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

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5 days ago

Sea slime killing U.S. seabirds

http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40654 Hundreds of birds—including this loon pictured on the Oregon coast—are... more

JanforGore
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Food Inc. available on DVD tomorrow

http://www.foodincmovie.com/

JanforGore
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World leaders accused of political myopia over Copenhagen climate change deal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/01/climate-change-world-leaders-accused The head of the international group... more

JanforGore
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Giant crack in Africa will create a new ocean

"A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.

"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.

"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous."

http://www.livescience.com/environment/091102-africa-rift-ocean.html"A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack,... more

DeliaTheArtist
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74 comments

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5 days ago

Dr. Nancy adorable but ... oh oh insider trading? Not cute when people trust you with their lives..?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Snyderman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Snyderman In 1999, Snyderman returned over... more

CarolynGillis
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2 comments

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5 days ago

Journal article states suppressed study shows GM corn killed ladybugs

http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/nov09/gm_corn_killed_ladybugs.php A recent article in Nature Biotechnology on how... more

JanforGore
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11 comments

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5 days ago

Tamiflu and Swine Flu Vaccine Patient Comments of permanent and serious side effects.

http://www.askapatient.com/viewrating.asp?drug=21087&name=TAMIFLU&sort=satisfaction&order=1 Please spread the word.... more

CarolynGillis
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19 comments

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5 days ago

Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical".

How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind.

But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests - still the predominant measure of people's cognitive abilities - do not effectively tap into it. "IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of 'good thinking'."

Read the full article here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?full=trueIS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent... more

retro_Syl
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38 comments

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5 days ago

Multiplying universes: How many is the multiverse?

HOW many universes are there? Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that... more

retro_Syl
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3 comments

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6 days ago

Where do ghosts come from?

It was in the 1970s that Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, proposed that... more

retro_Syl
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6 days ago

Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution

Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of... more

Tyrannous
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18 comments

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6 days ago

Government to ban organic farming?

This bill is sitting in committee and I am not sure when it is going to hit the floor. One thing I do know is that very few of... more

Supertramp_
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19 comments

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6 days ago

Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather... more

Tyrannous
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1 comment

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6 days ago

Ceramic pots purify water

http://www.filterpurefilters.org/ FilterPure has developed a program based upon strategies of affordable water filtration,... more

JanforGore
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3 comments

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6 days ago

Evolution May Lead To Shorter, Stouter Women

"Yale University researchers have detected the effects of natural selection among two generations of contemporary women and... more

DeliaTheArtist
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12 comments

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6 days ago

Brazilian social movements reject REDD carbon market mechanisms

http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/connections.php?ID=323
We are socio-environmental organizations and movements, male and female workers in family and peasant agriculture, agroextractivists, members of Quilombola (descendants of runaway slaves) communities, women's organizations, urban grassroots organizations, fishermen and women, students, traditional peoples and communities, and native peoples sharing the struggle against deforestation and for environmental justice in the Amazon and in Brazil at large. We gathered at the seminar "Climate and Forest - REDD and market-based mechanisms as a solution for the Amazon?," held in Belém, state of Pará, Brazil, on October 2-3, 2009, to analyze proposals for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) for the region in the light of our experiences with policies and programs implemented in the region in recent decades. In this letter, we are publicly calling on the Brazilian Government to reject the idea of using REDD as a carbon market-based mechanism and of accepting it as a means to compensate the emissions from Northern countries.

We reject the use of market-based mechanisms as tools to reduce carbon emissions based on the firm conviction that the market cannot be expected to take responsibility for life on the planet. The Conference of the Parties (COP) and its ensuing results showed that governments are not willing to take on consistent public commitments and that they tend to transfer the practical responsibility for achieving (notoriously insufficient) targets to the private initiative. As a result, public investments in and control of compliance with targets falter, while the expansion of a global CO2 market is legitimized as a new form of financial capital investment and a means to ensure the survival of a failed production and consumption model.

The REDD proposals under discussion do not make any distinction between native forests and large-scale tree monoculture, and they allow economic actors - which have historically destroyed ecosystems and expelled populations from them - to resort to standing forest appreciation mechanisms to preserve and strengthen their economic and political power to the detriment of those populations. In addition, we run the risk of allowing industrialized countries not to reduce their fossil-fuel emissions drastically and to maintain an unsustainable production and consumption model. We need agreements to force Northern countries to recognize their climate debt and to assume the commitment to pay it off.

For Brazil, international climate negotiations should not be focused on discussing REDD and other market-based mechanisms, but rather on the transition to a new production, distribution and consumption model based on agroecology, on a solidarity-based economic approach, and on a diversified and decentralized energy matrix capable of ensuring food security and sovereignty.

The main challenge for addressing deforestation in the Amazon and in other biomes in Brazil lies in solving the serious land ownership problems facing the country, which are at the roots of its socio-environmental conflicts.

Deforestation - resulting from the advance of monoculture and of policies that favor agribusiness and a development model based on the predatory exploitation and export of natural resources - can only be avoided if the land issue is appropriately addressed through a Land Reform and sustainable territorial reorganization measures, and if territories occupied by traditional peoples and communities and by native peoples are legally recognized.

We have a different vision on what territory, development and economics are all about, which we are building over time, based on the sustainable use of forests and free use of biodiversity. A set of public policies is necessary for ensuring recognition of and appreciation for traditional practices, on the basis of a balanced relationship between production and environmental preservation.

We are committed to keep on fighting for what we believe in the light of this vision and to make sure that any mechanism for reducing deforestation is based on a comprehensive set of public policies and public and voluntary funds that can ensure our rights and life in the Amazon and on the planet.http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/connections.php?ID=323 We are socio-environmental organizations and movements, male and... more

JanforGore
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6 days ago

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