Short Takes – 10-28-25

With Melissa, 2025 Becomes Only the Second Season with More Than Two Category 5 Hurricanes. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “Category 5 storms are rare—Melissa is only the 45th Category 5 in the Atlantic Ocean on record since 1851. These storms require a perfect alignment of prodigious available energy and conducive atmospheric conditions to reach and sustain such powerful wind speeds.”

Hurricane Melissa Turns Toward Jamaica, Bringing 175 M.P.H. Winds and Catastrophic Rains. NYTimes.com article (free) Link includes periodic updates. Pull quote: “Speaking on CNN, Mr. Holness offered a grim outlook, saying that he did not believe there was “any infrastructure within this region that could withstand” a storm that powerful.”

Monster hurricane to hit Jamaica: ‘I have been on my knees in prayer’. WashingtonPost.com article. Pull quote: “Rain is forecast to fall in torrents, totaling up to 40 inches in the mountains, which will result in catastrophic flash flooding and landslides. Storm surge of 9 to 13 feet as well as very large waves are expected to inundate areas near the south coast where the storm makes landfall — with the highest risk in parishes such as Westmoreland, Saint Elizabeth, Manchester and Clarendon. Once the storm moves to the north side of the island and winds change, surge risks will shift into Saint James and Trelawny.”

Bird Flu Is Back. Here’s What to Know. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and a large animal veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, notes that several states, including California and Idaho, are seeing ongoing infections in cattle—but that he knows this only because of informal conversations with colleagues. Meanwhile last month the USDA confirmed Nebraska’s first known dairy infection, suggesting the virus is still spreading among herds. But in general, reporting of infections in dairy cattle is slow and disorganized. “We don’t have enough information to know what our risk is, and that’s a pretty precarious position,” Poulsen says. “We don’t know what we don’t know.””

Fifth case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza confirmed at commercial poultry plant in Georgia. WALB.com article. Pull quote: “On Friday, Oct. 24, the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Management and State Agricultural Response Teams (SART) went to the plant to conduct depopulation, disposal, cleaning, and disinfection. All commercial poultry plants within a 6.2-mile radius have been placed on quarantine and will undergo surveillance testing for a period of at least two weeks, the release said.”

Strange object between Saturn and Uranus is 'evolving' its own ring system, study suggests. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “A team of Brazil-based astronomers found that the bands of material orbiting around (2060) Chiron, a 125-mile-wide (200 kilometers wide) object that circles the sun between Saturn and Uranus, are new and still taking shape. The findings suggest that Chiron's surroundings are in a transitional state somewhere between a chaotic cloud of debris and a fully formed ring system, offering scientists a rare snapshot of ring formation in progress, which has never been directly witnessed before.”

New images of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS show giant 'jet' shooting toward the sun. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “These and other peculiarities have led a small group of researchers to controversially claim that the object may be an alien spacecraft sent to spy on us. However, the vast majority of scientists maintain that 3I/ATLAS is a high-speed comet behaving exactly as comets should. The new images of the interstellar interloper, captured Aug. 2 by the Two-meter Twin Telescope (TTT) at the Teide Observatory in Spain's Canary Islands, further cement the object's natural origins.”

How Jack Smith’s strongest case against Donald Trump collapsed. WashingtonPost.com article. Pull quote: “Prosecutors believed they had ample evidence that at Mar-a-Lago Trump willfully retained dozens of national defense documents whose release could harm the country’s security. Prosecutors felt they had somewhat less convincing proof he had broken the law when taking records out of D.C., some on Jan. 20, 2021, the day of Biden’s inauguration.”                    

NOTE: Readers will have noticed a decrease in the number and timing of these posts. First, I have decided to cut back on my late night writing, just trying to increase the time available for sleeping, five hours of sleep is just not cutting it any longer, the price of getting older. This means that there will be increasing time conflicts in my morning writing hours, and my paying readers will get priority there. This means that there will be fewer of these posts. Priority will be on Federal Register posts (if/when the government reopens), as well as weather and medical posts. That will inevitably lead to a decrease in Space Geek posts, with those editions probably being longer, with some dating of the articles referenced. Comments and recommendations from readers are welcomed.