First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Aagaard et al. still don’t answer the question how fetuses and newborns acquire their gut biomes, except that it’s not from the vagina during birth, but they do clear up, what bacteria are acquired. How they get from a woman’s mouth to her placenta seems to be an open conundrum.
Electric storage is becoming a prominent theme in application-oriented science. As Zucker & Hinchliffe demonstrate, subsidy-free storage is not currently feasible, but it is also surprisingly near to becoming economically viable.
It is unfortunately quite common, like Siler-Evans et al. only to look at ecological benefits of wind and solar but not at their cost. These costs can be substantial.
At first glance Reichmuth & Ferroni’s figures look quite ridiculous and they don’t of course bother with anything as banal as sources, but comparing to e.g. Volker Quaschning they are, in fact, not impossible. His data for production energy per kWp result in repayment times of up to 20 a for monocrystalline cells. (The times he states are not compatible to his raw data.)
As Ortloff clearly describes, the height of the water source is given and changing the height of the destination would have enormous repercussions. So, while the slope may be close to the optimum, it’s questionable whether this came about through choice and insight and is not simply a result of the given topography. In sum an interesting hypothesis not sufficiently supported by data.
Fenner & Wright discuss one more confounder possibly invalidating simplistic isotope analyses.
I usually tend very much toward the “climate sceptic” camp, but looking at the AMOC trend in Smeed and in Roberts, it is very smooth and very linear with no visible sign of single-year fluctuation. I agree with Roberts, a non significant result means “not proven”, but I find it very hard to follow Schiermeier in reading a p (barely?) larger than 0.01 as nothing in it.