Earth and Science News- Earth and Science Videos and News // Current

^#61

Carl Sagan explains the Universe for FREE, on Hulu!

Carl Sagan was an American astronomer and author who simultaneously advanced our understanding of astronomy and astrophysics while... more

Scudettostarved
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The power of growing your own food

http://www.foodmatters.tv/_webapp_265468/The_Power_of_Growing_Your_Own_Food Is your lawn perfectly manicured but only contains... more

JanforGore
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'Alternative Nobel' winner David Suzuki feels 'humiliated'

VANCOUVER–Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki says he's proud to receive an "Alternative Nobel" prize... more

ras_menelik
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Monkey Moms Act Like Human Moms

"he intense, special exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants might have deep roots all the way back in monkeys.

Rhesus macaques and their offspring interact in the first month of life in ways much like what humans often do, scientists now suggest.

"What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?" asked researcher Pier Francesco Ferrari, a behavioral biologist and neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy. "They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch — so-called 'motherese' — and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar — they exaggerate their gestures, 'kiss' their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze."

Past research has shown these emotional interactions go both ways in humans — newborns are sensitive to their mother's expressions, movements, and voice, and engage their parents in much the same way. For years, these capacities were basically considered unique to humans, although perhaps shared to some extent with chimpanzees.

Now Ferrari and his colleagues extend these skills to macaques, "suggesting the origins of these behaviors actually goes way back," he told LiveScience. (Rhesus monkey ancestors diverged from those of humans roughly 25 million years ago, while chimpanzees diverged from our lineage 6 million years ago.)

Intriguingly, these exchanges virtually disappeared when infants turned about one month old.

"It's quite puzzling," Ferrari said, "but we should consider that macaque development is much faster that of humans. Motor competences of a two-week-old macaque could be compared to an eight- to twelve-month-old human infant. Thus, independence from the mother occurs very early. What happens next in the first and second month of life is that infants become more interested in interacting with their same-age peers."

This discovery suggests that by studying monkeys, scientists might get insights into the evolution of parental care and infant development in humans.""he intense, special exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants might have deep roots all the way back in... more

DeliaTheArtist
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9 comments

27 days ago

^#65

Moon Radio- "One Giant Bounce for Mankind"

Open your lungs and talk to the Moon! A massive project to bounce voices from Earth to the moon and back to another spot on... more

bexnorts
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5 months ago

^#66

"The human existence depends on the top six inches of soil." By Dervaes - Watch video too.

We are the Organic movement! Organic agriculture and beyond can combat deforestation, soil, water and air contamination,water... more

lookatmypix
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12 comments

17 days ago

^#67

First sub to reach ocean's deepest point

A robotic vehicle named Nereus has made one of the deepest ocean dives ever — 6.8 miles (10,902 meters), a team of... more

sk8r408
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5 months ago

^#68

Film about Pesticides Upcoming Screenings: "A Chemical Reaction"

http://www.pfzmedia.com/#/images/stories/screen/small/HomeDepot3.jpg Orlando International Film Festival 11.05.09 @ 1PM... more

CarolynGillis
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3 comments

4 days ago

^#69

Report: Americans getting better at conserving water

Americans are using less water per person now than they have since the mid-1950s, thanks to water-saving technologies and a nationwide push to safeguard dwindling supplies.

A report released Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey also shows that industries as well as the general population are sucking up less water overall than in 1980, when the nation's thirst for water peaked.

Experts said it was particularly welcome news in the burgeoning West, where cities built in dry regions are grappling with intense disputes and ecosystem collapse tied to dwindling supplies.

"Even during a time of population growth and economic growth, we are all using less water," said Susan Hutson, a USGS hydrologist in Memphis, and an author of the report. "It's exciting to see we have responded to these crises by really seeking solutions."

California, in the third year of a withering drought, was the most water-hungry state in 2005, the most recent year for which figures were available.

California used about 9 percent of all water extracted from lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, followed by Texas, Idaho and Illinois. All told, those four states drew more than a quarter of the country's total freshwater supplies in 2005.

Nationwide, about 80 percent of the 410 billion gallons used each day went to produce electricity at thermoelectric power plants and to irrigate farm fields.

But as the drought and environmental battles persist in California, some of the state's most productive farmers are receiving as little as 10 percent of their normal supplies, forcing growers to leave hundreds of thousands of acres unplanted and lay off thousands of farmworkers.

This year, city dwellers, too, have been forced to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown under mandatory water rations.

"We still have collapsing ecosystems because of water use, we still have rivers and aquifers that are overtapped, and we still have rapid population growth," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland. "I guess the optimistic way to put it is, we're learning our lessons about smart water use but we have a long way to go."

http://current.com/groups/water-is-life/Americans are using less water per person now than they have since the mid-1950s, thanks to water-saving technologies and a... more

JanforGore
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8 comments

8 days ago

^#70

Health Care Reform: Scrap GMOs

With a growing body of new scientific evidence behind them, experts say that any acceptance of the safety of GMOs flies in the... more

NonGMOTalk
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5 months ago

^#71

Soros: "I'm having a very good crisis"

A hedge fund manager who predicted the global credit crunch has said the financial crisis has been 'stimulating' and the... more

PatrioticAstronaut
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8 months ago

^#72

ABRA-CADAVER -- PLASTIC PEOPLE HARDLY A MAGICAL FORM OF ENTERTAINMENT!

Bodies in a suspended state of plasticine animation. REAL human bodies. We spend big bucks to see them posed in traveling exhibits... more

sfinfgeld2
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2 months ago

^#73

Is Tobacco the Next Anti-HIV Weapon?

The tobacco plant could soon redeem itself in the eyes of public health experts, say scientists who are producing huge amounts of... more

Anyother
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7 months ago

^#74

Transparent metal hints at nature of planets' cores

Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, turns out to exist after all - if you see in X-rays.

To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that can generate about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre.

At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process.

Normally in a solid metal, another electron will instantly take the place of the missing one. Flash is so powerful that it can rip an electron out of every atom before others have a chance to replace them. With one electron removed, the remaining electrons around each ion settle into a different configuration, becoming too tightly bound for the laser to remove.

That means the X-ray photons can't be easily absorbed, and they fly straight through the material, making the previously opaque aluminium transparent to X-rays.

This state doesn't last long, though. Within fractions of a nanosecond, the energy pumped into the electrons is delivered to the ions, and the ions fly apart violently. "As soon as you make it, the stuff blows up," says Justin Wark of the University of Oxford.

But for an instant, Wark and his team can create a new state of matter that is as dense as ordinary solid matter, but extremely hot. "That is the sort of matter you would get towards the centre of a giant planet," says Wark.

The team hopes to study the properties of this hot, dense matter using new, more powerful lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, California. These lasers produce higher-energy X-rays that could probe the structure of the new material and measure its properties – perhaps providing some insight into the heart of Jupiter and the other giant planets.Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage... more

SoundBigfoot
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3 months ago

^#75

Acid Test: the other CO2 problem

ACID TEST, a film produced by NRDC, was made to raise awareness about the largely unknown problem of ocean acidification, which... more

ras_menelik
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3 comments

14 days ago

^#76

Bhopal: horrendous legacy

http://www.theage.com.au/world/horrendous-legacy-20091030-hpte.html

THE rickshaw driver pulls in to the side of the road to allow us to take shelter from torrential rain. There, under a shop's awning, a small crowd is waiting for the weather to break. The group includes Sapna Sharma and her brother-in-law, Sanjay. Sanjay is holding his 18-month-old nephew, Anshul, who has kohl-rimmed eyes and silver bracelets on his ankles.

As we stand talking, some of the people start pointing to the child's hands and feet while speaking animatedly to us in Hindi, and then Sapna explains through our translator that her son was born with 12 toes and 12 fingers.

Shortly afterwards, about a kilometre away in the Shankar Nagar area of Bhopal, we meet another Indian child with congenital malformations, three-year-old Raj, who is visually impaired, cannot walk and whose head is oversized. ''The doctors said bad water could have been a cause of my son's condition. Older people here are gas victims and now the younger people are victims of the water,'' his mother, Poona Bai, says.

Here, in the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of children are being born with deformities and mental health problems. As we walk back to our rickshaw, we come across more afflicted youngsters who have followed us along the road. They include 12-year-old Rajesh, who is barefoot and bald. The other children make fun of him as his mother, Yashdabai, explains that they do so because they believe he is mad. Rajesh's older sister, Sonia, scolds the other children and says she has to protect her brother from bullies. Sonia is barefoot, too, and as she speaks a colleague notices that the young girl has huge feet.

This is the horrendous legacy Bhopal is facing 25 years on from the world's worst industrial accident. The Bhopal gas disaster, as it became known, has been dubbed the ''Hiroshima of the chemical industry''. It happened shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of poisonous gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant. The release of 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (known as MIC) from the factory exposed more than 500,000 people to toxic gas. Up to 10,000 are thought to have died within the first 72 hours after the leak.

At least 25,000 people exposed to the gas have since died, and today in Bhopal tens of thousands more Indians suffer from a variety of debilitating gas-related illnesses such as respiratory and psychiatric problems, joint pains, menstrual irregularities, tuberculosis and cancers. Then there is the escalating number of birth defects, including cleft palates, webbed feet and hands, twisted limbs, brain damage and heart problems.

Shankar Nagar is a slum area of the city, just north of the derelict Union Carbide factory. For years local campaigners have been demanding that Union Carbide, now owned by US multinational Dow Chemicals, clean up the abandoned pesticide plant, but so far their pleas have been ignored.

In 1999, a Greenpeace investigation found severe chemical contamination of the environment surrounding the former factory, which, the NGO said, was polluted with heavy metals and chemical compounds.

The report said: ''Analysis of water samples drawn from wells serving the local community has also confirmed the contamination of groundwater reserves with chemicals arising either from previous or ongoing activities and/or incidents. As a result of the ubiquitous presence of contaminants, the exposure of the communities surrounding the plants to complex mixtures of hazardous chemicals continues on a daily basis.

''Though less acute than the exposure that took place as a result of the 1984 MIC release, long-term chronic exposure to mixtures of toxic synthetic chemicals and heavy metals is also likely to have serious consequences for the health and survival of the local population.''

The Greenpeace study was backed in 2004 by Amnesty International, whose Clouds of Injustice report said, ''toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and water supply … and it is appalling that no one has been held
accountable.http://www.theage.com.au/world/horrendous-legacy-20091030-hpte.html THE rickshaw driver pulls in to the side of the road to... more