Stones of granite wrote:
When that was made, about 5 years ago, the oil price was about $110/barrel. This morning it was $55/barrel. What does that tell you?
That the price per bbl varies?
Indeed. So, why isn't it $220/bbl or more if peak oil was reached in 2012?
It'll go up again.
That's the general belief, and it has been recovering gradually, however, stockpiles are not diminishing and the OPEC deal to cut production is not making much in the way of inroads.
The simplistic model presented in the documentary is broken. There is a new reality in oil.
And your simplistic model "prices are going down, but they'll recover, hurrah!" is compelling evidence that stockpiles aren't diminishing?
You do understand that war and politics can affect oil prices?
I believe there's a war going on in the ME at the moment, involving a few major oil producing nations.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2017 9:47 pm
by Vengeful Glutton
Stones of granite wrote:
Vengeful Glutton wrote:Is yer wan Granite working in the oil industry lads?
Still. Just.
You should be sacked.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2017 10:13 am
by Stones of granite
Vengeful Glutton wrote:
Stones of granite wrote:
Vengeful Glutton wrote:
That the price per bbl varies?
Indeed. So, why isn't it $220/bbl or more if peak oil was reached in 2012?
It'll go up again.
That's the general belief, and it has been recovering gradually, however, stockpiles are not diminishing and the OPEC deal to cut production is not making much in the way of inroads.
The simplistic model presented in the documentary is broken. There is a new reality in oil.
And your simplistic model "prices are going down, but they'll recover, hurrah!" is compelling evidence that stockpiles aren't diminishing?
You do understand that war and politics can affect oil prices?
I believe there's a war going on in the ME at the moment, involving a few major oil producing nations.
If you're going to simply make things up, then we have no basis for a discussion.
There are far more things than simply war and politics that affect oil prices, and I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, but there have been wars in the ME for quite a long time now, covering periods of both high and low oil prices.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2017 10:14 am
by Stones of granite
Vengeful Glutton wrote:
Stones of granite wrote:
Vengeful Glutton wrote:Is yer wan Granite working in the oil industry lads?
Still. Just.
You should be sacked.
You're not the first to say this, but hey ho, I still have a job. Today anyway.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 5:19 pm
by kk67
Which Tyler wrote:Giant Turtles and Aurocs would be the way to go for the meat industry.
The former may take forever to mature; but they can do it off by themselves out in the sea; and just collect them when they come to land for breeding.
Aurocs would just replace cow.
The giant tortoise was supposed to be the most delicious meat ever know to man.
So delicious was it's flesh, that according to QI, it took 300 years for the botanical community to give them a scientific name. This was entirely on account of all the samples being eaten on board the vessels returning them to the natural history museum.
Well worth a watch if you've never seen it.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 9:49 pm
by rowan
Wonder how a Neanderthal rugby team would stack up . . .
The scientific world was set ablaze of late as discussions ramped up about the resurrection of the wholly mammoth. I know what you’re thinking: Jurassic Park. Well, not quite — but maybe not that far off, either. In an interview with Big Think, Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, wonders: what if we could clone the Neanderthal, or a dinosaur, based solely off their genomes?
It is a plausible question. George Church, geneticist and director of Harvard University’s Church Labs, believes that we can clone a Neanderthal in our lifetime. So much so that he thinks all we need is “one extremely adventurous human female.” While he doesn’t advocate for the project to be attempted straight away, he does encourage discussion on the matter. Church believes that with current stem cell technology and our completed sequence of the Neanderthal genome, we are equipped with the potential to clone a Neanderthal.
The Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, so cloning one from recovered DNA would be impressive enough of a feat — but what about something from 65 million years ago? Dr. Kaku addresses this, admitting that cloning a dinosaur won’t be as easy as cloning a Neanderthal or a mammoth (which wouldn’t very “easy” to begin with) — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Dr. Kaku notes that proteins found within the soft tissues of recovered dinosaur femurs resemble those of chickens, frogs, and reptiles — confirm the theory of their relation. He posits that through the use of a supercomputer, a genetic sequence could be produced, which would create theoretical potential for cloning through epigenetics.
When it comes to cloning mammoths or dinosaurs, the limitations are mostly technical at this point. With Neanderthals, however, there’s an addition element: ethics. Dr. Kaku asks important questions about what scientists would do after bringing a Neanderthal child to life: Should he or she be placed in captivity like some kind of zoo animal? Would they face a lifetime of study? What if the Neanderthal is naturally aggressive — should it be drugged or confined at all times? Many bioethicists debate the ethics of de-extinction, but there are also those that tout genetic diversity. Others believe the act is far too inhumane to even attempt.
Listen to Dr. Kaku’s argument below and decide where you stand on the should-we-or-shouldn’t-we of prehistoric cloning.
You'd need a wholly intact Neanderthal nucleus to transfer into an enucleated fertilized human egg. That's the easy bit. You would make Embryonic stem cell clones of any viable manipulations and sequence their genomes in their entirety to confirm they are intact. It would be nigh impossible to confirm the accuracy of this sample as it is generated from a single sample, so there is no way to compare polymorphisms across a population. The resultant clones would almost certainly be a train smash. Even if one did survive, you know what they say about inbreeding.....evolutionary dead end. Attempting to revive a species from a single sample genome. No way Jack.
Dunno how many individual mammoth genomes/intact nuclei from individual animals.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 10:21 pm
by morepork
morepork wrote:You'd need a wholly intact Neanderthal nucleus to transfer into an enucleated fertilized human egg. That's the easy bit. You would make Embryonic stem cell clones of any viable manipulations and sequence their genomes in their entirety to confirm they are intact. It would be nigh impossible to confirm the accuracy of this sample as it is generated from a single individual, so there is no way to compare polymorphisms across a population. The resultant clones would almost certainly be a train smash. Even if one did survive, you know what they say about inbreeding.....evolutionary dead end. Attempting to revive a species from a single sample genome. No way Jack.
Dunno how many individual mammoth genomes/intact nuclei from individual animals.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 10:22 pm
by rowan
WaspInWales wrote:Would have to expand the 6Ns if that happened!
Shorter and stockier than Sapiens. Looks like they'd make good scrummagers but could struggle in the lineout as well as out wide in terms of pace. I don't think we'll be seeing a team of Neanderthals winning the Rugby World Cup any time in the future somehow...
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 10:25 pm
by WaspInWales
rowan wrote:
WaspInWales wrote:Would have to expand the 6Ns if that happened!
Shorter and stockier than Sapiens. Looks like they'd make good scrummagers but could struggle in the lineout as well as out wide in terms of pace. I don't think we'll be seeing a team of Neanderthals winning the Rugby World Cup any time in the future somehow...
I think the lack of height can be negated with the use of spears.
Any mention of spears in the laws? Could well be a loophole to exploit. If Eddie didn't like ruck-gate (sorry Mike), I can't wait to see how he responds to players being taken out with primitive weapons.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 7:33 am
by rowan
WaspInWales wrote:
rowan wrote:
WaspInWales wrote:Would have to expand the 6Ns if that happened!
Shorter and stockier than Sapiens. Looks like they'd make good scrummagers but could struggle in the lineout as well as out wide in terms of pace. I don't think we'll be seeing a team of Neanderthals winning the Rugby World Cup any time in the future somehow...
I think the lack of height can be negated with the use of spears.
Any mention of spears in the laws? Could well be a loophole to exploit. If Eddie didn't like ruck-gate (sorry Mike), I can't wait to see how he responds to players being taken out with primitive weapons.
Most accounts I've read suggest Sapiens eventually defeated Neanderthals precisely because of our superior tactics and weaponry, developed as big game hunters (v. small game hunters). We were on the back foot for a very long time - thousands of years, in fact - but eventually gained the upper hand with our more advanced team-work, and bigger clubs and spears, and finished them off about 30,000 years ago (with a little hybridization along the way).
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 7:40 am
by rowan
Neanderthals actually look well-suited to league, where they wouldn't need to worry about lineouts either. I mean, lower cranium, larger bowbridge, flat noses and short necks - those guys would slot right into the NRL. No one would know the difference!
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 10:28 am
by Which Tyler
kk67 wrote:The giant tortoise was supposed to be the most delicious meat ever know to man.
So delicious was it's flesh, that according to QI, it took 300 years for the botanical community to give them a scientific name. This was entirely on account of all the samples being eaten on board the vessels returning them to the natural history museum.
That's what I was thinking of when I named them - with the benefit of them looking after themselves as a food source, then predictably bringing themselves in for slaughter.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 4:23 pm
by rowan
So camels - like horses - evolved in the Americas but went extinct there. Wolves and their canine cousins bears also originated in the Americas, though they did not go extinct and remained prominent there.
Although they are now extinct in North America, camels first evolved there more than 40 million years ago. Living camels are now limited to the Old World (dromedary and Bactrian camels), and South America (llamas, guanacos, and alpacas). For much of the Cenozoic however, camels were common and diverse in North America. One of the last camels to live in North America was Camelops, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago.
It was either the Sweden or Norway that reintroduced Wolves to their ecology with a lot of success. Even a migratory animal like a Mammoth would have reasonable range in Siberia..?. I'm asking. Looks like a lot of wasteland on the tv.
If they are an animal we caused to go extinct,....and they are the prey of polar bears whose ice we've stolen. Then lets get them back in the ring.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:12 pm
by rowan
kk67 wrote:It was either the Sweden or Norway that reintroduced Wolves to their ecology with a lot of success. Even a migratory animal like a Mammoth would have reasonable range in Siberia..?. I'm asking. Looks like a lot of wasteland on the tv.
If they are an animal we caused to go extinct,....and they are the prey of polar bears whose ice we've stolen. Then lets get them back in the ring.
They were certainly not the prey of polar bears. Aside from humans, saber-toothed tigers were their main enemy. No point bringing them back now but for our own amusement, and genetically that would be a hybrid mammoth-elephant anyway, from what little I understand about the process. They were a creature of the Ice Age. This is the age of global warming. They wouldn't thank us...
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:29 pm
by kk67
rowan wrote: They were a creature of the Ice Age. This is the age of global warming. They wouldn't thank us...
I don't think evolution entirely works like that. Especially not when it's man made extinction.
People, silly middle management types, like to talk about how they are at the 'top of the food chain'. City Boys talk about how they are 'Alpha Males'.
They are all too thick to understand that they are actually part of a food cycle,.....whereby we are all interdependent upon each others welfare. It's the thick greedy knuts that will kill us all.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:38 pm
by morepork
Turns out that Mammoths were more inbred than the Royal Family. Shallow gene pool.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:43 pm
by rowan
kk67 wrote:
rowan wrote: They were a creature of the Ice Age. This is the age of global warming. They wouldn't thank us...
I don't think evolution entirely works like that. Especially not when it's man made extinction.
People, silly middle management types, like to talk about how they are at the 'top of the food chain'. City Boys talk about how they are 'Alpha Males'.
They are all too thick to understand that they are actually part of a food cycle,.....whereby we are all interdependent upon each others welfare. It's the thick greedy knuts that will kill us all.
I think we can say primarily man-made. The recession of the Ice Age itself probably contributed as well. Woolly rhinos went out with them, and so to did the big saber-toothed cats that preyed on them. Hypothetically-speaking, an interesting experiment would be to bring them back and allow them to co-exist with Siberian tigers, and see how long it takes saber-tooths to evolve again (probably a few thousand years, minimum).
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 10:16 pm
by kk67
I reckon we genetically reverse engineer the Morelocks to devour all financial workers and build a pair of Golgafrinchan space ships for the rest of the morons. Only two though,...we'll need some hairdressers.
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 8:20 am
by rowan
This follows the apparent discovery recently of remains belonging to a previously unknown species of ancient man in Melanesia:
The Denisovans are a mysterious species of humans who once lived across Siberia and East Asia. Only known from a handful of bone fragments and the DNA they left behind in living humans, there is not much for researchers to go on. But the discovery of two ancient human skulls in China might just change this.
In 2007, researchers uncovered a haul of flint tools dating to between 105,000 and 125,000 years ago, and nestled among the same layer of sediment, the fragments of two partial skulls were unearthed. Now, a new paper detailing this find, and published in Science, has suggested that they don’t fit with any of the currently known fossils of archaic human species from that region.
When the discovery of Denisovans was first announced in 2010, it stunned the archaeological world, not least because while we have their DNA, no physical evidence larger than a piece of finger bone exists. The new partial skulls seem to show a mix of features, leaving some to speculate that they could indeed be the first skulls ever discovered of this puzzling species. It has to be pointed out that, at the current time, this is just speculation, but if it can be proven, would be a massive revelation.
Curiously, the two fossil crania also bear resemblances to another early archaic human skull that was discovered 850 kilometers (530 miles) north of this latest find, also dating to roughly 100,000 years ago. It suggests that they may have all been regional members of an ancient human species, but what that the species looks like is a bit of a mystery.
The mix of features, somewhere between modern humans and Neanderthals, as well as the dates intriguingly point towards the possibility that we could be looking at skulls of the enigmatic Denisovans. We know the species existed in East Asia sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, and that they mated with both humans and Neanderthals over this period, but to date, we have scant physical evidence for them, just a few small bones from the hand.
The authors of this latest paper are careful not to make this claim, however, and confirmation will have to wait until further genetic tests have been carried out, or fossils found. Researchers have already tried to extract DNA from the skulls, but unfortunately to no success. Despite them being significantly different from Neanderthal skulls found in both Western Europe and the Middle East, it could still transpire that the skulls simply represent a regional difference in the species, or perhaps yet another unknown species of archaic human who once roamed across Asia.
Neanderthals dosed themselves with painkillers and possibly penicillin, according to a study of their teeth.
One sick Neanderthal chewed the bark of the poplar tree, which contains a chemical related to aspirin.
He may also have been using penicillin, long before antibiotics were developed.
The evidence comes from ancient DNA found in the dental tartar of Neanderthals living about 40,000 years ago in central Europe.
Microbes and food stuck to the teeth of the ancient hominins gives scientists a window into the past.
...
They apparently had a bigger brain capacity than homo sapiens and may have been more intelligent. & they existed for at least twice as long as we have so far - three or four times as long, according to some estimates. So best not revive the species via genome editing, or they might just end up taking over!
Re: The 6th Mass Extinction
Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 9:41 am
by Which Tyler
rowan wrote:They apparently had a bigger brain capacity than homo sapiens and may have been more intelligent. & they existed for at least twice as long as we have so far - three or four times as long, according to some estimates. So best not revive the species via genome editing, or they might just end up taking over!
Yes to all of that; the only real surprise from the article is that Neaderthal diet has been found to range from vegan right up to rhinocerus. Like you, I'd been under the impression that it was "our" team work and blood-thirstiness from being big-game hunters that had set us apart from the small-game and fishing of the Neanderthalls.
Let's be honest though, it'll probably eventually emerge that we simply out-bred them.
We know they were more powerful, probably more intelligent, and capable of speech and weaponry (though IIRC their weapons were a little more "crude" - maybe that was the difference?)
Neanderthals actually look well-suited to league, where they wouldn't need to worry about lineouts either. I mean, lower cranium, larger bowbridge, flat noses and short necks - those guys would slot right into the NRL. No one would know the difference!
