#For context it's kind of like standing next to a nuclear reactor and then the audience points at a heavy object blocking a window and says-

[bonefall]

Question: what’s your source on the phytoestrogens? Bc the only times I’ve ever heard that claim, they all source back to this one study on sheep in like the 40s, which… well it’s not very well supported

(Although maybe you don’t care about that, which would be fair. These are fictional cats after all not clinical studies)

You're probably coming from Hbomberguy when he was specifically addressing lunkhead chuds, who pass around the claim that phytoestrogens lower human fertility and sex drive. The "soyboy" claim.

Human studies on the effects of phytoestrogens are pretty lacking overall, but what does exist doesn't back up that claim-- because humans don't graze on red clover in west australia like a sheep. What that means is that it doesn't impact human fertility the way a terrified conservative brain stem thinks it does.

(ESPECIALLY not in a plate of soybeans, which has significantly lower levels of phytoestrogen than red clover.)

But what it DOES do is bind to the estrogen receptors in your body (and acts as a really good antioxidant but that's neither here nor there) which can mean it can act AS estrogen... or as an antagonist.

If you want to know more (especially if you have a background in chemistry, this source talks a lot about the structural similarities between estrogen and phytoestrogen and the mechanism of action) then go dive into PHYTOESTROGENS IN FUNCTIONAL FOOD by Fatih Yildiz, which collects together many of the studies that we do have on the matter and omits controversial ones.

(Plus it's an easy read for such a science-heavy publication imo)

Though I have to stress that my HRT guide is, y'know, fake cats! Nothing in nature replaces modern medicine***, but I wanted to make a good resource for WC fans with trans cats who wanted a little bit of scientific accuracy, wanted to cut herbs that cast Liver Failure 1000 on felines, and could reasonably be found in a temperate environment

***= Except medicinal maggots. Medicinal maggots are literally magical. Nothing debrides necrotic tissue like green bottlefly larvae and as far as I'm concerned they're the closest thing to divinity we have on this earth. And medicinal leeches I love you leeches im so sorry that anyone has ever called you a pest you're cherubic angels and she doesnt deserve this </3

[sciencespies]

In a Tunnel Beneath Alaska, Scientists Race to Understand Disappearing Permafrost

https://sciencespies.com/nature/in-a-tunnel-beneath-alaska-scientists-race-to-understand-disappearing-permafrost/

In a Tunnel Beneath Alaska, Scientists Race to Understand Disappearing Permafrost

To enter the Fox permafrost tunnel—one of the only places in the world dedicated to the firsthand scientific study of the mix of dirt and ice that covers much of the planet’s far northern latitudes—you must don a hard-hat then walk into the side of a hill. The hill stands in the rural area of Fox, Alaska, 16 miles north of Fairbanks. The entrance is in a metal wall that’s like a partially dissected Quonset hut, or an enlarged hobbit hole. A tangle of skinny birches and black spruce adorn the top of the hill, and a giant refrigeration unit roars like a jet engine outside the door—to prevent the contents of the tunnel from warping or thawing.

On a mild, damp day in September, Thomas Douglas, a research chemist, escorts visitors through the tunnel door. Douglas works for a project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), which has its fingers in everything from snowmelt modeling and wetlands plant inventories to research on stealth aircraft. But his own work focuses on several aspects of permafrost, and he leads occasional tours here.

Inside, the permafrost tunnel itself is even stranger than its exterior. A metal boardwalk crosses a floor thick with fine, loose, cocoa-colored dust. Fluorescent lights and electrical wires dangle above us. The walls are embedded with roots suspended in a masonry of ice and silt, with a significant content of old bacteria and never-rotted bits of plant and animal tissue. Because of this, the tunnel smells peculiar and fetid, like a malodorous cheese (think Stilton or Limburger) but with an earthy finish and notes of sweaty socks and horse manure.

A trim person in a light jacket, Douglas strolls down the boardwalk with an amiable half-grin on his face, narrating the surroundings with the kind of glib enthusiasm of a museum docent or a mountain guide. “This part of the tunnel here is about 18,000 years old. We’ve had it carbon-14 dated. This is kind of a bone-rich area right here,” he says. He gestures to what look like gopher holes in the silt—the gaps left behind by cores drilled by science teams. The bone of a steppe bison, a large Arctic ungulate that went extinct about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, rests in the hard peat. A little further along: a mammoth bone. We have stepped both underground and back in time.

The earthen walls look like they could be soft, like mud, but he raps the end of a long metal flashlight against one of them, and it makes a clinking sound. “You can see this is hard as a rock,” he says.

Permafrost is one the weirder concoctions of the Earth’s Ice Ages. In the abstract, it sounds like a simple substance—any earth material that stays frozen for two or more years. In reality, it is a shape-shifting material that underlies about 24 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere—from the Tibetan Plateau to Siberia and parts of Arctic and sub-Arctic North America. Now many such areas are becoming both volatile and fragile. Permafrost can be hard as bedrock, but when it thaws, if it’s rich in ice and silt, it can morph into something like glue or chocolate milk or wet cement. In its frozen state, it can hoard materials for thousands of years without allowing them to decay. It can suspend bacteria in a kind of cryo-sleep—still alive for millennia.

Research chemist Thomas Douglas stands at the entrance to the Fox tunnel.

(Whitney McLaren / Undark)

Much of the scientific research on permafrost has been done from above or afar, via remote sensing equipment and computer models, or through happenstance in old mining tunnels or places where a river bluff has fallen apart and exposed millennia-old ice. Sometimes it’s done via the laborious process of hand-sampling and boring a hole deep into the ground. “Really most of us are studying permafrost from the surface, and we’re imagining what it looks like underneath,” says Kimberly Wickland, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who studies carbon emissions from lakes and wetlands. The Fox tunnel is one of only two underground facilities dedicated exclusively to the scientific study of permafrost where a visitor can actually walk around inside the frozen earth. (The other is in Siberia.) When Wickland stepped into the tunnel for the first time in 2001, it was like a revelation she says—the moment she truly grasped what permafrost was.

Here, people like Wickland collaborate with Douglas, his colleagues, and researchers from all over the world. Collectively, they have studied everything from the utility of ground-penetrating radar in space exploration—the tunnel is thought to be an analog for Mars—to isotopes in steppe bison bones that might suggest something about the migration habits of these creatures before they went extinct. Here you can see the stuff in three dimensions, and easily retrieve 18,000 to 43,000-year-old specimens of it for research. You can reckon with how complex permafrost is, how much of it remains hidden, and how much scientists still need to learn. You can study and decode the vast amounts of information it potentially holds about the Earth’s history, and you can test the ways its disappearance might influence the planet’s future.

Indeed, permafrost is discussed most often these days in a global context and, increasingly, it is a subject of alarm. In December, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that the world’s permafrost—which used to capture and store carbon—is instead collapsing and setting loose things that it had long ago entombed. Some scientists worry its thaw could liberate microbes wholly foreign to the modern world (a threat whose significance seems even more disturbing in light of the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic). Meanwhile, the NOAA analysis suggests that the globe’s unraveling permafrost is already releasing as much as 300 to 600 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere annually, about as much as the myriad industrial and transport activities of France or Canada. The finding is a warning signal—possibly the beginning of a feedback loop in which natural processes in the Arctic may make the impacts of climate change far worse.

As climate change warms soil temperatures across Alaska, too, the Fox tunnel probably contains some of the most protected and coldest permafrost in the area. How long that will remain true is hard to predict. A visitor to the tunnel can’t help but wonder just how much will ultimately be lost biologically, ecologically, and scientifically—as the planet’s permafrost collapses.

Early on, permafrost was mostly an engineer’s concern, and it was often a nuisance. Around Fairbanks in the early 20tth century, permafrost was an obstacle lying between prospectors and the gold beneath. So miners would blast through or thaw it with devices called steam points, turning the frozen earth into muck, then haul it out to get to the gold. (The younger, front part of the hill in which the Fox Tunnel now stands was dredged and hauled away by gold miners, which is why the tunnel features mainly ancient permafrost.)

Elsewhere, permafrost was a construction problem. In 1942, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent more than 10,000 soldiers and civilians to carve the Alaska Highway through eastern Alaska and into Canada, engineers discovered that one could not build directly on top of the stuff without thawing it—a hard lesson that involved broken equipment and trucks stuck in unyielding mud. The construction challenges helped identify “cold regions research requirements” that would later lead to the formation of CRREL, according to a history published by the Corps.

Only in the Cold War did the frozen ground begin to seem like a possible asset, and a thing worthy of scientific inquiry. The Department of Defense wanted to see whether icy terrain could offer a secure location for military bases and operations. In 1959 and 1960, the U.S. Army built what amounted to a city under the snow in Greenland, called Camp Century, with labs, a dormitory, a gymnasium, a barbershop, and a nuclear reactor to supply heat and power. Here, they studied the properties of snow and drilled to the bottom of the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time. The camp was also intended to house “Project Iceworm,” which aimed to build thousands of miles of tunnel inside the ice sheet and use them for storing ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. But after a few years, it became clear that Greenland glaciers were too dynamic and unstable to support such a network, and the project was canceled. The camp was abandoned in 1966.

The Fox permafrost tunnel had a more modest purpose. In 1963, when it was first dug, it was simply designed to test whether frozen ground could be an adequate bunker or smaller-scale military storage facility. Permafrost is naturally shock-absorbent and could theoretically handle shelling and bombing. George Swinzow, a geologist in the Experimental Engineering Division of CRREL, one of the first builders and stewards of the tunnel, had also attempted to create his own synthetic version of permafrost, called “permacrete,” which he used to build columns, bricks, and other underground supports and masonry inside another newly excavated tunnel near Camp Tuto in Greenland. (Swinzow would also later write a tome titled “On Winter Warfare,” about the technical problems of combat in cold places.)

In 1968 and 1969, the U.S. Bureau of Mines borrowed the tunnel and tested some blasting and drilling techniques in a gently sloping side channel called a winze. At the end, the tunnel looked like a lopsided letter “V.” For the next two decades, the main research carried out here still focused on engineering — permafrost as a physical thing rather than a biological one, a substrate that would affect the construction of buildings and pipelines. The engineers soon discovered that permafrost would warp and bend as it approached about 30 degrees Fahrenheit (or -1 degrees Celsius). So CRREL installed the first refrigeration unit at the entrance and a set of fans to send the cold air back through the earthen passageways. The chiller now keeps the facility at about 25 degrees (or about -4 degrees Celsius).

After turning down the winze, the boardwalk ends, and Douglas instructs his visitors to “walk daintily,” or to “walk like ninjas.” The ceiling of the tunnel lowers, and he implores them to avoid kicking up the dust, also called loess, a type of delicate dirt carried miles by the wind and collected in this hill. When the tunnel was first dug, the ice held the loess in place. But when exposed to frigid air, ice will convert directly to water vapor, a process called sublimation. When the ice departed, it released the particles of dust onto the floor. Dig through the dust—as Fairbanks paleontologists sometimes do—and you can find ground squirrel bones, millennia-old leaves still tinged with green, ancient seeds and fruits, and beetle carapaces that look like they might have recently died on your windowsill.

By the early 2000s, the dusty surface of the tunnel also made it seem like a good analog for Mars, which has cold dirt and layers of its own permafrost. Researchers began running prototype rovers through the tunnel and using ground-penetrating radar to find novel ways to look for the water and ice—or even extraterrestrial life—on Mars. Around the same time, NASA became interested in whether ice-dwelling microbes might hold clues about the form and function of life on other planets. In 1999 and 2000, a NASA astrobiologist named Richard Hoover sampled microscopic filaments that he thought might belong to bacteria frozen into a 32,000-year-old section of the permafrost tunnel. In 2005, he announced his findings from those samples—the first species ever discovered to be still alive in ancient ice, an extremophile called Carnobacterium pleistocenium.

Thomas Douglas points to an image showing the layout of the Fox permafrost tunnel.

(Whitney McLaren / Undark)

The discovery heralded a new understanding of permafrost. It was proof that life could exist in extreme places. But more ominously, it suggested that the thawing happening all over the planet could awaken both ecological processes and long-dormant organisms, and not all of them might be benign.

Emerging from the winze, the permafrost tunnel opens into a high-ceilinged gallery of water-ice patterns, each one as beautiful as an abstract sculpture. This is the newer part of the tunnel, a section burrowed out between 2011 and 2018. The drilling here exposed these massive cross-sections of ice and earth, called “ice wedges.” Some are as wide as 15 feet across. (Unusually, some of the academic scientists at CRREL dug this part of the tunnel themselves, driving heavy machinery into the earth. Douglas was not involved, but snow researcher Matthew Sturm, who holds a post at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, described driving a skid steer, like a small bulldozer, and a research engineer manned a device called a rotary cutter, attached to an excavator.)

Ice wedges are giant spears that form when water trickles into cracks in the silty parts of the permafrost. The new ice carves out gaps where water can percolate every summer season, so the wedges gather more ice and expand over time. Here, they spread across the walls in dark, glossy, marbled forms. “Isn’t this a wild shape? It reminds me of, like, a Da Vinci sketch,” exclaims Douglas. “Doesn’t it look like an eagle, like a man becoming an eagle?” He pauses before a sheet of ice that curiously resembles a figure—a head with pointed ears, arms spread like wings atop a glassy body, and feet shaped like tree roots. The formation is accidental, frozen in place here about 25,000 years ago, but such fantastical shapes abound. A few feet away from the eagle-man is a horizontal ice-tube that looks like a diorama, with grassy bits and roots and air bubbles suspended in it. This plant matter is around the same age but looks like someone picked it yesterday and stuck it inside a glass case.

The eagle-man and every ice formation in this gallery is a slice of a wedge. By capillary action, water can also collect into lenses and chunks in the soil. Some become enormous; some remain microscopic. Most of these bits of ice are about 99 percent frozen water, with little silt mixed in. But salts in the permafrost can lick the edges of the ice and form unfrozen bits. Here, in what are called brine channels, live other microbes. Today, these microbes are an increasingly active areas of study in the tunnel—and in permafrost research elsewhere in the world—for good reason.

In the popular imagination, microbes in permafrost are like tiny undead monsters—superbugs that awaken and spread pandemics. In 2016, the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia had its first anthrax outbreak in 75 years, likely triggered when a heatwave thawed the region’s permafrost and released anthrax spores from a long-dead reindeer carcass. At least 20 people were infected, and one 12-year-old boy died. Such risks have given scientists enough pause that, in November, an international group in gathered in Hanover, Germany to discuss them.

And microbes may have an even more disturbing role in shaping the fate of the atmosphere: It is the microbes that will determine how much of the permafrost’s carbon escapes into the air and how much can be stored again in the dirt. In 2013, Wickland and a group of her collaborators came to the tunnel to gather bits of 35,000-year-old permafrost that had been carved out of the walls during the recent excavation. They collected these scrapings in several coolers packed with dry ice then flew with them to their laboratory in Colorado. They suspended the samples in water, then strained them, like tea, and measured how much carbon dioxide leached from the water.

The thawed, awakened bacteria in the tea began breaking down the organic carbon in the sample; in less than a week, about half of it was emitted into the air as carbon dioxide. It was a disturbing finding. Scientists had long debated how quickly or gradually the thawing of permafrost would affect the global climate. But this study suggested the warming of ancient soils could produce a giant burst of emissions into the atmosphere in a short period of time—one more reason to be wary of the stuff.

But there are other scientists who are trying to find redeeming value in the newly awakened microbial community. Some have continued Hoover’s work, but brought more powerful DNA analysis into the search for live microbes in ice that might yield insights about interplanetary life. Robyn Barbato, a soil microbiologist at the CRREL lab in New Hampshire, also has plans to gather samples from the tunnel for the purpose of bioprospecting. This is the term used to describe the search for microbes that might help with the design of things like super-cold glue, bio-bricks, sustainable road materials, and antifreeze. “I consider the Far North and the Far South to be kind of the new Amazon. There’s all this biodiversity,” Barbato says. “We could really encounter interesting and useful processes that we can adapt to make things more sustainable.”

At least three times in the past 27 years, flooding from a combination of engineering troubles and heavy spring and summer rains has threatened the tunnel. In 1993, the floodwaters collected at the rear of the old tunnel, warped the ceiling, and brought down large chunks of silt. In 2014, water flowed into the tunnel from a nearby hillslope, and frozen puddles collected inside. In 2016, “we nearly lost the tunnel,” recalls Sturm. The rains altered the drainage above, and water infiltrated an ice wedge adjacent to the tunnel. “By the time anything could get done, it had eroded a house-sized piece of ice wedge.” The main pulse of the floodwaters ultimately drained away from the tunnel, but the close call reminded CRREL staff of the potential for catastrophe. Patches of ice from the various floods still linger in the tunnel.

“To me, that’s one of the most salient things we learned from the tunnel,” Sturm says. When permafrost collapses or erodes, the landscape left behind is called thermokarst. The word evokes limestone karst — a type of belowground terrain that is like Swiss cheese, full of caves, rock pools, springs, and streams formed by dissolving and eroding limestone. But thermokarst is far more unstable than limestone karst. Within a few years, a puddle left by permafrost thaw can turn into a lake, then collapse into a ravine. Permafrost won’t decay because of warm temperatures alone. Water will play a destructive role. Fires have also raged in recent years across Alaska and Siberia. Inside the tunnel, near a second entrance, is a thin black band along the wall, a line of charcoal from what was probably a fire. In the Anthropocene climate, if flames laid bare the hillside above the tunnel, heat might radiate into the ice inside and help thaw it.

Douglas leads the group out this second door and past another loud cooling fan into the damp air and daylight. He walks up the hill onto what is effectively the tunnel’s roof and then into the forest behind it, following an old footpath behind a fence through clusters of dwarf birches, willows, black spruce, and fragrant Labrador tea. It is a picture of collapsing permafrost and another active area of research. CRREL researchers have set up various meters and cameras to track snowfall and melt throughout the forest. His tour crosses several areas of sunken, flooded ground, and then a long gully with spruce trees curved toward it, as if they are bowing. Tea-colored water trickles through the center. This is the top of a collapsed ice wedge.

“Who knows how far out that ice wedge has melted?” Douglas says. “There is this sense that the underground is not stable.”

That sense of collapse extends far beyond here. The mean temperature of Fairbanks over the entire 2019 year was 32.6 degrees Fahrenheit, just above freezing, and permafrost cannot survive many more years like it. What lies inside the tunnel seems more and more like a captive, rare animal, an Earth form that might soon be lost. In a time of climate change, the Fox tunnel becomes a project for reckoning, on a grand scale, with that loss and its cascading effects. “Sometimes we’ll kind of joke about, at one point, we’ll have the only permafrost in the Fairbanks area,” Douglas says. This year, he and his colleagues will experiment with other means to extend the tunnel’s longevity, such as using solar panels to power its chillers. They will complete an expansion project begun this winter by the end of 2021, doubling the size of the tunnel. This will allow them to see permafrost from many angles above (with radar) and below (with the human eye) and develop means to scan frozen ground on a large scale.

At its essence, it’s an effort to study and visualize the remaking of large parts of the Earth.

In the next 80 years, in just one lifetime, most of Alaska’s near-surface permafrost will fall apart, Douglas explains. “That will fundamentally alter hydrology, vegetation, the snowpack, the timing of spring melt, heat exchange, habitats for animals, and it’ll basically completely change the landscape.” The work ahead at Fox, he adds, is to understand the staggering ramifications of this loss. Alaska and all of the far North, he says, are “just going to be a fundamentally different place.”

UPDATE: A previous version of the piece incorrectly stated that the planet’s permafrost could be releasing as much as 300 to 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The amount is 300 to 600 million metric tons. The piece also wrongly stated that Thomas Douglas set up meters and cameras to track snowfall and melt throughout the forest behind the permafrost tunnel. The work was conducted by various CRREL researchers.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

#Nature

[blairtrabbit]

Thoughts under the cut. Aka Why am I such a fucking downer on this why can’t I just enjoy things. Why must I be a nerd like this.

I have been trying to just let this image go because its an illustration out of context and we have no idea what they will look like rendered and moving in universe but there are a couple things really bothering me about this I have to talk about. 1. Why in the ever loving fuck does Danger Deux have a core reactor? Remember in the first movie when they were making their last stand pulling all the old guys out of retirement and the movie made a point of talking about how the Danger having a Reactor Core made it an obsolete model? The Gipsy Danger ran on nuclear power like the older units Cherno Alpha and Coyote Tango and the big glowy center on its chest is basically like a gigantic cooling unit. Its dangerous and was eventually changed because a. Having human pilots in a nuclear robot is incredibly dangerous if the shielding is faulty or something happens and it overheats during a battle. I recall Stacker suffering some repercussions because of that. b. Nuclear Robots blow up and could potentially hurt the environment or civilians. I vaguely recall the Danger doing something like that at the end of the movie. The Striker and the Typhoon were digitized being newer and better models. Its less dangerous for the pilots and for the area they are fighting in. So one would assume these brand spanking new robots are the latest and greatest models right? Thinner, lighter....so I repeat- Why. THE FUCK. Does Gipsy Danger 2:not-electric bugaloo run on a NUCLEAR CORE? probably because it looks good and no other reason and that pisses me off. 2.THEY DIDN’T JUST GIVE IT ONE CORE THEY GAVE IT TWO I AM DYING INSIDE. Actual conversation in the art department. Artist 1: Guys I am working on Gipsy 2:Back 2 tha Hood and I want it to look like the first one but different. How can I make it the same but..different. Artist 2: Mmm Well the first one had that cool nuclear core right? Artist 1: Yeah? Artist 2: How about. TWO CORES.

3. If they made Dangeresque 2 nuclear because of what happened with Striker and the electric pulse why aren’t all the Jaegers nuclear? So. When Newt drifted he gave the Precursors all this info about the Jaegers and Leatherback was able to use an electronic pulse to knock out the Striker and temporarily disable it. If the PPDC assumes this will happen again then wouldn’t they make all the Jaegers nuclear? Then why does only one have any kind of indication it runs on nuclear power? And why only Gipsy Danger 2:this time its personal? The answer is there is no reason. They just wanted people to be able to tell this robit was Gipsy Danger 2:I still know what you did last summer. I feel like Del Toro thought out almost every detail in the first movie  and worked to make each Jaeger unique. This doesn’t bode well. 4.Why did they have to give these Jaegers almost identical color schemes to the Danger The Typhoon and the Eureka? In fact if you look at them for a few minutes you realize it's just the Danger The Typhoon and the Eureka with less personality. why did they remake three previous Jaegers instead of creating new original ones?  You know why? Because they think we’re stupid. They think we’re stupid and we won’t know these are Jaegers 2 fast 2 furious without some painfully obvious references to the original film. Just like they think we needed Stacker to have a son otherwise we might have wandered into this movie and thought we it was Transformers 12:Age of Fucktron and wandered mindlessly away to see whatever Dreamworks movie is out. Why can’t you give me more credit Hollywood. I don’t need to have Khan to be the villain in my Star Trek movie to know that its a Star Trek movie. I don’t NEED to have a fugitive droid on a desert planet to know I’m watching a Star Wars movie. STOP TREATING ME LIKE I’M FUCKING FIVE YEARS OLD. I DON’T NEED A JAEGER WITH TWO CORE REACTORS. I CAN HANDLE NEW THINGS. 5.Look I know they’re just ripping off Manga/Anime Mech and Kaiju movies to begin with but at least the first time they tried to cover it a little better. The Crimson Typoon had a headlight for a head and three arms. The Cherno looked like a nuclear plant that could walk and even the Gipsy and the Striker had a very thick well thought out and original look. They moved ponderously and with weight. They were made too look like a person could wear them as a suit. Even if these are newer models all I can see is someone  looking at Evangelion’s paper copying chunks of it and presenting it to their teacher expecting an unearned A+.I get it you guys took the original designs and threw some Gundam darts at them. You did your re-runs of Macross homework. I’m just...unimpressed and I bet you anything these things will move like they weigh four pounds. Oh god please let me be wrong on this. This leads me to my next question. 6. Why did all of them go on such dangerous diets? Did the Iphone teach us nothing? Making technology thin doesn’t make necessarily make it BETTER. Striker Eureka 2: The Squeakuel is the worst offender on this front. Its got this top heavy box sitting on top of an itty bitty waist. You know what I would go for if I was a Kaiju? Probably that waist. I mean i know its bikini season Striker 2: Back in the Habit but eat a fucking sandwich. 7. It better be just the illustration that has them looking this goddamn clean. Jaegers get dirty and rusty and covered with battle damage.Even Gipsy who was renovated and rebuilt from top to bottom had patches of paint and scratches and chips in places. These goddamn things look like toys. They look like plastic fresh out of box toys. In the movie they had better look at least slightly weathered even if they are new or I will glare at them the entire two hour running time. I will give them smouldering glares the likes of which has never been seen before or since. God please let the movie be more impressive than this. Also as an aside. Why are all the Jaeger pilots so young? Why is no one drifting with their parents? I feel like i’m seeing behind the scenes of fucking Pacific Rim babies or Pacific Rim High School musical. I have a feeling somebody higher up pressured them about using more of the young people to get those sweet tween dollars. But at least they hired a diverse cast. Are all the previous generation dead? Is Herc going to come back and train any of these people? Seems like a bit of a mess at the ole PPDC.

[maxwellyjordan]

Argument preview: Justices may consider role of legislative motive in pre-emption analysis

On November 5, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, which could test the extent to which a court will explore a state legislature’s motives when evaluating whether a state statute is pre-empted by federal law. The facts concern the largest uranium deposit in the United States, located in south-central Virginia. The petitioners are owners of the deposit who wish to mine uranium, and they are challenging a 1983 statute by which the Virginia General Assembly passed a moratorium on uranium mining:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, permit applications for uranium mining shall not be accepted by any agency of the Commonwealth prior to July 1, 1984, and until a program for permitting uranium mining is established by statute.

Virginia Uranium argues that the Virginia moratorium is pre-empted by the Atomic Energy Act, which generally precludes states from regulating matters of radiation safety that come within the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This argument — invoking what is known as field pre-emption — involves the thorniest issues to watch for at oral argument and is the primary focus of this preview. In addition, Virginia Uranium contends that the moratorium should fall because it conflicts with the AEA’s purpose of promoting nuclear development in the United States.

A few words about uranium development are necessary to understand the nuances of the case. Uranium development begins with three steps: the physical mining of uranium ore; milling the ore to produce “yellowcake,” which is a concentrated uranium powder; and managing and disposing of the mill tailings, a sandy, radioactive waste left behind after producing yellowcake. Of these steps, there is no question that the NRC does not have jurisdiction to regulate uranium mining on private lands — regulating that activity has always been the states’ domain. By contrast, the AEA requires uranium mills and tailings-disposal facilities to hold NRC licenses designed to protect the public health and safety. Under certain conditions, states may apply for and be granted authority to take over this regulatory function, but Virginia has not done so for these activities. Otherwise, the statute provides that nothing in the relevant section affects states’ authority to “regulate activities for purposes other than protection against radiation hazards.”

The inference from this language is that the AEA pre-empts state efforts to regulate radiation safety for uranium milling and tailings management — like commercial reactor operation and the management of spent nuclear fuel, among many other things. In Pacific Gas & Electric Co. v. State Energy Resources Conservation & Development Commission, the Supreme Court upheld a California statute that imposed a moratorium on new nuclear power plants in the state until the United States developed a means of disposing of spent nuclear fuel. Although the challengers contended that the state was motivated by safety concerns, the Supreme Court accepted the state’s economic rationale and refused to evaluate the state’s “true motive.” By contrast, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit rejected a Utah law that established a licensing scheme for private storage of spent nuclear fuel because its clear purpose was to regulate radiation safety.

The outcome of next week’s case may well depend on how deeply the Supreme Court is willing to inquire into legislative motive to define the scope of the pre-emption. On its face, the moratorium extends only to a matter within state authority — uranium mining. The court could stop there and uphold the moratorium. But what if at least some of the members of the General Assembly were also motivated to guard against radiation safety concerns arising from activities within the jurisdiction of the NRC like milling and tailings management? Should that matter?

The district court answered no. It granted Virginia’s motion to dismiss, refusing to look beyond the text of the moratorium and underscoring the states’ clear authority to regulate private uranium mining; the U.S. Court of Appeals for 4th Circuit affirmed. But Virginia Uranium — whose motion for summary judgment was denied as moot — argues that there is evidence showing an impermissible, non-mining, safety-related motive underlying the moratorium. Indeed, the parties vigorously dispute whether Virginia conceded, for purposes of the motion to dismiss, that its moratorium on mining was motivated at least in part by safety concerns associated with milling and tailings management.

The Pacific Gas & Electric decision does not squarely address such circumstances because California’s prohibition was directed at the construction of nuclear power plants — an activity that would unquestionably have been pre-empted if the moratorium had been based on state safety concerns, but which survived because of the economic purpose of the moratorium. There is a suggestion in PG&E that legislative purpose might be relevant to defining the pre-empted field; that is, a state’s legislative purpose to regulate radiation safety would help define the relevant scope of the pre-emption analysis. Yet the Supreme Court refused to undertake such an analysis. Moreover, in a subsequent decision, English v. General Electric Company, the court declined to answer whether PG&E’s suggestion was part of the holding of the case.

In a different context, the court in Shady Grove Orthopedic Associates v. Allstate Insurance Co. rejected the relevance of a state legislature’s subjective intentions when it held that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure trumped a New York law prohibiting certain kinds of class actions. The court expressed concern that not only is it difficult to pinpoint a single legislative purpose, but also that such an approach could mean that one state’s statute would be pre-empted, yet another state’s identical statute could stand. Indeed, in only a few contexts — such as equal protection and establishment clause cases — has the Supreme Court looked behind neutral statutory text to ascertain an illegitimate purpose, and even then it has been cautious, as in 1971’s Palmer v. Thompson. It would be a big step indeed to use Virginia’s legislative purpose — if it can be identified — to define the scope of the court’s pre-emption analysis.

At oral argument, watch for inquiries about the record — whether at a motion-to-dismiss stage the court may even consider Virginia Uranium’s evidence about impermissible motive — and perhaps some probing as to whether Virginia has made concessions about its legislative purpose. The central debate, however, is likely to focus on the proper role of any such motive in the court’s analysis.

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