Welch says, "but [can also] find cancers that were never
going to matter." That's because some cancers grow
slowly and never become dangerous, he says.
This exact same phenomenon is already occurring with breast cancer. Everybody is a "breast cancer survivor" these days, because they keep finding these turtle tumors that were never going to be a problem. If you look at mortality rates between those who screen early and those who don't, they are the same.
While it is true that there is plenty of uncertainty regarding the value of finding DCIS, it is well established that there is significant benefit to finding small invasive breast cancers such as invasive lobular carcinoma and invasive ductal carcinoma. The value is particularly significant if the lesions are found before exceeding 1 cm in size, which they often are nowadays. The paper sited refers to one study focused on DCIS and another Canadian study on breast cancer screening during the 1980's and 1990's before there were good mammography screening standards. The Canadian study essentially just showed that poor screening is of limited value.
In Germany, it's "you can't say that", which is I think what he's talking about. Germany is probably the most extreme in the Western world in that regard - they have e.g. a court that can ban political parties if their platform is "counter to the free democratic basic order". Not to mention minor censorship, like excising swastikas and mentions of Hitler (ironically, a recent example was with a game about how Nazis are bad and you should fight them).
Attacks on free speech in USA and Europe have nothing to do with offensive language and everything to do with control. Be careful what precedents you set and what things you celebrate. Pendulums swing.
And here we go with the currently popular victim game which also brings the famous "censorship vs. moderation" trope and the "das wird man doch wohl noch sagen dürfen" classic.
Please...this is ridiculous. Nobody falls for that besides the right wingers themselves.
Nobody wants the right circle jerk in their comment section.
The same way the right doesn't want any criticism of their behavior within their own bubble portals.
both the left and the right are in a bubble. Generally speaking assume that between your in-group there are as many bad people as in your out-group.
It is hard to make example that would not further polarize this thread, but I can promise you that the same intolerance and bubbles are present on both side of the political spectrum (for sure in the US, even if I live in Germany now I don't know much about this country...)
I brought the bubble up to demonstrate that the right is moderating all kinds of not fitting content where they are able to.
The big conspiracy the right wants to paint here based about moderation of their hate speech or pure insulting language is something that is being reinforced through their political figureheads and sold as censorship. I did not see anything like that on the other side (yet).
It's a disgusting and ridiculous play, especially in regard of real censorship which is really out there today.
Radio Shack used to always want a bunch of information from you for their database, whenever you would buy anything, cash or not. It was good training in refusing to participate in data harvesting that, 30 years after my first nervous "No", is more relevant and necessary than ever.
Most people in the west have no idea the holodomor genocide of millions by the Bolsheviks (much of whose leadership and financing was from New York) ever occurred. His downplaying of it is doubtless partly responsible.
The original income tax was also promised to be only a tax on the rich. These things have a way of finding the non-rich eventually.
Also, remember in 1970, the bank secrecy act put in place a $10,000 threshold for deposits or withdrawals, that were not reported on a "suspicious activities" list. This is also where we got the $10,000 travel disclosure rule. You will note that in 50 years, that threshold has not budged, putting non-wealthy people and transactions under the microscope. These laws are not adjusted for inflation, and we all expect there to continue to be inflation at the current or even an accelerated rate.
So, two masses were close enough in relative velocity and vector, that one of them didn't careen off the other one, and instead, allowed the weakest of all known forces to bond them together as they hurtled at high velocity through space.
This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me. I'm not saying it's artificial. That would be even more unlikely, by orders of magnitude. Just saying "Wow!".
Contact binaries are fairly common. Expected to make up about 10-15% of NEOs. My layman's understanding of how Kuiper object contact binaries develop is mutual capture during the early life of the solar system and angular momentum decay until they come into contact.
Can you say more about how angular momentum decays in orbital mechanics? I understand that, because the Earth rotates faster than the moon orbits, our tidal bulge will be ahead of the sublunar point, and will accelerate the moon in its orbit. Are there any other ways to get rid of angular momentum?
Tidal forces are one way - either between the two binary components, or from a close encounter with a third, larger body.
Another is the "YORP Effect". Sunlight falling on an asteroid produces a slight thermal radiation pressure (push). If, due to asymmetries in asteroid shape/albedo, the net radiation pressure force is not aligned with the asteroid's center of mass, it will produce a torquing force which will cause the asteroid to spin faster (or slower) over time. Applying the idea of YORP Effect to binary asteroids yields the "BYORP [Binary YORP] Effect", by which the orbital dynamics of the binary system are modified by this asymmetric radiation pressure over time, in a way that either pushes them together into a contact binary or apart into two unbound asteroids.
It's even hypothesized that some asteroids may be in a binary/contact-binary cycle on long timescales! There are solutions to the above in which the BYORP effect causes a loss of angular momentum in a binary pair, causing them to merge into a contact binary - but the contact binary may settle into a state where the YORP Effect actually causes the newly merged asteroid to spin faster, eventually flinging them apart due to centripetal forces... back into a binary state where the BYORP Effect may again cause them to merge someday.
> This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me.
At this mass these bodies are at, they aren't going to crush together from gravity to form a single round body.
However, if you've got two bodies in very similar orbits around the Sun, in close proximity, it doesn't seem incredible to me that they might eventually collide and stick.
When you think about the vastness of space (even in our own star system), as well as the incredible amount of time involved since the formation of our system, many things that seem statistically unlikely probably become very likely. How many objects are in orbit around the Sun in this system? We probably only know a small fraction of them, since we can't see ones this small very well from this distance, and there could be many more that are even more distant. So really unlikely objects like this could be more common than you think.
In the vastness of a universe as large as ours, polka dotted unicorns are probably very likely. But it's still unlikely to actually encounter one ... you know, because they're polka dotted unicorns and because the universe is so big...
What I mean is, your argument doesn't make any sense. Just because the universe is big, doesn't make unlikely events more likely to be stumbled upon.
If a center of mass begins to aggregate in an area of space, smaller objects may get captured and will move in an elliptical orbit with the forming object at one of the foci of an ellipse. Because the other foci of the ellipse is also fairly stable, it is also a likely point for smaller objects to aggregate into another larger object. Objects forming in pairs can reinforce each other. Over time when the small objects around the two foci have all aggregated, the objects at the foci will fall together due to gravity.
It doesn’t seem unlikely to me. There are many many approach paths that would result in two similar sized objects ending up orbiting each other.
Once they are orbiting each other then it’s just a matter of time for the orbits to decay. In the final, they would be spinning very very fast but would be inching towards each other until they touch.
Given the slower speeds in the outer solar system, especially since they will be rotating in the same direction, so the relative speed will be less, I would imagine that contact binaries would be fairly common. And since they are primarily made of ices, the actual contact event should melt the ice, which will then re-solidify since the impact speed is so little.
I don't know if this is how it actually happens, but it gives a mechanism for this being fairly common. The only information I could find was a short wikipedia article:
What's exciting to me is, both the first interstellar object we've observed visiting our solar system (Oumuamua) and the first Kuiper Belt Object we've visited have been "unusual". That strongly suggests to me that the unusual is more usual than we would have suspected, which means there's probably a great deal of opportunity to increase our understanding of the universe!
Oumuamua was literally the only extra-solar object known. There was nothing to be picked.
Similarly for Ultima Thule. They may have been able to find a different target, but it was very difficult to find any target at all in the first place (lots of Kuiper belt objects are known; the difficulty was finding one that could be reached by New Horizons). See this Twitter thread that was linked elsewhere: https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1077986070128668674
At least in the case of Oumuamua though, being non-spheroid wasn't really the weird thing about it. It was that it exhibited comet-like acceleration, without any visible off-gassing, and without breaking up as it passed the sun, as a comet would be expected to do. Also the fact that from our current understanding, it is much more likely for a comet to be ejected from a solar system than an asteroid, so it's surprising (not impossible, certainly, but unlikely) that the first interstellar object was more like an asteroid.
Pluto may be a KBO also. Further, it's possible some moons of the gas-giant planets are captured KBO's.
The unusual thing about Ultima Thule is that it's in a nearly circular and "flat" orbit, which many experts interpret to mean it's mostly undisturbed from its point of origin. It's a prime "fossil".
Pluto has a "disturbed" orbit such that its origin is currently unknown. Same for gas-giant moons. Pluto has also been turned inside-out, perhaps multiple times, by a still unidentified force. Ultima Thule is probably mostly as-is since formation.
> Pluto has also been turned inside-out, perhaps multiple times, by a still unidentified force.
Whoa, come again? How do we know this? What does it mean for a planet-like object to be turned inside out?
Inside out just means that the local equivalent of Earth's geologic plates seem to be subducting below the surface and fresh geologic plate equivalents are abducting back up. You can estimate how long a planetary surface has been exposed to the elements by the statistical distribution of number and size of craters. We have a reasonable idea of the likelihood of objects impacting Pluto, and it should have a lot of craters. Pluto's moon Charon has many more visible craters but Pluto has large areas with no large craters, so some sort of geologic process must be going on that's recycling areas of the landscape and covering or subducting the craters.
Given lack of fast erosion from liquid water or significant wind (in a very thin atmosphere), whatever geologic process is smoothing out Pluto is happening quickly compared to other points of reference we have.
I use the example of Earth's geologic plates, but that's only one possible explanation. There's also speculation about freeze/thaw cycles of the planetary material and atmosphere (since it has an irregular orbit), movement of water-ice mountains, cryovolcanos, and other theories.
There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible for temperature increases on Earth, Mars, Triton, Jupiter, and Pluto.
While CO2 promoters point out the fact that solar irradiance changes are relatively small over time, they ignore that those same irradiance changes correspond to changes in solar magnetism, which means changes in cosmic ray incidence on planetary atmospheres. It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation.
It's really not as clear cut as you have been taught.
"There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible"
The solar constant in the past 400 years has varied less than 0.2 percent.
"It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation."
Not well known, because the research is still ongoing. Henrik Svensmark's research in a dust- and impurity-free atmosphere contributed to our understanding of aerosol microphysics, but others agree that the effect in the real, present-day atmosphere is very tiny.
"Cosmic particles would be negligible compared with the background aerosol and the aerosol humans are adding by burning things, tilling soil, etc.”
"If clouds were affected by cosmic rays, they would have been affected a hundred times more strongly by human air pollution, and the world would have cooled over the past century, rather than warmed."
This work offers a new understanding of global particle
formation as based almost entirely on ternary rather than
binary nucleation, with ions playing a major but subdominant
role. Our results suggest that about 43% of cloud-forming
aerosol particles in the present-day atmosphere originate
from nucleation
This is a major effect, confirmed by your own article. I'm not certain why you linked it, since you are arguing against cosmic rays effecting cloud formation.
I don't know why I linked it if you just end up making your very own conclusions.
This paper is part of the CERN CLOUD project (http://cloud.web.cern.ch/), an experiment trying to model our atmosphere to find out how much aerosols affect cloud formation and climate change.
The conclusion so far is that cosmic rays can charge aerosol particles, and produce big enough particles to contribute to cloud forming. This represents less than 10% (several per cent) of the total particle formation from nucleation, a major, but subdominant role. Nucleation (the creation of big enough particles) itself plays a 43% role, the rest is particles already in the atmosphere. So cosmic rays is less than 10% of 43%.
In any case if cosmic ray created aerosols would have such a large effect on clouds, so would other aerosols, such as those from air pollution.
Clouds themselves play a less than 10% role in climate change, so it's like 10% of the 10% (cosmic ray nucleation) of 43% (nucleation), as I said a tiny effect. Clouds also not just trap heat, but reflect sunlight back, cooling the planet.
Even if we were to stipulate his 10% number, that's 4.3% of cloud formation based on cosmic rays. Not insignificant.
Your repeated contention that pollution aerosols are of equal magnitude to cosmic rays contribution requires a large helping of evidence to back it up, given the huge quantity of cosmic rays that impact the troposphere.
Even if you think that cosmic rays are the bread and butter of cloud formation, the net effect would be global cooling. Clouds reflect more energy back into space than they do back to the ground.
I would also like to mention that this cosmic ray climate change denialism started with the media misreporting Henrik Svensmark's paper.
The Daily Express itself said "Winter is coming: Exploding stars could lead to ICE AGE warn scientists" https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/894696/ice-age-weathe....
Most of the media attention was on the sensationalist claim that cosmic rays are causing climate change, from which the various Facebook people extrapolated cosmic rays = global warming. Just so you know, this is the original source of this claim.
The paper itself is about aerosol microphysics, but that's not as exciting as "Giant EXPLODING stars FREEZING Earth".
4 Conclusion
We have shown a strong correlation between solar and
tropospheric variability, in that swings from El Ni˜no
to La Ni˜na are related to the phase of the solar
cycle’s “fiducial clock,” and that that clock does not
run from the canonical solar minimum or maximum, but
instead resets when all old cycle flux is gone from the
solar disk. While the exact mechanism remains to be
elucidated, changes in cosmic ray flux appear to the be
the driver of these ENSO swings.
Finally, in the absence of sensitivity to solar-driven CRF
variations in current coupled climate models, we have a year
or so to wait to see if this indicator pans out. However,
should the coming terminator be followed by such an ENSO
swing then we must seriously consider the capability of
coupled global terrestrial modeling efforts to capture
“step-function” events, and assess how complex the Sun-Earth
connection is, with particular attention to the relationship
between incoming cosmic rays and clouds/ precipitation over
our oceans.
This is a great paper actually. It depends directly on the premise that cosmic rays cause drastic changes in cloud microphysics. The proof presented for this is a statistical correlation between termination points of sun activity and ENSO (El Nino, La Nina).
They plan to establish causation by predicting ENSO changes based on solar activity, which is good. Once they do that, they will need to prove that cosmic rays are more important in cloud microphysics than the CERN CLOUD experiments suggests so far.
I'm not certain how to respond to such a non-argument in such a biased forum as this one. I would respectfully just point out that on this subject, you are in a filter bubble, which you obviously have made no attempt to escape from.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10549-018-4691-4