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Putting cows on a seaweed diet helps curb their methane burpsBY SHAENA MONTANARI MARCH 23, 2021.

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Expanding a cow's diet to include a pinch of seaweed could go a long way in helping tame their burps and farts-and protect the climate.

A new study released last week led by scientists at the University of California at Davis showed that adding just a small amount of dried red seaweed to the feed of beef steers reduced their methane production during digestion by over 80 percent, which could have implications for global greenhouse gas emissions if this new cow diet trend could be deployed at a large scale.

Livestock, particularly cows, are potent sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Globally, livestock are responsible for 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with cows being responsible for a large chunk of it. Their digestion is one of the culprits of methane emissions because of their unique stomachs, called rumens. The rumen is filled with microbes known as methanogens that break down plant matter and form methane as a by-product-or simply put, climate-challenging belches.

The study involved altering the diets of 20 male cows, bred specifically for their beef, to test if adding a specific type of red seaweed, called Asparagopsis taxiformis and commonly found in warm, temperate waters of Australia, would change how much methane they produce during digestion over a period of 21 weeks.

Ermias Kebreab, professor of animal science at UC-Davis and study author, had done a similar study on dairy cows a few years ago and saw that seaweed helped reduce the methane they produced over about a two week period. In this study, he wanted to extend the experiment to make sure the cow's digestive system didn't adapt to the new food, which would reduce the methane-zapping benefits. Luckily, it turns out the benefits of adding seaweed don't diminish over time.
[Related: 11 percent of food waste comes from our homes]
The cows were divided into two groups: one that had around 50 grams of seaweed added to their diet, and another that had around 90 grams added. The powdered seaweed supplement was mixed into the feed with molasses and water. This specific type of seaweed contains active ingredients that stop the methanogens, the methane-producing microbes that help with digestion, from working to their full potential. When that process is interrupted, less methane is formed during digestion.

Beef cows are fed three different types of diets throughout their lifetime that contain different ratios of plant forage, grain and corn-the starter diet, transitional diet and finisher diet-which was replicated in this experiment. The results show that adding seaweed to all three types of diet did end up lowering the amount of methane produced at each stage in the experimental groups, with reductions up to around 80 percent for cows at the finishing diet stage with the highest amount of seaweed supplementation.

The study also found that the beef cows gained weight similar to cows fed a more traditional diet, which is an important step to getting a methane-reducing supplement accepted widely by the beef industry. Galen Erickson, a professor and beef feedlot extension specialist at the University of Nebraska Lincoln who was not involved in the study, says a factor called performance, which is how much weight a cow gains, is also important to the industry. "I'm intrigued by what is the impact on performance, because that will be very important for adoption...It'd be great if it didn't have any negative impacts on performance and then just only positive impacts on methane," he says.

He is most excited about the reduction in methane production in the final "finishing" diet phase in later weeks of the study. "That is not something that's been normally observed," he says, in the phase of the diet where cows are eating more grain and corn than plant forage.

The results seem promising, Erikson says, but with the small sample size and limited study, more research will be needed to specifically see how seaweed supplementation impacts the final carcass weight of the steer compared to cows that eat the traditional diet. The seaweed-supplemented cows also tended to eat less food than their control group peers, Erickson says, so more findings need to be done on if the cows would naturally choose one over the other.
[Related: US egg producers could save billions of chicks a year. So why aren't they?]
Kebreab notes that the meat and dairy from these cows doesn't taste any different, which is another important factor in industry adoption. "We had about 112 people as a taste panel, and they did not detect any differences in taste," he says, adding that the meat was also graded prime.

Of course, there's still a lot of work to do before all of the world's dairy and meat cows have a taste for red seaweed."I think we just need to work out exactly how it can be grown and packaged and processed, and all that," Kebreab says, "I have high hopes for it."

Studies such as this one show that there are potential ways to produce for meat with less of a greenhouse gas footprint, which is crucial for making sure people get the calories and nutrients they need to be healthy. Not everyone in the world is able to reduce their meat or dairy intake for the sake of the climate, Kebreab says. While some people are able to take vitamin supplements to get nutrients they might be missing from not eating animal products, being able to completely avoid meat products, especially when accounting for where people live and how much money they have to spend on food, is no guarantee. "The majority of the world doesn't have that luxury," he says.
Correction 03/24/21: The headline has been updated to more accurately reflect the contents of the article.

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Feeding cows seaweed substantially reduces their methane emissions

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Expanding a cow's diet to include a pinch of seaweed could go a long way in helping tame their burps and farts-and protect the climate.

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Researchers just measured Jupiter’s stratospheric winds for the first time—and they’re a doozy.BY LETO SAPUNAR MARCH 19, 2021

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An international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter's raging stratospheric winds for the very first time-and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it.

Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter's troposphere-where the planet's iconic stripes lie-and way up in its ionosphere. But this new study was first to take wind speed measurements of Jupiter's stratosphere using the incredibly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). They measured wind speeds near the equator and near the poles.

Some results weren't too surprising-they found that speeds at the equator were roughly what models had predicted. "But what was completely unexpected is what we saw near the poles," says study-author Thibault Cavalié, a planetary scientist at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux who led the experiment. The team found 300- to 400-meter-per-second winds- roughly 700 to 900 miles per hour-whipping across the poles in unanticipated directions.

"It's a really hard observation," says Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at Berkeley who has used ALMA previously but was not part of this study. She adds, "it's a really great paper, they really show very nicely these wind profiles in the ... upper atmosphere."

Jupiter's winds almost exclusively go eastward or westward, as we see in the planet's trademark red and white horizontal stripes. This rule holds for the troposphere-save for vortices like Jupiter's red eye, where winds swirl like a hurricane. In the stratospheric layer above however, the winds instead appear to follow the shape of Jupiter's auroral rings, which, like Earth's northern lights, result from its magnetic field steering solar winds to the poles. Those auroral rings aren't perfectly lined up with the poles, so the wind flow doesn't match the neat bands of the troposphere.

The unusual polar wind patterns trekking north and south instead of staying east and west are "really mind boggling," says Glenn Orton, senior research scientist and observational astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the study.

For decades, the easiest way to figure out planetary wind speeds was to simply take a snapshot of the planet, then another one some time later and see how far the clouds moved between the two frames, Cavalié says. But at higher altitudes this doesn't work, because the winds are invisible. There are no clouds to track.

But ever since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact on Jupiter back in 1994, researchers have kept tabs on two compounds the object delivered there: hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Both chemicals are long-lived, and they're still floating around in the jovian atmosphere. The team was able to trace the unique spectral fingerprints of the hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Since they could track winds using the movement of clouds, perhaps they could use these molecules to do the same.

To do so, the team first pinpointed both types of molecules by detecting their frequencies. Then, they made use of something called the doppler effect, which means those frequencies change depending on if the molecules are moving toward us, or away from us. So on Jupiter, as the molecules blew towards the telescope, they would produce slightly different spectral signals than those moving away. By measuring the difference-how much the frequencies got bumped-the team could measure the speed at which the molecules (and the wind) were moving.

In the future, Cavalié says, space telescopes may be able to learn more from the water deposited by the comet's impact, because water is such a rare molecule on Jupiter. The study is also a stepping stone, he says, for the European Space Agency's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission which plans to launch next year. That craft will get close looks at Jupiter and three of its moons and be the first to orbit Ganymede-the largest moon in the solar system.

Cavalié was 12 years old when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet hit Jupiter-a little young to be part of that observation. But he says the event nudged him towards a career in planetary science.

Years later, the comet is still making its mark.

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Researchers just measured Jupiter's stratospheric winds for the first time-and they're a doozy

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An international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter's raging stratospheric winds for the very first time-and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it. Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter's troposphere-where the planet's iconic stripes lie-and way up in its ionosphere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter's raging stratospheric winds for the very first time-and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it.

Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter's troposphere-where the planet's iconic stripes lie-and way up in its ionosphere. But this new study was first to take wind speed measurements of Jupiter's stratosphere using the incredibly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). They measured wind speeds near the equator and near the poles.

Some results weren't too surprising-they found that speeds at the equator were roughly what models had predicted. "But what was completely unexpected is what we saw near the poles," says study-author Thibault Cavalié, a planetary scientist at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux who led the experiment. The team found 300- to 400-meter-per-second winds- roughly 700 to 900 miles per hour-whipping across the poles in unanticipated directions.

"It's a really hard observation," says Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at Berkeley who has used ALMA previously but was not part of this study. She adds, "it's a really great paper, they really show very nicely these wind profiles in the ... upper atmosphere."

Jupiter's winds almost exclusively go eastward or westward, as we see in the planet's trademark red and white horizontal stripes. This rule holds for the troposphere-save for vortices like Jupiter's red eye, where winds swirl like a hurricane. In the stratospheric layer above however, the winds instead appear to follow the shape of Jupiter's auroral rings, which, like Earth's northern lights, result from its magnetic field steering solar winds to the poles. Those auroral rings aren't perfectly lined up with the poles, so the wind flow doesn't match the neat bands of the troposphere.

The unusual polar wind patterns trekking north and south instead of staying east and west are "really mind boggling," says Glenn Orton, senior research scientist and observational astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the study.

For decades, the easiest way to figure out planetary wind speeds was to simply take a snapshot of the planet, then another one some time later and see how far the clouds moved between the two frames, Cavalié says. But at higher altitudes this doesn't work, because the winds are invisible. There are no clouds to track.

But ever since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact on Jupiter back in 1994, researchers have kept tabs on two compounds the object delivered there: hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Both chemicals are long-lived, and they're still floating around in the jovian atmosphere. The team was able to trace the unique spectral fingerprints of the hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Since they could track winds using the movement of clouds, perhaps they could use these molecules to do the same.

To do so, the team first pinpointed both types of molecules by detecting their frequencies. Then, they made use of something called the doppler effect, which means those frequencies change depending on if the molecules are moving toward us, or away from us. So on Jupiter, as the molecules blew towards the telescope, they would produce slightly different spectral signals than those moving away. By measuring the difference-how much the frequencies got bumped-the team could measure the speed at which the molecules (and the wind) were moving.

In the future, Cavalié says, space telescopes may be able to learn more from the water deposited by the comet's impact, because water is such a rare molecule on Jupiter. The study is also a stepping stone, he says, for the European Space Agency's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission which plans to launch next year. That craft will get close looks at Jupiter and three of its moons and be the first to orbit Ganymede-the largest moon in the solar system.

Cavalié was 12 years old when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet hit Jupiter-a little young to be part of that observation. But he says the event nudged him towards a career in planetary science.

Years later, the comet is still making its mark.

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Researchers just measured Jupiter's stratospheric winds for the first time-and they're a doozy

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An international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter's raging stratospheric winds for the very first time-and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it. Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter's troposphere-where the planet's iconic stripes lie-and way up in its ionosphere.

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Palabras 1, 2 y 3

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Palabras 4, 5 y 6

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Palabras 7, 8 y 9

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Palabras 10, 11 y 12

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Palabras 13, 14 y 15

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Palabras 16, 17 y 18

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Palabras 19, 20 y 21

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Palabras 22, 23 y 24

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Palabras 25, 26 y 27

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Palabras 28, 29 y 30

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xaOPxuZHhBUNcUnwFquEKL_o-wb64RGwNKx-_5XKFs8/edit?usp=sharing

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1.60
2. 60
3. 60
4. 100
5. 20
Total 300