Australians Only Thread

[Spike]

16 hours ago, Carnivore Chris said:

You dog cunts!

I’ll send you back to England in a pine box ya dopey eyed cunt

[CaaC (John)+]

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Australian research shows how the Mediterranean went from brine to megaflood to thriving marine ecosystem

An extraordinary megaflood occurred 5 million years ago as the Mediterranean rose 10 metres a day!

Research coming out of the Australian National University (ANU) delves deeper into what happened in the Mediterranean during a megaflood five million years ago.

The event, called the Zanclean megaflood, was the greatest flooding event known to science.  It turned the Mediterranean basin from a barren, salty brine pool into the bustling marine ecosystem we know today. The ANU study sheds light on how this transformation took place.

Published in Nature Geoscience, the research indicates that it took 26,000 years for the salt accumulated in the eastern Mediterranean to wash out into the Atlantic Ocean, making the sea suitable for abundant marine life.

Being from Cyprus myself, I grew up with the knowledge that you can find seashells on the island’s largest mountain range, the Troodos Mountains. The Mediterranean has had a tumultuous history filled with tectonic activity, sinking and rising islands, and floods.

Lead author and ANU PhD researcher in palaeoenvironments, Udara Amarathunga, says the Zanclean flood was one of the most abrupt global environmental shift since the mass extinction which saw the disappearance of the non-avian dinosaurs.

Udara Amarathunga. Image provided.

Amarathunga says it was “the rebirth of the Mediterranean.”

“Our study fills a gap in the story.

“The megaflood triggered the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC) when the Mediterranean basin partially dried up as the Atlantic-Mediterranean gateway was closed, leaving behind huge bodies of salt and killing most life forms.”

Amarathunga told Cosmos that the MSC began six million years ago as the European and African continental plates pushed against each other, cutting the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic at the point where Gibraltar lies today.

This “gate,” says Amarathunga “was not fully closed and allowed a small amount of inflow to the Mediterranean. But it closed entirely by 5.6 million years, and this is the peak of the Salinity Crisis.”

Though the scientists are not sure of the exact extent of the Mediterranean’s drying, Amarathunga says they believe its levels reduced by 1-2 kilometres, creating an eastern and western basin separated by what is now Sicily.

But the Mediterranean is no longer an inhospitable brine, so what changed?

Slowly, but surely, Amarathunga explains, erosion saw small amounts of water trickling from the Atlantic back into the Mediterranean. The megaflood hypothesis was first elaborated in 2009 by Spanish scientist Daniel Garcia-Castellanos who suggested that, after this initial slow flow, the “dam wall” would have broken and seen a massive volume of water enter the Mediterranean Sea.

The energy produced by the mass movement of water in a single day at the peak of the flood would have been equivalent to 500 times the energy produced by Niagara Falls in a whole year. It’s estimated that the Mediterranean Sea would have risen more than 10 metres per day at the peak of the flood.

“This is termed the most abrupt flood in recorded history,” says Amarathunga. “And, as the Mediterranean was filled, the global sea level was lowered by about nine metres!”

Immediately after the flooding surface in the eastern Mediterranean, there is an “organic-rich layer” which shows low oxygen levels in the water, since oxygen leads to oxidation of this organic matter. This layer doesn’t appear in the western basin. So, these anoxic dead zones in the eastern Mediterranean indicates that the eastern basin was anoxic after the flood.

The megaflood and the organic-rich layer deposition happened in stages.

The western basin of the Mediterranean fills up first. Then, once the land barrier to the eastern basin is broken, there is a waterfall into the east. But this waterfall, Amarathunga’s work shows, would have carried with it large amounts of salt into the eastern basin.

“Our interpretation is that, towards the end of the flood, both basins are mixed. But because of the floodwater’s energy, all the salt is transferred from this waterfall to the eastern basin,” Amarathunga says. “Now this salt needs to transfer that salt to the Atlantic. We used another model to estimate the time it will take to remove the salt that to the Atlantic.”

“Our work indicates it took another 26,000 years to remove all the excess salt to the Atlantic Ocean and return the Mediterranean to a normal marine basin.”

This lengthy transition period was unknown to scientists until now. The megaflood hypothesis is subject to some controversy, however. Some scientists suggest that the Mediterranean never dried up in large scale. This new ANU study provides evidence which strengthens the megaflood hypothesis.

Amarathunga said such rapid and large transformation are rare, making the Zanclean flood a unique example of how quickly entire ecosystems can shift.

But there is more work to be done to fully understand the impact of the megaflood.

“It’s unclear how such a transformation would have changed the regional climate,” Amarathunga says. “Also, further studies could tell us more about how organisms evolved as the Mediterranean was reborn.”

To do this, Amarathunga says that they will look for “biomarkers” in the sediment laid down millions of years ago.

“Biomarkers are a very good way of telling stories like this. The techniques we will use for future research will be geochemical measurements. That includes X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction. We will look at biomarkers and will also quantify the amount of organic matter in the sediment.”

Amarathunga says that there are 11 sites across the Mediterranean with sedimentary records from the period – seven in the western basin and four in the east. While his research is based on one of these sites in the east, he says “we cannot just look at one site and tell a story about the whole basin.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/mediterranean-megaflood-anu/

 

Edited August 17, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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[CaaC (John)+]

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Underground ‘genius lab’ one step closer to finding dark matter

A black (mine) hole in central Victoria ready to swallow up the equipment…

An experiment to search for dark matter, which will take place in a gold mine under the Victorian town of Stawell, has just completed the first stage of its plans.

Stage one of the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) was officially opened today. Although there’s no detector or other equipment yet in the new space, the once cave like structure now looks like a shiny new laboratory, equipped with working showers and air-conditioning.

The lab, located in the active Stawell Gold Mine, is 1-kilometre underground and includes a research hall 33 metres long, 10 metres wide and 12.3 metres high.

“We know there is much more matter in the universe than we can see,” says Professor Elisabetta Barberio from the University of Melbourne.

“With the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory, we have the tools and location to detect this dark matter. Proving the existence of dark matter will help us understand its nature and forever change how we see the universe.”

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Read more: Genius lair: Australia’s dark matter experiment underfoot

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The lab has now been handed over to the SUPL team who will start bringing in equipment in the next month.

This may take a while, as the detector is housed in tonnes of steel that need to be brought down the long, winding tunnel in the mine itself.

The experiment has been marred by delays. The original project was set to be finished in the mid-2010s, and even last year there were hopes of getting it finished by the end of 2021.

However, with the lab finally complete, it hopefully won’t be too long until they start trying to detect the mysterious particles which seem to make up our Universe.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/underground-genius-lab-stawell-finding-dark-matter/

 

[Azeem]

[Spike]

There may be a sort of homecoming sooner than expected. My wife is worried for me and she thinks I will never really ‘reengage’ back into life, she has made comments about how I seem to be on ‘autopilot’, and that going home is really the only solution. As soon as December maybe but what gets me is we aren’t really making progress on having a kid when I’m far away.

[Toinho]

2 hours ago, Spike said:

There may be a sort of homecoming sooner than expected. My wife is worried for me and she thinks I will never really ‘reengage’ back into life, she has made comments about how I seem to be on ‘autopilot’, and that going home is really the only solution. As soon as December maybe but what gets me is we aren’t really making progress on having a kid when I’m far away.

Can you start the process for your wife to join you? I think you've explained here before, but what are your options?

[Spike]

41 minutes ago, Toinho said:

Can you start the process for your wife to join you? I think you've explained here before, but what are your options?

Oh we have already started. We just need another statement from a friend.

[Toinho]

18 minutes ago, Spike said:

Oh we have already started. We just need another statement from a friend.

I can be the friend? Haha.

[Spike]

8 hours ago, Toinho said:

I can be the friend? Haha.

You really want to fill out a document detailing how you know me and my wife, and getting a bunch of documents that prove you are an Austrslian

Edited August 29, 2022 by Spike

[Toinho]

18 minutes ago, Spike said:

You really want to fill out a document detailing how you know me and my wife, and getting a bunch of documents that prove you are an Austrslian

Ah I’m Australian. 

[Spike]

1 hour ago, Toinho said:

Ah I’m Australian. 

‘I have never met his wife but I assure you that I exist and we talk on a tiny Internet forum that is a relic of early 00s internet culture. I am not a crackpot’

[CaaC (John)+]

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The Southern bent-wing bat is the 2022 Australian Mammal of the Year

Congratulations to the dingo for coming in second!

After 6 weeks of intense voting – in which more than 50,000 votes were cast in total – we can finally announce that the winner of the inaugural Australian Mammal of the Year contest is the Southern bent-wing bat!

The Southern bent-winged bat swooped ahead of the dingo early and held onto its lead through some fierce competition in the two days of intense voting! In the end, this critically endangered microbat triumphed in the competition with almost 60% of the vote.

A round of applause for the Southern bent-wing bat!

Southern bent-wing bats live in caves throughout southwest Victoria and southeast South Australia. This tiny, cave-dwelling bat only reaches an average length of approximately 5 centimetres (including their head and body) and weighs only 15 grams – that’s the same as a 50-cent coin!

FULL REPORT

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

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Do Australia’s mine tailings contain a wealth of rare earths, right under our noses?

Tailings mounds and dams might be a pre-packaged source of the critical minerals and rare earths vital for modern green technology.

 

Most are unsightly and useless, and they may even be toxic. But the castoffs from 200 years of mining in regional Australia could be a golden opportunity in the rush for green energy.

A series of supply shocks has awakened the world to the value of critical minerals and rare earths. They are used in the production of lightweight but strong alloys, batteries, electric motors and resilient electronics and are vital for high-performance and miniaturised technologies.

But they’re hard to find, costly and dirty to extract and refine, and their supply and prices are immensely volatile.

“Some 70–80% of the supply of most of these minerals is controlled by just one country – China,” says Monash University associate professor Mohan Yellishetty. 

But this doesn’t need to be the case. Rich reserves of these minerals sit – on top of the ground – right under our noses.

They’re usually in remote and regional Australia, amid mining boom towns that have seen better days. But those boom days can come again, says resources engineering expert Yellishetty.

Much of the environmental and economic cost of mining these minerals has already been paid. The explosives have been detonated, the drills have done their boring. The diesel has been burnt to haul the ore out of the ground. And it’s often already partially refined.

Why do this all over again if such easy pickings are available?

“If you look at Olympic Dam [in South Australia], which we have studied a few times, it could supply quite a big chunk – up to 40% – of the world’s demand for rare earths,” says Yellishetty. “But only if BHP is happy to recover them.”

Most rare earths and critical minerals are found paired with a more common metal. So we know where to look. Olympic Dam, for example, is Australia’s largest copper mine. But associated with copper are the elements yttrium, cobalt and tellurium.

“At present, no critical minerals are extracted,” Yellishetty says. “They all end up in tailings. So all the hard work of digging them out of the ground has already been completed. It’s just a matter of finding a business and legal model to refine them.”

Australia’s made a start, he adds.

Geoscience Australia’s $225 million Exploring for the Future project is surveying national mine waste sites to map their potential.

For example, the Hellyer gold mine in western Tasmania has some $1.5 billion worth of gold, silver, lead and zinc sitting in its tailings dams.

Century mine at Lawn Hill in Queensland’s Gulf Country has the potential to become the world’s fourth largest zinc mine – thanks to the discarded tailings.

Sometimes, the results appear to defy logic.

OneVictorian gold mine, Yellishetty says, at times produces particularly high concentrations of antimony. This is needed for ammunition, cables and enamels.

“This is where the relevant legislative/regulatory structure may have to be agile to account for these dynamics so we can get most of our mineral ores.”

And that represents a failing of state and national policies. There are no legal means of separately licencing the rights to recover such by-products. And exactly who owns and can access what on a disused mine is yet to be determined.

But moves are afoot to change this, Yellishetty says. A few bold miners and the Exploring for the Future project are identifying opportunities.

“There’s still a lot of nitty-gritty that needs to be worked out,” Yellishetty concludes. “But at least there are positive moves. It’s a matter of having something is better than having nothing.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/sustainability/do-mine-tailings-contain-rare-earths/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Scans of tiny 13.5-million-year-old Aussie crocodile suggest it may have spent most of its time on land

Adults of the diminutive crocodiles would have been 70 to 90 centimetres long.

A tiny crocodile which called north-western Queensland home 13.5 million years ago has revealed its secrets to University of Queensland (UQ) researchers.

The palaeontologists used high-tech methods to scan the fossils of the creature to uncover previously unknown details about its anatomy. The findings are published in the Journal of Anatomy.

Named in 1993, the ancient croc is called Trilophosuchus rackhami, meaning Rackham’s three-crested crocodile. It was named after Alan Rackham, the current manager of the Riversleigh Fossil Discovery Centre at Mt Isa in northwest Queensland.

“By micro-CT scanning the beautifully preserved skull, we were able to digitally separate each bone,” says author Jorgo Ristevski, a PhD candidate at UQ.

“We estimated that at adulthood, Trilophosuchus rackhami would have been between 70 and 90 centimetres long and weigh one to two kilograms, which was very small compared to most present-day crocs. This was a truly unique looking croc, with a short snout and three distinct ridges on the top of its skull.”

Trilophosuchus lived in the middle of the geological period known as the Miocene which lasted from around 23 million to 5 million years ago.

At the beginning of the Miocene, Australia separated from Antarctica. Over the next millions of years, the Australasian continental plate would travel northward, pushing up against the islands of southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Antarctica would inch further south, growing colder.

Australia’s climate in the Miocene was much more humid and wetter than it is today, though it would get dryer by the late Miocene as more of Earth’s atmospheric moisture was being trapped in the ice sheets of Antarctica which were beginning to form.

Even so, in the time that T. rackhami lived, northern Australia was still covered in lush tropical rainforest. It was a vibrant time of rich plant and animal life. Northern Australia would have resembled today’s Amazon.

Ristevski says palaeoneurology – the study of fossil brain and nervous systems – can provide key insights into the animal’s evolution, anatomy and behaviour.

“For one of the studies, I digitally reconstructed the brain cavity of Trilophosuchus rackhami and found that it resembles that of some distantly related and potentially terrestrial extinct crocs from Africa and South America,” Ristevski explains.

By scanning the animal’s skull, Ristevski was able to compare it to other known extinct and living crocodilians. His results suggest that the T. rackhami may have spent a lot of its time on the forest floor rather than in the water.

“We were quite surprised because evolutionarily speaking, Trilophosuchus rackhami is more closely related to today’s crocs. The fact it resembles other potentially terrestrial crocodiles may indicate that Trilophosuchus rackhami spent more time on land than most living crocs.”

Head of UQ’s Dinosaur Lab, Associate Professor Steve Salisbury, says Australia had a rich array of prehistoric crocs up until very recently. “Trilophosuchus rackhami was certainly one of the cutest,” says Salisbury.

“If we could travel back in time to north Queensland 13 million years ago, not only would you need to watch out for crocodiles at the water’s edge, but you’d also have to make sure you didn’t step on them in the forest.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/13-million-year-old-aussie-crocodile/

 

[Spike]

On 29/08/2022 at 08:55, CaaC (John) said:

 

I keep thinking about this, everyday it comes to my mind. ‘Mammal of the year’ what a strange award. Do I have a chance to win? What do I have to so?

[CaaC (John)+]

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Unearthing Australia’s ancient birds of prey

Piecing together the prehistory of Australia’s birdlife reveals stunning insights.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with dinosaurs and megafauna, and I’ve wanted to know more about them. From at least the age of five, I knew I wanted to be a palaeontologist.

That interest has stayed with me over the years. After graduating from Adelaide University with a Bachelor of Science in evolutionary biology, I came to Flinders University in 2016 and took on a project with Professor Trevor Worthy looking at 20 million-year-old fossils of rails, a type of waterbird, from New Zealand. That was my introduction to bird fossils. I then went on to do a PhD project from 2017 to 2021 on Australian eagle fossils from across different time periods, and I’ve been working on them ever since.

Most of our fossils come from caves. When animals die, bones left on the surface quickly erode away. But caves protect bones from the elements and provide an environment that allows them to be more easily preserved. Some caves are fairly easy to access, but sometimes you have to put on all the caving gear, take lighting with you, and go down these very steep, deep holes to get down to the bottom.

We found some stunning fossils at the end of last year, which are part of an upcoming publication. We went into a cave in the Flinders Rangers of South Australia, hoping to find more fossil material of an eagle specimen that we knew had been found there previously, back in the 1950s and ’60s. We thought there might still be some fossil bones that were overlooked.

We ended up finding quite a lot more than we expected, which was a thrill. We found just over two dozen more bones of the eagle, as well as lots of isolated fossils of small birds and mammals that probably ended up there by accident or were brought in by predators like owls.

Our next publication describes the eagle fossils as a new species from the Pleistocene (2.5 million to 11,000 years ago), which is quite a recent extinction, relatively speaking. It would have been very impressive to see in flight – based on the bones we have, we estimate it to be around twice the size of a wedge-tailed eagle.

We also recently undertook a review of fossil eagle bones collected from the Wellington Caves in NSW to identify more material from a species found by the Warburton River in SA over 100 years ago. Back when this fossil was discovered it was thought to be an eagle. But we looked at the tarsometatarsus, which is the lower leg bone where the foot connects to the leg in birds. This bone is very different in vultures and eagles. In eagles, you can see a lot of scarring from its musculature, and it’s quite robust and powerful because it needs to sink its claws into prey and hold on. But because vultures don’t actively kill their own prey, they have much shallower, more reduced muscle attachments comparatively.

It became quite obvious to us that this fossil bone had to come from a vulture rather than an eagle. This was a stunning discovery – vultures obviously don’t exist here anymore. This was a unique Australian bird that belongs to a group known as the Old World vultures, found throughout Asia, Europe and Africa.

We think their extinction is most likely connected to the extinction of Australia’s megafauna, which occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago. Animals like Diprotodon and the giant kangaroos and wombats would have been providing a lot of the carcasses necessary for vultures to survive on. But when they died out, the vultures’ main food supply would have dried up.

I have also published a paper on Australia’s oldest known eagle, from a 25 million-year-old species found in South Australia. This one was found out in the desert, in a very arid zone near Lake Frome. That is different to cave work! You’re sweating all the time, you have to watch out for the flies, wear sunscreen and sunglasses – it’s quite a challenging experience.

All these discoveries are very exciting, because we don’t have an extensive fossil record of eagles in Australia. They’re not very abundant in most depositional environments, which are typically formed in aquatic or semi-aquatic regions. Finding even a few eagle bones can tell us so much.

The next big thing? I now really want to know what was going on with our eagles between the period 25 million years ago and the Pleistocene, because there’s a big gap there. We don’t know of many species at all from that time period.

This could tell us a lot about the diversity of these species of eagles and the Australian vultures before they died out in the late Pleistocene. Fossil species from that time period could indicate whether our eagles have been long-term inhabitants evolving over time, or if we’re getting sequential extinctions, with new species arriving from elsewhere to take their place. We would discover whether the driver for diversity is endemic evolution or continual migration from overseas.

Our magnificent wedge-tailed eagle is part of the same genus as 10 other species from around the world. It’s closely related to species like the golden eagle from across the northern hemisphere, Bonelli’s eagle from northern Africa, southern Europe and parts of Asia, and Verreaux’s eagle from southern Africa. It’s a very close relative to Gurney’s eagle in the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea region, which is not unexpected given their geographic closeness.

That might suggest it’s a much more recent arrival than you’d think – which is a pretty similar story for most of Australia’s other eagles and hawks. Only the black-breasted buzzard and the square-tailed kite are completely unique to Australia. There’s so much more we need to understand.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/australias-ancient-birds-of-prey/

 

 

Edited September 9, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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[Azeem]

[Spike]

9 hours ago, Beelzebub said:

Fake news. They are called tuck shops.

[Toinho]

1 hour ago, Spike said:

Fake news. They are called tuck shops.

Not here. We don’t even have a school canteen though haha 

[CaaC (John)+]

9 minutes ago, Toinho said:

Not here. We don’t even have a school canteen though haha 

I can't remember having a school canteen either when I was out there, used to go to a shop across from the school and get a big Boston cream bun. 

[Spike]

3 hours ago, Toinho said:

Not here. We don’t even have a school canteen though haha 

I hste that

[CaaC (John)+]

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Will Australian homes really be hit by power outages in the next few years?

Market operator calls for infrastructure investment to negate security concerns

Committing to several electricity generation and transmission projects which are currently anticipated to take place this decade would shore up reliability in Australia’s electricity grid and reduce the chances of power outages.

That’s the message from the nation’s electricity market operator AEMO, which has identified “reliability gaps” for several states emerging from the closure of five coal-fired power stations over the next decade. These stations account for the equivalent of 14 percent of the market’s capacity.

While Australia’s expected energy use is expected to remain within the ‘interim reliability measure’ enacted to reduce load shedding risk across the energy market this summer, the outlook beyond this is expected to see a drop in reliability as demand increases amid an increasingly electrified economy. 

Without sufficient investment in new supply and transmission, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia would be affected by reliability gaps in the next three to four years.

However right now there is about  3.4 GW of anticipated generation and storage projects and if they are delivered in-line with currently projected timeframes, that outlook would improve – pushing anticipated gaps back to 2027/28 at the earliest.

These projects include a combined 2,400 megawatts of wind power generation and battery energy storage,  850 MW of solar generation, 100 MW of peaking capacity using gas and diesel and transmission projects in New South Wales and Victoria.

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman called for further investment in supply and transmission infrastructure to meet increasing demand within the system.

“In the next decade, Australia will experience our first cluster of coal-generation retirements, at least five power stations totalling 8.3 gigawatts (GW), equal to approximately 14 per cent of the NEM’s total capacity,” Westerman says

“Without further investments, this will reduce generation supply and challenge the transmission network’s capability to meet reliability standards and power system security needs.”

That’s a view shared by Associate Professor Liam Wagner, a senior research fellow in the school of economics and public policy at Adelaide University.

Wagner says measures like a further expansion of Australia’s transmission network beyond current plans, further uptake and incentivisation of renewables and implementation of carbon pricing are measures that would help to bolster market reliability.

“The system’s strength and stability are of significant concern, particularly for a developed economy like Australia,” Wagner says.

“We need to have high reliability in our energy system and the only way we’re going to be able to make up for its current inadequacies is to act now.”

One of the inadequacies Wagner identifies is the reduced availability of gas supplies in the domestic market. The interim gas report released by the ACCC in August projected gas shortages for Australia’s east coast, the result of an imbalance between export and domestic gas retention policies.

“We need to have a significant increase in the amount of gas that’s made solely available for domestic purposes,” Wagner says.

“We are in a gas crisis at the moment simply because of exports, not because we don’t have enough gas.  So really, we are in a situation where we should be guaranteeing the supply of gas, and ensuring that those gas fired generators can ramp up and be online when they’re needed.”

While that’s a short-term imperative, the other factor pointed to by AEMO’s Westerman, is infrastructure investment.

This includes upgrades of existing transmission interconnectors and new transmission pathways between states.

Preventing power outages requires coordination

Investment in transmission is required to help efficiently move renewable power where it’s needed – for example between South Australia and Queensland.

And while Australia has the technological and knowledge resources to execute a ‘green’ overhaul of its national grid, Professor Ariel Liebman who heads up the Monash Energy Institute says the question is whether it can be done fast enough.

“We have all the technology components – wind, solar, and storage – that’s affordable at scale,” Liebman says.

“Transmission we have all these things [components], we know how to build them.

“It’s a matter of building enough of them fast enough.”

The May federal election brought a Labor government to power with a policy to position Australia as a ‘renewable energy superpower’ with a $20 billion investment policy to ‘rebuild and modernise’ the country’s electricity grid.

Achieving that will require better coordination between the commonwealth and the states, the latter of which is responsible for infrastructure.

While bodies like the Australian Energy Market Commission (the market rulemaker), the national energy regulator (compliance) and AEMO (operations) broadly take care of the market, Liebman believes a united approach between two tiers of government will be critical to avoiding the lights going off.

“The challenge here is that the jurisdiction actually rests with the states over their infrastructure,” Liebman says.

“They’ve delegated some of it to the federal government’s bodies, like the AEMC, AER, and the operator AEMO whose job it is to inform and operate in real time – they don’t have any planning or investment powers.

“That framework is a bit cumbersome, and isn’t necessarily fit for the fast transition we need.

“So we need to look at the mix of powers that these bodies have, and how to make it more efficient, and take the politics out of it, between the states and between the states and the federal government.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/australia-power-outages/

 

 

Edited September 11, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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[CaaC (John)+]

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3D X-rays and AI could help detect illegally trafficked Australian wildlife hidden in luggage or cargo

Australian scientists created artificial intelligence algorithms to detect animals from CT scans.

Australia is proudly home to some of the world’s most diverse and unique wildlife, but with that richness comes a market for illegal wildlife trafficking.

Existing techniques to detect illegally trafficked wildlife have involved X-ray scans, physical detections via border security, and use of biosecurity dogs.

Now, Australian scientists have found that 3D X-ray technology and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can be used together to detect trafficked wildlife hidden in luggage or other cargo.

The team created a 3D scanned ‘reference library’ for three classes of wildlife – lizards, birds, and fish – which they used to ‘teach’ artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to detect the animals.

The AI achieved a detection rate of 82% with a false hit rate of just 1.6%.

The recently published study, in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science Human-Wildlife Interactions, is the first to document the use of 3D x-ray CT scanning technology for wildlife protection.

“Taking animals from the wild poses risks to the species’ conservation, local populations, habitats and ecosystems, and stopping wildlife from being trafficked into Australia protects our unique natural environment from exotic pests and diseases,” says Sam Hush, acting Assistant Secretary for Environment Compliance at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).

“It is also extremely cruel. Smuggled animals often suffer stress, dehydration or starvation and many die during transit. We have been working with the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) to test and validate the wildlife 3D x-ray and algorithms which have both proven to be very effective.”

There is also a biosecurity element. “Illegal wildlife trafficking poses a significant biosecurity risk to Australia as it could introduce pests and diseases that could impact on the environment, as well as human and animal health,” says Dr Chris Locke, Deputy Secretary of the Biosecurity and Compliance group at DAFF.

The research team used 3D X-ray CT technology using Real Time Tomography (RTT) in the study. This is a technique which uses X-rays to produce a series of image cross sections through an item, in this case an animal, which can be manipulated to provide a 360-degree view of it.

The already deceased specimens were scanned using a system used for explosive detection screening currently in use at international borders and around the world in airports and mail cargo facilities.

The library included 294 scans from 13 different species in different scenarios – from an animal on its own to more complicated and realistic trafficking scenarios – which was then used to teach AI algorithms to detect the animals.

“This paper demonstrates the boundless potential the 3D x-ray algorithm has in helping to stop exotic wildlife from being trafficked, protecting Australia’s agricultural industries and unique natural environment from exotic pests and diseases.

“This innovative technology is an invaluable complementary platform to our existing biosecurity and wildlife detection tools at Australian international borders, with potential worldwide applications in the future,” Locke says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/detecting-trafficked-wildlife-x-ray-ai/

 

Edited September 22, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Rock art – a deep look into Marra Wonga and its Seven Sisters story

The imagery at Marra Wonga tells of a narrative with thousands of different layers.

The Marra Wonga site, near Barcaldine in central Queensland, is home to around 15,000 individual works of rock art.

Though they stretch across 160 metres of sandstone, and likely several thousand years of creation, the petroglyphs tell one cohesive story: that of the Seven Sisters, a common motif in Aboriginal cultures that bears a close resemblance to the Ancient Greeks’ Pleiades.

Researchers based at Griffith University, and Iningai Traditional Owners, have been documenting the site’s art from both an archaeological and ethnographic perspective and have recently published their findings in Australian Archaeology.

“Ten clusters of designs spread across the length of the engraved area of Marra Wonga appear to have been placed in a particular order, from south to north, although the designs were likely made at different times, with an accumulation of these clusters and other rock markings over time,” says lead author Professor Paul Tacon, from Griffith University’s Centre for Social Cultural Research.

“However, the order makes sense for contemporary Aboriginal community members as different parts of a Seven Sisters Dreaming story, in the correct sequence.”

FULL REPORT

 

 

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WildObs: Australian scientists are trying to create a huge database of wildlife selfies

Smile for the trap camera!

Around the country, there are thousands of cameras hidden in the wild, just waiting for an unsuspecting potoroo, dingo, or feral cat to snap a selfie.

These cameras, and the massive number of images and data they capture, are currently mostly isolated – potentially used for a research project or two, and then deleted to make room on the hard drive for something else.

However, a team of Australian researchers from the University of Queensland, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as James Cook University and others, are trying to create something much more far reaching. The team is in the early stages of building a central database, which they’ve named the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs), to collect, store and tag this huge quantity of data.

“We’re creating a national standard for wildlife monitoring so researchers can, for the first time, systematically monitor wildlife across the Australian continent,” says UQ ecologist, Dr Matthew Luskin.

The idea for WildObs is to have a national ‘one stop shop’ for researchers. Eventually, the team hopes it will be treasure trove of information for researchers looking for certain animals or location data even without entering the field.

But aware that they’re unlikely to convince researchers to give up their hard earned data without reward, the team is creating helpful tools for ecologists in the field, to make it attractive to use the system.  

“We want to provide tools for practitioners that set camera traps on the field, provide tools to rapidly sort out images using artificial intelligence and then once those images are all sorted … we aim to provide some nifty tools for users to then analyse that camera trap data,” UQ ecologist Zachary Amir told Cosmos.

The AI system which WildObs is using is called Wildlife Insights, and has already sorted over 54 million camera trap records from around the world.

Zachary Amir setting up cameras on K’gari. Credit: UQ/QPWS

The researchers stress that this is still very much early days. Some of the team – like Amir – have been creating new datasets for the system, having recently finished taking 130,000 photos on 25 cameras on K’gari (Fraser Island) monitoring potoroos. Now, he’s just starting a new camera survey across Queensland’s tropical rainforests, hoping to get camera data across nine national parks.

For him, he’s happy for the data to be out there for other researchers to analyse as soon as possible, although he explains that there the system will have embargoes in place if the researchers want to get a first shot at their data before it goes to the wider research community.

“My interest is looking at species interactions, and I want to understand how the abundance of feral cats in one park might affect the abundance of musky rat kangaroos in a different park,” he says.

“The more people that have more data, the better decisions we can all make. It’s just it’s better for all parties.”

The WildObs team are hoping to be as transparent and open as possible with their data, although there are still some kinks to work out. For example, sensitive species might need their coordinates blurred, while hunters could use their data for more nefarious reasons.

 

“There will still be checks in place to make sure it’s not pig hunter Joe, who uses the data to find out where feral pigs are,” says Amir.

“But if you’re a researcher and you’re going to use the data for science, or if you’re a land manager trying to make better decisions – there should be no boundaries … We are aiming for pretty open transparency and availability of these data sources.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/wildobs-australia-scientists-database-ai-system/

 

Edited September 27, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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