Nautilus Magazine:

Several things. People have long wondered, why has the Great Red Spot been around for such a long time? The Great Red Spot is a storm, and we are used to storms on Earth. The average hurricane lasts a couple of weeks at most, and it has a definite mechanism for destruction: It either goes into cool water, which cuts off its fuel supply, or it goes over land, which really cuts off its fuel supply. Tornadoes are quite impressive, but they’re very ephemeral—they only last a few hours. So why do we have a Great Red Spot lasting so long? People used to say, “Oh, it’s clouds hanging around a mountain top.” Or “It’s an iceberg in a sea of hydrogen.” Those theories pretty much stopped around 1979, when Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by the planet. Nobody really knew it was a vortex, a huge hurricane that takes about six days for a single rotation. The United States would fit into the Red Spot a couple of hundred times. I mean, it’s really huge. One of the great things about the Voyager missions was that they took hundreds of pictures of the clouds that make up the Red Spot, so we could finally see the whole thing swirling around, and that’s how we knew for sure it was a vortex. Nobody knew it was really spinning. [...]

The harvest of that energy is what balances the loss of the Great Red Spot’s energy from thermal radiation. In a computer simulation, you can actually measure the direction and magnitude of all the energies that go in and out of the Great Red Spot, and the whole energy budget balances very nicely. You’ve got this great drain of potential energy in the atmosphere in the area surrounding the Great Red Spot due to this circulation of gas, but it’s OK because the sun re-establishes radiative equilibrium in that surrounding area and re-supplies its energy. So, ultimately, the source of energy that prevents the Great Red Spot from being destroyed is the sun. [...]

I am speculating that the Red Spot is, from top to bottom, somewhere between 50 and 70 kilometers tall. From side to side, it’s about 26,000 kilometers. So it’s a pancake. Just like with a tube of toothpaste, if I squish the pancake with high pressure at its center, something is going to squirt out the sides and top and bottom. It’s known that the Great Red Spot has a high pressure at its center, but its gases don’t go squirting out horizontally from its sides because of the Coriolis force in those directions—instead they squirt out vertically from the top and bottom. So, what can prevent the gases from squirting out vertically? The only way that I know to prevent that is if the top of the Great Red Spot has a dense cold lid of atmosphere above it. It’s that extra density that pushes the gases in the Great Red Spot back down. And, below the Great Red Spot, there must be a warm buoyant floor of atmosphere, and that floor prevents the high pressure center from pushing the gases in the Great Red Spot downward and out its bottom. That’s the balance.

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UnHerd: Let loose the lynx!

Red kite are not the only successful reintroduction of a formerly native British species. In Scotland, the sea eagle — also driven to extinction in this country 100 or so years ago — was reintroduced in the 1990s, and have started to breed. Ospreys returned naturally to Scotland and have been reintroduced to England, after being driven extinct in the 19th century.

Perhaps more spectacularly, beavers have been reintroduced in Gloucestershire, Devon and Scotland; they had been extinct in Britain for at least 250 years. Their revival has changed the waterways around there: the dams they build filter the rivers, removing silt from the water; they create big, still pools that fish, insects and amphibians can breed in and waterbirds feed from. The Devon reintroduction saw a 1,000% increase in frogspawn levels and a growth in local bat populations (they feed on the insects that bred in the ponds). Beaver dams also reduce the risk of flooding further downstream, by breaking up the flow of the river. [...]

Ross Barnett’s marvellous book The Missing Lynx tells the story of Britain’s lost megafauna, and it gets much more dramatic than red kite and beavers. There were hyenas in Yorkshire, which coexisted with humans. There were cheetahs, and lions (the bones of which were found when Trafalgar Square was being excavated); there were giant Irish elk, six foot tall at the shoulder. Mammoth, of course. Woolly rhinos. Sabre-toothed cats. Aurochs: vast great deadly wild oxen that could look a tall man in the eye. Hippos in the Thames. [...]

Wolves are generally shy of humans. There are thousands living in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia and elsewhere. In some of those countries, they are protected as endangered species; in others, they are not, and in Bulgaria they have a bounty on their heads as though it were the late middle ages all over again. (In Russia, wolves in the south-east are under pressure and occasionally eaten by the increasing tiger population, because Russia is extremely hardcore.)

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National Geographic: Mysterious oxygen spike seen on Mars puzzles scientists

In the Martian spring and summer, the red planet’s oxygen levels spike an extra 400 parts per million, or 30 percent above what researchers expected to see based on the behavior of other gases in the planet’s atmosphere. The oxygen spike seems to partially correlate to another gassy mystery: a seasonal ebb and flow of atmospheric methane on Mars. [...]

Though it’s tempting to think of photosynthesis when hearing about oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere, non-living processes are known to make oxygen on Mars, and these findings are not necessarily evidence of life. Instead, the results highlight gaps in our understanding of the red planet’s surface chemistry—holes that must be filled if we are to hunt for direct evidence of past or present Martians.[...]

Future missions might be able to help, especially if they can take more atmospheric measurements. Because of the many science demands on Curiosity, Trainer’s team obtained only 19 data points across the Martian seasons. While this gives them a sense of the long-term pattern, they can’t see any shorter-term changes. What would researchers find if they could take daily, or even hourly, oxygen and methane readings from Mars?

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Associated Press: France and Germany propose EU overhaul after Brexit upheaval

Paris and Berlin, long seen as the axis of the continent’s post-World War Two unification process, said a “Conference on the Future of Europe” was necessary to make the EU “more united and sovereign” across a range of challenges.

These include Europe’s role in the world and its security, they said in a document that comes amid growing concern that Europe is ill-equipped to deal with new security and economic challenges, especially from a rising China. [...]

The two-page Franco-German paper said other areas where Europe needed to be more united included its near neighbors, digitalization, climate change, migration, the fight against inequality, the “social market economy” and the rule of law.

It said a reflection lasting more than two years should consider reforms that would, among other aims, promote democracy and the functioning of a bloc that will group 27 countries after Britain’s expected departure on Jan. 31.

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Politico: Germany sets out plan for automatic relocation of asylum seekers

The document has some elements that could win favor from both Mediterranean and northern states, but its call for automatic relocation, and the lack of alternative solidarity measures for countries that don't want to take part, could upset Central and Eastern European countries, according to diplomats. Furthermore, countries such as Hungary have always opposed mandatory relocation and, despite the word not being used in the document, it is clear that this scheme would be compulsory. [...]

One of the document's key aims is to scrap the Dublin regulation under which asylum claims are dealt with in the country of first arrival. Dublin creates “clear imbalances” as “in 2018, 75% of all applications for international protection were lodged in only five member states,” the document says, a point that will come as no surprise to Italy and Greece. [...]

In the German plan, EASO, the EU agency for asylum, would play a key role. There's already a Commission proposal to turn EASO into the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) and in the German plan if an applicant gets through the initial assessment, then “the EUAA would determine which member state is responsible for examining the asylum application.” Yet the agency is often criticized for its internal troubles and having “increased powers could be a problem for some member states,” said one diplomat. [...]

The German document looks at other key points, including how to regulate access to the welfare state: “accommodation and social benefits would be provided only in the member state responsible” but “social benefits should be funded EU-wide as far as possible” and “paid according to an index which would ensure that benefits are at an equivalent level across the EU, independent of the member state.”

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