[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
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You may be temporarily homebound, but thanks to today’s technology, that doesn’t mean you have to stop exploring. Despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, and the resulting closures of many national parks from sea to shining sea, lovers of the great outdoors can quench their thirst for wide open spaces by tuning in to one of the many cameras streaming live from inside the country’s parks.
Why not plan a virtual trip to one of America’s most breathtaking natural treasures, Glacier National Park? The park comprises more than 1,500 square miles of Montana wilderness, populated only by glaciers, lakes, hiking trails, mountain peaks, and the occasional grizzly bear. (Plus, it’s easy to leave no trace when your visit is via the Internet.)
As of publication, the park isn’t completely closed, but it’s functioning under modified operations. According to the National Park Service, “As of March 21, 2020, the Apgar Visitor Center and Bookstore will close until further notice. The park will continue to provide visitor information through alternative means at the Apgar Visitor Center Plaza.”
If you’re practicing social distancing or find yourself quarantined inside for the foreseeable future, check out the best Glacier National Park webcams for your at-home viewing pleasure. Practice patience; the images refresh only every minute or so.
Lake McDonald Webcam
Searching for that iconic Glacier National Park lookout? You’ll find it here. The best of the park’s stunning scenery is on display in this soothing feed from the foot of Lake McDonald. Tune into this webcam for a viewpoint of the glacially carved lake, the Continental Divide in the distance, and dramatic weather patterns — during the winter months, this webcam is sometimes dominated by foggy, limited-visibility views of thick snow, sleet, or rain before breaking to reveal a placid lake framed by snow-capped peaks.
For a more dynamic experience, check out the Lake McDonald PTZ webcam; park rangers occasionally aim this camera at different points across the Lake McDonald Valley.
Apgar Village Webcam
This webcam is trained on the park’s central hub, which, during the summer, involves a flurry of activity ranging from visitors arriving to camp, shop, or eat to school buses full of children coming for field trips. Apgar Village is home to the largest campground in Glacier National Park as well as alternative lodging facilities, two gift shops, a restaurant, and boat rentals and other recreational equipment. In its quieter moments between the onrush of human activity, you might even see a few deer passing through.
Middle Fork of the Flathead River Webcam
Keep an eye on this webcam, located near park headquarters, for a view of the rolling Flathead River and its happenings, which can include groups of rafters in the summer and wandering wildlife in the winter, especially coyotes and deer. The Flathead River forms the southwest border of Glacier National Park and also appeals to kayakers, thanks to its calm, clear waters.
Apgar Mt. Southeast View Webcam
When the weather’s clear enough to enjoy the view from this webcam, you may be confused by the image that forms: 9,376-foot Mount Saint Nicholas bears a striking resemblance to the Matterhorn, but the remote Apgar Mt. Southeast View webcam is posted thousands of miles from Switzerland, Italy, and the European Alps. That’s because both Mount Saint Nicholas and the Matterhorn are glacial horns, a geological feature formed by glaciers carving out three or more sides of a peak at the same time.
St. Mary Visitor Center Webcam
The webcam posted at the St. Mary Visitor Center, located on the park’s eastern boundary, faces west into the park, with Red Eagle Mountain dominating the view and other mountains surrounding St. Mary Lake complementing it. In the winter and spring, tune in at dawn and keep your eyes peeled for elk; in the summer, enjoy a sweeping view of colorful wildflower blooms carpeting the expansive meadow between the visitor center and the mountains beyond.
Another nearby webcam, the St. Mary Visitor Center PTZ webcam, can be moved and zoomed in by park staff if they’ve spotted an elk or want to provide a closer look of the mountains in the distance.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 February 2020 06:22.
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.
New Coronavirus ‘Won’t Be The Last’ Outbreak To Move From Animal To Human
The new strain of coronavirus that has killed hundreds of people in China and caused a travel lockdown of some 56 million people has been classified as a “zoonosis” because of the way it spreads from animals to humans.
Science writer David Quammen says the virus, which the World Health Organization last week declared a global health emergency, is just the latest example of how pathogens that start in animals are migrating to humans with increasing frequency — and with deadly consequences.
“When there’s an animal host, then it becomes much, much more difficult to eradicate or even control an infectious virus,” Quammen says. “This novel coronavirus — whether or not it turns out to be a huge catastrophe, or something we can control — one thing we know is that it won’t be the last.”
Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, traces the rise of different zoonoses around the world, including AIDS, Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He says that one of the first questions that arise with any zoonosis pertains to the animal host: How is it being transmitted?
In the case of the new coronavirus, researchers believe that the virus may have originated with horseshoe bats in China and then could have possibly spread to other animals — which people then ate.
Quammen notes that humans are the common link in all zoonoses: “We humans are so abundant and so disruptive on this planet. ... We’re cutting the tropical forests. We’re building work camps in those forests and villages. We’re eating the wildlife,” he says. “You go into a forest and you shake the trees — literally and figuratively — and viruses fall out.”
Quammen says that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously. But he also warns against panic: “Being educated and understanding it and being ready to respond and support government response is very useful. Panicking and putting on your surgical mask every time you go on a subway ride, an airplane, is not nearly as useful.”
Interview highlights
On wild animal “wet” markets where viruses can mix
When I was in southern China researching [Spillover], only briefly, I got to see some of these markets where all forms of wild animals were on sale. ... By the time I got there, [these sorts of markets] had gone underground ... suppressed after the SARS outbreak. But then [the markets] gradually came back ... allowed to continue again and proliferate when this new virus began.
If you go into a live market, you see cages containing bats stacked upon cages containing porcupines, stacked upon cages containing palm civets, stacked upon cages containing chickens. And hygiene is not great, and the animals are defecating on one another. It’s just a natural mixing-bowl situation for viruses. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. And one of the things that it allows is ... the occurrence of “amplifying hosts” [a species that rapidly replicates copies of the virus and spreads them].
On the theory that palm civets were “amplifier hosts” for the 2003 SARS outbreak
The civet is a type of mammal that belongs to the family of mongooses. But it’s a medium-sized animal, and it is both captured from the wild for food and captive-bred and raised for food, and it was the first big suspect in the SARS outbreak. It was found that some of the people who got sick very early on had eaten butchered civet. And they tested some civets, and they found evidence of the virus. They found antibodies or fragments of DNA or RNA in these civets, suggesting that they had been infected with the virus. And that didn’t prove they were the reservoir host, but it made them the No. 1 suspect, until a couple of Chinese scientists did further work and they established that, in fact, the virus was not living permanently in the civet population in the wild or in captivity. It [had] a different reservoir host. It was living in bats and had passed, presumably, at a market somewhere. It had passed from a bat into one or more civets, and they became the amplifier host. ...
Thousands of civets in captivity were butchered and electrocuted and smothered and drowned in this first, panicked blind reaction in China to the SARS outbreak.
On why bats are often hosts for viruses
Bats are implicated in what seems to be more than their share [of zoonoses]. There are a lot of different species of bats. One-quarter of all mammal species are bats. But there are other things [special] about them — including aspects of their immune system. There have been some discoveries lately that bat immune systems are “downregulated” in a certain way that allows for the metabolic stresses of being a mammal that flies. And the downregulating of the immune system to avoid overreaction to those stresses seems, perhaps, also to create an environment in which viruses are more tolerated in bats than in other mammals.
On how coronaviruses have evolved through different species
One of the reasons SARS could adapt from bat to civet to human is the fact that it is a coronavirus, which is a group of viruses that are very readily adaptable. Experts call that intrinsic evolvability. Their rate of mutation is very high when they copy themselves. Their genome contains a lot of mistakes, and that represents mutations that are sort of the random raw material for Darwinian evolution. So viruses that have high mutation rates are able to evolve quickly and adapt quickly. And coronaviruses ... have that characteristic.
The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:
The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize.
Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …
If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot. …
The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and doing it while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.
The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.