setting.

At that time, we had no anticipation that archaeology (verging on the closest shores of palaeontology) would ever get access to genetic information. That is why it literally wasn't on the curriculum. Though my home area was watching the application of "DNA fingerprinting" to a couple of local rape cases - you may have heard of the developments in this since. This "genetics" thing was of some importance, if of no relevance to palaeontology.

3 Species are considered proven, Homo Sapiens, Home Neanderthalis and Denisovans.

That very question is the point - are they 3 species, or one species with regional variation? Yes, I did see the claim that the skull assigned to Homo longi, and I said at the time that "that is going to be a beautiful argument point between the morphological species concept and the genetic species concept. That is going to be in textbooks for generations." As, indeed, you are proving.

Where, in the published formal literature, do you see an assertion that "this genome and this (these) body fossil(s) are the holotype(s) for a species which we are erecting called Homo denisova spec.nov. ..." Because that is what "declaring a new species requires" - a holotype, a description (emphasising differentiation from pre-existing similar species) and a unique species name. (Assignment to a genus is common, but not required ; assignment to a new genus is rarer, but still common ; all higher taxonomic levels are matters of debate and opinion, and get revised on a regular basis. Which is why you generally cite whose definition (of what date ; people change their opinions with new evidence) you are using for any particular higher-level taxonomy.) [People sometimes re-use species names, but try to keep them unique within a taxonomic branch. But it's not good practice. And with search engines, it is pointless these-decades. there is no shortage of words available, even if your linguistics are lacking.]

When the Denisova genome was detected and announced, the authors (Paabo and associates, IIRC) explicitly stated that they were not asserting a new species. Which is why, if the association between the Homo Longhi body fossil and the genomes from Denisova (and several other sites, plus modern SE Asian populations) is accepted, then it is the Homo Longhi name that the genome will be attached to. The genomic data was uploaded to Genebank, MolbioBank, or something similar. I'm not sure that genetics has got to the point of having rulebooks as comprehensive as the ICZN and the botanists. Since it's pushing a century that the ICZN have had a rulebook, maybe now would be a suitable time for the geneticists to get their databases and practices into some sort of rulebook. IANAgeneticist ; they might have done so already.

Has someone been putting something in the water? That's the second 4-digit UID I've seen in the last few days - and I've barely touched the Slash for months.

'non planet' is called a 'Plutoist'?

To quote the paper's Abstract (becasue I haven't got to reading the body yet ; nobody has raised a point that has needed me to read that far, yet :

A stellar occultation by the ~ 250-km-radius plutino (612533) 2002 XV93 on

And :

Our findings indicate that a fraction of distant icy minor planets can exhibit atmospheres possibly caused by ongoing cryovolcanic activity or a recent impact event of a small icy object.

This is a "small icy object" (they don't even waste consideration on it being a "dwarf planet" or not ; it's probably not particularly spherical, but with only 2 chords and a non-chord, it's hard to say what the actual profile is) which has a "plutino" class of orbit (meaning : 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune).

Oh, it's you, Angel ; I don't remember you being a particularly "Pluto is Planet IX" obsessive. Or are you just prodding the hornet's nest to elicit amusing buzzing sounds ?

Since both tails (orbit of Pluto ; orbit of (612533) 2002 XV93) are wagged by the dog of Neptune's orbit, and are constrained (and adjusted) by orbital resonance to stay very close to 3/2 of Neptune's orbital period, then both of their average orbital speeds will be similarly constrained by Neptune's orbital speed.

There will be a variation between the perihelion speed and aphelion speed, but that will average out over the orbit. Check Kepler's Laws.

It's a paper aimed at professionals in the field (or at least, trainee professionals in the field), not a Wikipedia page or an introductory textbook for American school pupils.

You know, I bet you didn't read a word of the paper. Not even far enough to note the "Abstract" section, and the football team (OK - volleyball team?) of author names and institutions. Which are rather give-aways for something being a paper, not a magazine article.

Thank you - I was just setting up to do exactly that.