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Lightning Can Trigger Nuclear Reactions, Creating Rare Atomic Isotopes (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Rare forms of atoms, like carbon-13, carbon-14, and nitrogen-15, have long been used to figure out the ages of ancient artifacts and probe the nuances of prehistoric food chains. The source of these rare isotopes? Complicated cascades of subatomic reactions in the atmosphere triggered by high-energy cosmic rays from outer space. Now, a team of scientists is adding one more isotope initiator to its list: lightning. Strong bolts of lightning can unleash the same flurry of nuclear reactions as cosmic rays, the researchers report in Nature. But, they add, the isotopes created by these storms likely constitute a small portion of all such atoms -- so the new findings are unlikely to change the way other scientists use them for dating and geotracing.
One of the few articles that are actually related to science. Not a clickbait headline... and there are no comments. I get that real science isn't "sexy" but it'd be nice to see a discussion about what this discovery could mean. What are the wild ideas for using lightning to create this isotope? What are the new possibilities? I imagine that we'll be able to generate them artificially, so what can be done with them? IANA Physicist but there used to be some here, and their comments were always welcomed and interesting.
"It's really not that big of a deal, when you consider what happens in some parts of the world. Isis killed 300+ in a mosque in Egypt. These are fellow muslims. "
Fellow? Hardly. They were Sufis, apostates.
"They are subhuman animals."
You mean like Christians, who made war among themselves for hundreds of years because of some minor differences in interpretation of non-existent gods?
You don't understand how science applies the principle of uniformitarianism. It's not an assumption. It's a testable hypothesis. Like if physics of the past worked the same as today, then we should see "X" in the evidence, otherwise we will see something different. Whether the experiment was conducted 5 minutes ago, 500 years ago, or 5 million years ago affects the practical aspects of doing the science, not the fundamental nature of how science is performed by making predictions and then going out and comparing the evidence to them.
For example, we don't assume 14C decayed in the past like it does today. We can count annual growth rings in trees, corals, and glacial ice going back thousands of years to see whether the carbon isotope results match. Likewise, for longer-term isotopic systems like uranium-lead we can make predictions about how nuclear processes worked, and see if the geochemical signatures in natural nuclear reactors such as Oklo, which was active almost 2 billion years ago. There are also many tests of whether nuclear processes worked the same in the past via such things as astronomy, where the distances involved are large enough that you are looking back far into time. If nuclear processes worked differently in fundamental way, for example, then you'd see differences in the way that light fades after a star goes supernova as you looked at events further and further away. Scientists have always been interested in the possibility that fundamental physical constants have changed in the deep past, and have looked for evidence, but it's kind of a boring exercise because usually the results show no detectable change to within measurement limits.
We don't simply assume this stuff works exactly the same and ignore ways to test it, especially when there is evidence for variation of rates of *some* processes today, and some fundamental things about the Earth have changed over the long term (e.g., little or no free oxygen in the atmosphere billions of years ago, or changes in the Moon's orbit that have affected the tides). Those differences yield different products. The more fundamental nuclear stuff, not so far.
The only people who think scientists blindly apply the principle of uniformitarianism are usually pseudoscientists with an axe to grind or people who don't understand how scientists actually use it. It's nothing more than an application of Occam's Razor until you've got evidence that significant change has actually happened.