Birds are gone

[jfz9580m]

88. Not sure

I have felt in recent years that wildlife rhythms in general sound a bit off..but it is so hard to tell if that sort of thing is merely in your head or real. Not just birds, chipmunks alarm calling, cicadas, insects..
But you really can never be sure that it’s not your head processing sound differently.

And one has to be careful because if stupid shit like this:
https://www.audubon.org/news/no-5g-radio-waves-do-not-kill-birds

No, 5G Radio Waves Do Not Kill Birds

Here's the truth behind a Facebook falsehood spreading across the internet.

On the internet, there is often a fine line between a healthy skepticism of new technologies and blatant misinformation. The recent claim that the radio waves from 5G cellular communication towers are causing mass bird die-offs is a perfect example of just how thin that line can be—and how quickly falsehoods can spread across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even in the comments of Audubon magazine's stories.

The origin of this claim is as head-spinning as it is instructive, so let's untangle the knot: Does 5G really kill birds, and if not, why are so many people shouting about it online?

The first part of this saga is fairly straightforward: No, 5G—the fifth generation of our mobile cellular network—does not kill birds. “Radio wave emissions above 10 MHz from radio transmission antennas (including cell telephone towers) are not known to harm birds,” says Joe Kirschvink, a biophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who specializes in magnetics, in an email.

Krischvink isn’t just an expert on such matters—he was also involved in a related study that has proven prescient. In 2014, Kirschvink, at the same time as another group of biologists in Germany, found that low-level magnetic radiation, such as AM radio waves, could interfere with migratory birds' ability to orient themselves using the Earth's magnetic field. Although the researchers found that the birds were still able to compensate, they proposed restricting the use of the AM frequency band.

Aware of how this research and the resulting proposal might be interpreted by the general public, Kirschvink issued a strong disclaimer in his study: “Modern-day charlatans will undoubtedly seize on this study as an argument for banning the use of mobile phones, despite the different frequency bands involved,” he wrote.

Despite Kirschvink's clear warning, the claims that cellular radio waves kill birds spread nonetheless. The blame for that, however, doesn't fall on Kirschvink and his peers, but rather one “UFO researcher” posting on Facebook.

The "5G kills birds" phenomenon was started by John Kuhles, who according to the fact-checking site Snopes, “runs several anti-5G conspiracy websites and social media pages.” In a Facebook post last year, Kuhles claimed that a recent mass die-off of European Starlings in the Netherlands was caused by a 5G antenna test. Despite the fact that the local municipality never named a cause for the die-off, and the fact that the test Kuhles cites happened months before the die-off occurred, other Facebook pages and health blogs nonetheless picked up the post.

Things got weirder and even more obfuscated when Indian sci-fi blockbuster 2.0, currently the highest-budgeted Tamil-language film ever made, hit cinemas just days later. Apart from being a parable about how technology is ruining our lives, 2.0 specifically depicts electromagnetic radiation from cell towers wiping out bird populations, validating Kuhles' crackpot theory. “Following the release of ‘2.0’, which revolves around a plot depicting harmful effects of EMF radiation on birds, Indian news organisations, mostly Tamil media, published stories on the movie by adding the ‘birds died in The Netherlands due to 5G’ bit,” reported Indian fact-checking outlet Alt News.

Of course, it didn't stop there.

Of course, it didn't stop there. Fans of 2.0 then found a 2012 YouTube video in which University of Southern California professor Travis Longcore discusses his study finding that communication towers kill 6.8 million birds annually. Dozens of comments on the video either cite the movie directly, or mention that 2.0's director, S. Shankar, “sent them here." Contrary to 2.0's plot, however, Longcore's research attributed these bird deaths to the disorienting lights used on communication towers, not the electromagnetic radiation they emit.

“People have observed for a very long time that nocturnally migrating birds are attracted to lights at night and it's exacerbated during periods of bad weather,” he told NPR in 2012. “It leaves them circling these towers that they encounter and running into either the guide wires on the towers, each other, ending up on the ground and taken by predators.”

Further fueling the 5G flames is a general anxiety around electromagnetic radiation that has been on the rise for the past two decades. Not unlike the claims that 5G kills birds, these fears are also unfounded, stemming from a misinterpretation of a single chart in a 2000 report on the potential health impacts of installing WiFi networks in Florida's Broward County Public Schools, the New York Times reported earlier this year.

Consulting with the school district, physicist Bill Curry cited a chart showing that brain tissue absorbs more radiation as radio frequency increases, thus concluding that WiFi signals, operating in the Ghz spectrum would be hazardous. He was wrong. According to the Times, as radio frequencies increase, our skin blocks them out, making radio waves safer as they increase in frequency (to a certain point). Unfortunately, no one caught Curry's error.

“Over the years, Dr. Curry’s warning spread far, resonating with educators, consumers and entire cities as the frequencies of cellphones, cell towers and wireless local networks rose,” the Times reports. “To no small degree, the blossoming anxiety over the professed health risks of 5G technology can be traced to a single scientist and a single chart.”

Taken together, it’s a strange and worrisome sequence of events that leads us to 5G being blamed for bird die-offs, but it’s also typical of how misinformation spreads on the internet: an urgent headline, backed by a series of half-truths and misinterpretations, validated by popular culture, and amplified and laundered repeatedly through social media posts.

Fortunately, unlike many other conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns ricocheting around the web, this one doesn’t pose direct harm to anyone or anything. But how the 5G myth and others like it can still cause damage is by distracting people from the many real and urgent threats facing birds and the environment. After all, there are enough of those that we don’t need to make up any new ones.

It is true that electronics noise does disrupt birds:

https://www.science.org/content/article/electronic-smog-disorients-european-robins

Electronic Smog Disorients European Robins
Migratory birds thrown off by AM radio waves

The traffic reports on AM radio might help humans navigate, but the electromagnetic waves they travel on could have the opposite effect on birds. A 7-year investigation has discovered that radio waves disrupt the piloting systems of migratory European robins. The work, experts say, provides convincing evidence that such transmissions can alter animal behavior.

For decades, people have feared that cellphones, power lines, and other sources of electromagnetic radiation might harm both human health and nature. But don't fret. Your cellphones are still safe to use in the wild. "Modern-day charlatans will try to exploit this study to claim that cellphone radiation causes damage, but it's not screwing up the robins," says geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the study. "It's telling them to use a different sense."

European robins, like many migratory birds, can navigate via Earth's magnetic fields—but they don't have to. Scientists have known for 30 years that robins' magnetosense deactivates when it might lead them astray, for instance if they hit a spot where Earth's geomagnetic field dramatically changes strength. Low-intensity radio waves now join this group of negative triggers.
Biologists at the University of Oldenburg in Germany stumbled upon the phenomenon by accident in 2004 while they were testing a basic feature of European robin behavior. During the spring and autumn, the birds' urge to travel is so strong that captured individuals will reflexively start jumping in the direction of their migration, even scratching up the bottom of their cages. But when the robins were held in wooden huts on campus, they were suddenly clueless as to which way they were supposed to be going.

So the researchers started experimenting to see why the birds' compasses appeared to have shut off. Change their food? No difference. Tweak their sleep cycles with artificial lighting? Nada. Finally, they started wondering if the magnetic fields produced by electronic devices on campus might be the culprit.

To find out, the researchers installed aluminum wallpaper inside the birds' wooden huts. The metal sidings were linked by means of wires to metal rods buried in the dirt outside. When electromagnetic noise struck the aluminum, it was soaked up and passed into the land. Known as "grounding," this canceled out the electromagnetic noise coming through the huts' walls, leaving a signal from only Earth's magnetic field. After the screens were built, the robins aligned in the right direction, the team reports online today in Nature. But when the shields were switched off, the birds became disoriented again.

Given the skepticism surrounding prior research into electromagnetic noise and animal habits, the project leaders used double-blind experiments to replicate the finding. Undergraduate and graduate volunteers ran the trials. Some worked in wooden huts with the shields turned on, while others had them off—but to eliminate bias, the students didn't know who was working where.

"We added a number of securities to protect ourselves from wishful thinking," says neurosensory biologist Henrik Mouritsen of the University of Oldenburg, who led the study. "The conditions were repeated with different generations of students, and experiments were blinded on all levels."

Artificially reintroducing magnetic fields into a screened hut allowed the researchers to pinpoint possible sources of the misguiding noise. The most disorienting electromagnetic noise had frequencies matching those produced by AM radio stations and small devices like electronic article surveillance—those little magnetic tags for clothing at department stores. This is 1000 times less powerful than the frequencies emitted by cellphones and 400 times higher than those produced by power lines. Moving the birds to a rural location without electronic noise immediately restored their navigation skills.

European migratory bird populations are declining. Though habitat destruction is the main suspect, the findings raise questions as to whether humanmade electromagnetic pollution from radio stations and home electronics is a general problem across Europe, or if this phenomenon is specific to Oldenburg.

"I just wonder where this strong field originates," says retired zoologist Roswitha Wiltschko, who co-discovered the avian magnetic compass with her husband Wolfgang in the 1970s and who was not involved in the work. "We were doing these experiments in the central district of Frankfurt, a major city, and we never had problems with magnetic fields disrupting the orientation of our birds." Wiltschko feels the study is "really well done" but thinks more research is needed before claiming that this is a general occurrence.

If it is, the effect should be short-ranged and limited to within 5 to 10 km of AM stations, says Kirschvink, who thinks that birds may have evolved this off switch for their magnetic compass long before Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio in order to combat radiation fluxes created by the sun's activity.

On a different head, the street traffic on my street has been obnoxiously heavy lately. I live in a very corrupt communist state in the Global South where the govt has caused many environmental disasters in the name of “development”. So I wouldn’t put it past these corrupt creeps to do bogus traffic studies etc deploying bots and AI etc.


It’s one thing if it’s studies like those done by Mouritsen.

And this seems respectable enough:
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2022/11/10/worlds-largest-open-track-traffic-experiment-being-conducted-in-nashville-nov-14-18/

World’s largest open-track traffic experiment being conducted in Nashville

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Nov 10, 2022, 3:00 PM

The CIRCLES Consortium, consisting of Vanderbilt University and several other universities, in coordination with Nissan North America, Toyota, GM, and the Tennessee Department of Transportation, will test 100 AI-equipped vehicles in an effort to mitigate human-caused traffic jams.

The experiments are scheduled to occur along a four-mile stretch of I-24 starting on Monday, Nov. 14 through Friday, Nov. 18, 2022, between the hours of 5 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., integrated into the normal flow of traffic.

The I-24 MOTION testbed, where the AI-equipped vehicles will travel in the normal flow of traffic, is the only automotive testing environment of its kind in the U.S. It is opening in fall 2022 and is equipped with 300 4K digital sensors that are mounted on poles spaced 600 feet apart. The system generates data on the 260,000,000 vehicle-miles of traffic that occurs annually within the testbed.

In this experiment, researchers from the CIRCLES Consortium will deploy up to 100 vehicles, comprised of Nissan Rogue, Toyota RAV4 and a Cadillac XT5, that each include an AI-equipped adaptive cruise control technology used in an earlier experiment.

In that test—conducted with 20 cars on a closed track—just one vehicle equipped with the AI system changed the driving behavior of the other 20 cars, alleviating the stop-and-go dynamic that often leads to traffic jams with no obvious cause. Because of the ripple effects that the AI-equipped cars had on other drivers, researchers measured a sizeable fuel savings compared with driving in typical traffic jams.

As researchers increase the scale of the testing and introduce real world driving conditions, they will investigate whether the improved traffic and fuel-economy outcomes measured in the smaller study continue to hold.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Energy. Support was also provided by Toyota North America and General Motors.

But based on my experiences here I wouldn’t want any such experiments with birds or traffic conducted in this region without public comment as well as strict oversight by respectable scientists like Mouritsen or say Madhav Gadgil who wrote this report on the Western ghats in India which were completely disregarded.

I do not trust the government let alone the private sector where I live. And would expect to find a self-dealing shill who enables encroachment into living spaces ignoring the effects on wildlife and human health with corrupt, inept deployment of technology.

I wouldn’t want any of it in or near my home or on my street. This is not Germany or the US and politics aside it’s pretty corrrupt and this cartoon in the Indiatimes gets it:



Based on my experiences locally with the kinds of people who do these shady, creepy real world experiments, whether it’s tech or the humans deploying the tech, data or exploitation of the street and residences, it should not be conducted without explicit consent and certainly it would be a hard no from me were my neighborhood, streets and home involved.

I was sexually harassed multiple times by a defence contractor with a Lockheed Martin contact in 2014, creeps on the street starting from 2023. Nothing I have seen here would indicate the data science, AI or other work, studies like Mouritsen’s or traffic studies conducted here would be anything but corrupt.