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This story is part of a National Geographic News series on global water issues. A remote Indian village is responding to global warming-induced water shortages by creating large masses of ice, or "artificial glaciers," to get through the dry spring months. ( See a map of the region .) Located on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau, the village of Skara in the Ladakh region of India is not a common tourist destination. "It's beautiful, but really remote and difficult to get to," said Amy Higgins, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who worked on the artificial glacier project. "A lot of people, when I met them in Delhi and I said I was going to Ladakh, they looked at me like I was going to the moon,” said Higgins, who is also a National Geographic grantee.
Artificial Glaciers Water Crops in Indian Highlands
The concept, based on the latest cellular and geologic research, resembles a suggestion by famed naturalist Charles Darwin that life could have sprung from a "warm little pond" rich in nutrients. (Find out about Darwin's scientific inspirations in magazine.) Despite this early musing by Darwin, marine-origin theories for life have been popular in recent years, because oceanographers continue to find oases of life thriving on the seafloor. In these deepwater ecosystems, simple yet hardy microbes munch on noxious minerals spewing from hot volcanic vents—a setting many experts think could resemble the birthplace of the first cells. (Related pictures: "'Lost World' of Odd Species Found Off Antarctica." )
Life on Earth Began on Land, Not in Sea?
The history of recording: The earliest recorded sounds
IT MUST have been excruciating for the National Museum of American History's archivists to have the earliest known recordings of the human voice but not to be able to listen to them. The records, made in the Volta Lab of Alexander Graham Bell in the early 1880s, were too fragile to play. But the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to scan them optically and retrieve the sound, as described on the museum's website here . Six recordings have been released on YouTube . The most familiar text is this one:Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11-years-old. She’s a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She’s an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up.
Roe v world News, Video and Gossip - Jezebel
Ray Kurzweil predicts that in the coming decades the term “life expectancy” will become irrelevant. By then medical advances and nanotechnology will be such effective tools with which to repair our bodies as they break down with age it will be as simple as car repair, changing out old parts for new and getting us back on the road again. Indefinitely. Even without the breakthrough technologies that allow us to regrow organs or reprogram faulty genes technological advances are making their imprint on our longevity. But a puzzling part to the equation has emerged.
While Average Lifespans Increase, 114 Remains A Stubborn And Mysterious Upper Bound. Why?
WORK until you drop. That is how many people characterise the argument of those—this newspaper included—who call for a later retirement age. Life expectancy may be steadily increasing but few are eager to add to their years of toil. Indeed, the French Socialist Party wants to reverse a recent rise in the retirement age from 60 to 62. In part, this resistance to working longer is because people tend to feel they are entitled to put their feet up after a career of 35-40 years. But it is also because many reckon old people should get out of the way so that the young can take their jobs, a sentiment expressed recently by Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, who wrote that “the young can't advance because everywhere they find my complacent generation is in situ.”
Buttonwood: Keep on trucking
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman. Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense.
Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It
Webb, J, Ph.D. When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily "fall apart," experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression. It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you. ~ Woody Allen When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily "fall apart," experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression.
Dabrowski’s Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults
This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional) By Charlotte Sankey from Creative Warehouse – a media and publishing agency specialising in environmental issues. We all love a room with a view, but when it comes to planning for the future of a building we tend to forget about the world beyond its walls. We home in on the structure itself – its foundations and floors, cavities and cracks – isolating it from its natural surroundings.