South Korea’s meteorological agency has warned that tsunami waves up to 0.3m could hit the eastern coast of the country between 18:29 to 19:17 local time on Monday. It has asked residents in the mountainous Gangwon province to province to evacuate to higher ground.
Russia has issued tsunami warnings in the far eastern port cities of Vladivostok and Nakhodka, its state news agency TASS reported.
A magnitude 4.2 earthquake has struck.
The quake registered an intensity of 3 on the Japanese seismic scale of zero to 7.
Japan Airlines plane in flames on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport
Watch: First pictures of plane on fire on Tokyo runway
All 379 of the passengers made it off safely. The Coast Guard is saying that the Japan Airlines plane collided with one of their fixed-wing aircraft.
Update: Five of the six crewmembers on the Coast Guard plane are unaccounted for.
Driver allegedly left suicide note in deadly Rochester crash being investigated as domestic terrorism, source says
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/us/kodak-center-new-york-car-crash/index.html
The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating after two vehicles – one laden with gas canisters – crashed and plowed into the crowd outside the concert at the Kodak Center, killing two people and injuring five others. The At least a dozen gasoline canisters found
The crash ignited a fire that took firefighters nearly an hour to extinguish, the chief said.suspect, who has been identified as Michael Avery from Syracuse, has died, two law enforcement sources said.
The study focused on a weedy plant called the field pansy, whose white, yellow and purple flowers are common in fields and on roadsides across Europe.
Field pansies typically use bumblebees to sexually reproduce. But they can also use their own pollen to fertilize their own seeds, a process called selfing.
Selfing is more convenient than sex, since a flower does not have to wait for a bee to drop by. But a selfing flower can use only its own genes to produce new seeds. Sexual reproduction allows flowers to mix their DNA, creating new combinations that may make them better prepared for diseases, droughts and other challenges that future generations may face.
…
The researchers suspected that these changes made the new field pansies less attractive to bumblebees. To test that idea, they placed bumblebee hives inside enclosures with old and new field pansies. Sure enough, the bees paid more visits to the old plants than to the new ones.
As bumblebee populations have declined, Dr. Cheptou said, the cost of producing nectar and big, attractive flowers may have become a burden on the flowers. Instead of investing energy into luring pollinators, he speculated, field pansies are having more success by directing it to growth and resisting diseases.
The researchers suspect that many other flowers face the same challenge to their survival, and they may also be evolving in the same direction. “There’s no reason to think that other plants have not evolved,” Dr. Cheptou said.
If that’s true, the plants may be making a bad situation worse for pollinating insects. Many pollinators depend on nectar as food; if the plants make less, the insects will go hungry.
Pollinators and flowers may be locked in a downward spiral. Less nectar will drive down populations of insects even more, making sexual reproduction even less rewarding for the plants.
The spiral will not be bad for just the insects, Dr. Cheptou warned. If some plants eventually give up on sexual reproduction altogether, it is unlikely that they will be able to regain that ability again.
In the long term, the genetic limitations of selfing could put plants at risk of extinction. “They will not be able to adapt, so extinction will become more likely,” Dr. Cheptou said.
dunno. with the speed of the change, i’d wonder if that isn’t evolution but epigenetics. different expressions in genes based on the environment. it’d make sense that flower plants have [eta: preexisting] adaptions that can work across generations to protect against local changes in their environment.
that makes it sound imminent but flowering plants are maybe 300 million years old? plain old extinction – especially for the bees – seems much more likely than losing pollination due adaptation. ( not that that’s a good thing. 
)
Nah, I doubt that.
Flowers are cheap. Nectar ist super-cheap. And the genus Viola is not only capable of selfing, Viola odorata is school textbook material for cleistogamy.
Even the proverbial modesty -
Dem kleinen Veilchen gleich, das im Verborgenen blüht, sei immer froh und gut, auch wenn Dich niemand sieht - might actually be a reference to that: Viola odorata does grow its cleistogamous flowers on stalks which then bow down, grow hidden below the soil surface and develop their seedpods there.
Is there a link to the original research?
We just got notice that UVA Hospitals are overfull, the ED is overfull, and no further patients will be accepted. It closed with “we appreciate your safe and creative efforts to keep our patients away from the hospital.” Creative? WTF?? Yeah, it’s bad everywhere. I have said repeatedly that the healthcare system has collapsed, it’s just a slow-motion catastrophe. But even in slow motion, it can be horrifying.
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”
