Scientific American sur Twitter : "These 4 #climate trends reveal what's happening to our changing Earth: #science. State of Earth in 4 Climate Trends. What better day to step back and take stock of the planet than Earth Day? Started in 1970 to raise awareness in the U.S. about the environmental state of the planet, Earth Day is now celebrated in more than 190 countries and has led to the creation of legislation in the U.S. aimed at protecting the environment.
But one global trend has continued to alter the world—the rise of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, which have led to an ever-rising average global temperature. It’s easy to get caught up in individual records or wondering what influence climate change has on extreme weather events. But to really understand climate change, the trends are what matter. Here are four that make it clear how our planet is changing. The Number: 400 ppmThe Trend: Current level of CO2, up from pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm Even though carbon dioxide doesn’t make up much of the Earth’s atmosphere, its heat-trapping ability helps prevent Earth from being cold and barren, like Mars. The Internet Is Improving the Way We Communicate. Panic about the rise of social media is largely overhyped and misplaced. True leaders gone, of land and people.We choose no kin but adopted strangers.The family weakens by the length we travel. —Jane’s Addiction, “Three Days,” 1990 It seems pretty obvious to most observers that our social networks have changed in the past few decades thanks to technology.
The widespread use of cell phones, the increasing affordability of air travel, the rise of the Internet, and the advent of social media have changed the way we work, the way we live, and the way we make and maintain friendships. For some, this is cause for concern. We are, perhaps, too wired—more attuned to events and friends thousands of miles away than to what’s going on right in front of our faces, more likely to share cat videos over smartphones than to play catch in our backyards. Last week, I attended a lecture on this topic by Barry Wellman at the Political Networks Conference in Montreal. More friendships and less TV? Science and Spirituality: Jeff Lieberman at TEDxCambridge 2011. Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt. In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco.
This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles. But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. That’s heavy stuff. Medical breakthroughs missed because of pointless drug bans. In 1632 the Catholic Church convened a case against Galileo on the grounds that his work using the telescope to explore the nature of the heavens contradicted the church’s teaching - the culmination of a long fight that had lasted 16 years.
Galileo was put under house arrest and his research stopped. Some of his inquisitors refused even to look down a telescope, believing it to be the work of the devil. With his life under threat, Galileo retracted his claims that the earth moved around the sun and was not the centre of the universe. A ban by the papal Congregation of the Index on all books advocating the Copernican system of planetary motion - which we use today - was not revoked until 1758. Three centuries later we have an equivalent case of scientific censorship. In the 1960s and the 1970s the UN effectively banned a whole range of drugs from cannabis, opioids and cocaine through to psychedelics - LSD and “magic mushrooms”. A research black hole Time to challenge outdated controls.
How to encourage moral behavior. Suppose a high school student cheats on a test. How harshly should a parent or teacher treat this offense? The efficacy of punishment in such situations has been controversial, and a new study sheds some light on the consequences of punitive control in moral matters. When someone behaves immorally, a psychologist would typically say that the individual has not internalized the moral norm; that is, she may profess that an action is morally wrong, but she has not really taken that information to heart.
How can a parent or teacher encourage such internalization? Attribution theories have been quite influential in how psychologists think about this matter. These theories hold that a parent should NOT ensure moral behavior through the use of harsh or punitive measures. Doing so will gain compliance because the child will want to avoid punishment, but the child will not internalize the norm. But another prediction of the theory is wrong. Why would it be harder to resist temptation? Scientists find key to ageing process in hypothalamus | Science. Scientists have found a biological command centre for the ageing process in a lump of brain the size of a nut. The US team identified the mechanism in the hypothalamus, which sits deep inside the brain, and showed they could tweak it to shorten or lengthen the lives of animals. In a series of experiments, the researchers found they could extend the lives of mice by a fifth, without the animals suffering from muscle weakness, bone loss, or memory problems common in old age.
The work raises the tantalising prospect of drugs that slow down natural ageing to prolong life in humans, but more crucially to prevent age-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's. "We're very excited about this. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how their research led them to what appears to be the body's control centre for ageing. Cai said there may be several ways to slow down ageing, with drugs that dampen the activity of NF-kB in the brain, or raise levels of GnRH.
Moore's Law and the Origin of Life. Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so. But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s. A similar process works with scientific publications. Between 1990 and 1960, they doubled in number every 15 years or so. Extrapolating this backwards gives the origin of scientific publication as 1710, about the time of Isaac Newton. Today, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and his mate Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have taken a similar to complexity and life.
That raises an interesting question. Planck satellite: Maps detail Universe's ancient light. By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, Paris A spectacular new map of the "oldest light" in the sky has just been released by the European Space Agency. Scientists say its mottled pattern is an exquisite confirmation of our Big-Bang model for the origin and evolution of the Universe. But there are features in the picture, they add, that are unexpected and will require ideas to be refined. The map was assembled from 15 months' worth of data acquired by the 600m-euro (£515m) Planck space telescope.
It details what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB - a faint glow of long wavelength radiation that pervades all of space. Its precise configuration, visible in the new Planck data, is suggestive of a cosmos that is slightly older than previously thought - one that came into existence 13.82 billion years ago. This is an increase of about 50 million years on earlier calculations. Planck is the third western satellite to study the CMB. Continue reading the main story. TV time 'does not breed badly behaved children' 25 March 2013Last updated at 21:24 ET By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online The study's lead author Dr Alison Parkes and Jane Gentle from Mumsnet discuss the findings Spending hours watching TV or playing computer games each day does not harm young children's social development, say experts.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) team who studied more than 11,000 primary school pupils says it is wrong to link bad behaviour to TV viewing. Although researchers found a small correlation between the two, they say other influences, such as parenting styles, most probably explain the link. But they still say "limit screen time". This cautionary advice is because spending lots of time in front of the TV every day might reduce how much time a child spends doing other important activities such as playing with friends and doing homework, they say. US research suggests watching TV in early childhood can cause attention problems at the age of seven.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote. Scientists examine nothing, find something. Where did the speed of light in a vacuum come from? Why is it 299,792,458 meters per second and not some other figure? Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition The simple answer is that, since 1983, science has defined a meter by the speed of light: one meter equals the distance light travels in one 299,792,458th of a second.
But that doesn't really answer our question. It's just the physics equivalent of saying, "Because I said so. " Unfortunately, the deeper answer has been equally unsatisfying: The speed of light in a vacuum, according to physics textbooks, just is. Or did it? This happens because what we think of as nothing isn't really nothing. That may not sound like much, but it's enough to point the way toward a new underlying physics. But if even that can vary, what's left for us to hang our hat on? But, as we just noted, nothing is something. Allan Savory: How to green the desert and reverse climate change.
John Vervaeke - Chi Explained Without Magic. "CHASING ICE" captures largest glacier calving ever filmed - OFFICIAL VIDEO. Thomas Metzinger on brain and the nature of. Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero. Absolute zero is often thought to be the coldest temperature possible. But now researchers show they can achieve even lower temperatures for a strange realm of "negative temperatures. " Oddly, another way to look at these negative temperatures is to consider them hotter than infinity, researchers added. This unusual advance could lead to new engines that could technically be more than 100 percent efficient, and shed light on mysteries such as dark energy, the mysterious substance that is apparently pulling our universe apart.
An object's temperature is a measure of how much its atoms move — the colder an object is, the slower the atoms are. At the physically impossible-to-reach temperature of zero kelvin, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), atoms would stop moving. Bizarro negative temperatures To comprehend the negative temperatures scientists have now devised, one might think of temperature as existing on a scale that is actually a loop, not linear. TV | Billion-dollar drilling project aims for Earth's mantle. Jane McGonigal:Reality is Broken. Modern parenting may hinder brain development, researcher claims. (Medical Xpress)—Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame.
"Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago," says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development. "Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will 'spoil' it," Narvaez says. The United States has been on a downward trajectory on all of these care characteristics, according to Narvaez. Instead of being held, infants spend much more time in carriers, car seats and strollers than they did in the past. The mystery of matter deepens - physics-math - 07 January 2013. "IF YOU haven't found something strange during the day," John Archibald Wheeler is said to have remarked, "It hasn't been much of a day.
" But then, strangeness was Wheeler's stock in trade. As one of the 20th century's leading theoretical physicists, the things he dealt with every day - the space- and time-bending warpings of Einstein's relativity, the fuzzy uncertainties and improbabilities of quantum physics - were the sort to boggle the minds of most mere mortals. Even so, one day in 1978 must have been quite something for Wheeler. That was when he first lit on a very strange idea to test how photons might be expected to behave. Half a century earlier, quantum physics had produced the startling insight that light - everything in the quantum world, in fact - has a dual character. Sometimes it acts as if made of discrete chunks of stuff ...