Earth
cevans | June 16, 2007
Occasionally, a friend or associate tips me off to a particularly interesting manifestation of the word "Universe." Some are more interesting than others; some are really in line with what this manifestation of Universe is all about, and those blow me away the most. This one -- all shadowy polygons, flowers, and color fields -- comes from Greg Davis, who once discovered a rare old Unarius film completely independently of me, and at the same time. Thanks, Greg!
clock | March 14, 2007Today is a big day on Plos-Biology for the Oceanic Microbial Diversity Genomics. Last night they published not one, not two, but three big papers chockfull of data.
Accompani\ying them are not one, not two, not three, not even four, but five editorial articles about different aspects of this work.
James has already homed in on one important part of the discovery: the preponderance and diversity of proteorhodopsins - microbial photopigments that are capable of capturing solar energy in a manner different from photosynthesis. As always, light-sensitive molecules are thought to be tightly…
clock | February 15, 2007Global warming change is the topic of a symposium, free and open to the public, in NC State's Campus Cinema, located in Witherspoon Student Center, February 26-28, and featuring excellent speakers. Elizabeth Kolbert, author of FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE, opens the meeting on Monday, Feb. 26, at 7:00 p.m.
For more information and to see who else is speaking during the three-day event, click here
clock | February 3, 2007Russ, correctly, points out that the new UN report on Climate Change says not a word about the impact global warming will have on ecosystems, plants and animals (including the human animal).
clock | February 3, 2007Global Warming threat may be even harsher than the latest UN report suggests, but the Wingnuts want to make sure we teach the kids quite the opposite. Yeesh!
clock | January 1, 2007Food From Cloned Animals Safe? FDA Says Yes, But Asks Suppliers To Hold Off For Now:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued three documents on the safety of animal cloning -- a draft risk assessment; a proposed risk management plan; and a draft guidance for industry.
The draft risk assessment finds that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. The assessment was peer-reviewed by a group of independent scientific experts in cloning and animal health. They agreed with the methods…
clock | December 9, 2006Go check out The Mill and Carrboro Commons.
The Mill Editor did some digging and found that a lot of cool scientific research on climate is being done locally.
clock | December 7, 2006Amanda just reviewed Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and also recently wrote a post on the same topic while under the influence of the book. I agree with her 100%, so go and read both posts.
I have read the book a couple of months ago and never found time to write a review of my own. I also remember that I finished the book on a Thursday afternoon - an important piece of information as it is on Thursday afternoons that there is a Farmers' Market here in Southern Village, barely a block from me. The first thing I did when I closed the book was to walk up to the Farmers' Market…
cevans | November 8, 2006
The Explorer's Club is an American Institution founded in New York City in 1904 by the survivors of Frederick Cook's 1894 arctic expedition. Although its members are infamously eccentric (L. Ron Hubbard, for example, who carried the Club flag with him on several yachting expeditions) they have been responsible for some of Exploration's greatest firsts: the summit of Mount Everest, the deepest point in the Ocean, the surface of the moon. Of the 202 Club flags which have journeyed into the world, some have flown at both poles, the lunar surface, and the highest peaks on Earth. It is perhaps…
cevans | October 30, 2006
This just in from the NASA news wire: 11,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, a massive galactic snake is slithering across the Universe. Of course, it isn't a real lizard (the appellation is just some weird NASA Halloween humor) but the core of a sooty cloud larger than a dozen of our solar systems, which happens to be shaped sort of like a snake. Disappointing, I know; it would be nice, for once, to have something more interesting than dust, gas, and cold rocks bobbing around in the great beyond.
What if, maybe, outer space just isn't where the action is? The…
clock | October 10, 2006October 8-14 is Earth Science Week. This year's theme is "Be a Citizen Scientist!" Wolverine Tom is blogging hard this week - see this, this, this and this for now. How about an Earth Science Blogroll for all of us to bookmark?
cevans | September 7, 2006
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented effect on its outcome, and yet the Butterfly Effect has somehow mutated into a beloved believe-it-or-not tenet of pop science. A butterfly flapping its wings on a balmy midwestern afternoon, many of us believe, can cause typhoons on the coast of Japan. The image is lovely, of course, and gives us a…
cevans | July 27, 2006"It is to be remembered that despite the fact that you are accustomed to thinking only in dots and lines and a little bit in areas does not defeat the fact that we live in omnidirectional space-time and that a four dimensional universe provides ample freedom for any contingencies."
-- Buckminster Fuller
cevans | July 22, 2006This is upsetting.
NASA has deleted from its mission statement the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
This edit was made in conjunction with the Bush administration's new Vision for Space Exploration, whose primary objective is to shift NASA's emphasis (and public attention) away from Earth-bound issues (ie, global warming) and towards flashy manned Moon and Mars missions.
From the New York Times article on the subject:
"...the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the 'understand and protect' phrase was not merely window dressing but…
cevans | July 21, 2006
Every day, under our noses, obsolete scientific ideas run rampant. I'm not talking about the maddening sabotage of science constantly perpetuated by ideological conservatives -- that, although a daily frustration, is not unnoticed. This is a transgression that we all unknowingly commit.
Although everyone with a first-grade education knows that the Earth is a sphere -- the general belief in a flat Earth died out, of course, in the Middle Ages -- we still use the term "worldwide" to describe things on a global scale. The Earth's dimensions can be measured in volume, for one, and area; the word…
cevans | April 21, 2006
The Natural History Museum of LA County has its share of gems. A whole room of them, in fact. Hundreds of rubies, topaz, opals, obscure formations of marvelous multi-colored rocks and minerals -- even asteroids -- a veritable pageant of dramatically lit geological psychedelia. There are gems on top of gems, gems growing out of one another; there are glow-in-the-dark gems, gems carved into shapes, there's a gem called "Hambergite," a whole panoply of vibrant pinks, emerald greens, ghostly whites, and over 300 pounds of natural gold. The darkness of the room in comparison to these glowing…
cevans | March 19, 2006Despite the completely irrational nature of the rainstorms that have been sporadically whipping Los Angeles, we on Earth are lucky, weather-wise. We don't have to deal with rains of sulphuric acid droplets, nor infinite giant hurricanes like those which make up Jupiter's red spot or the dark spot on Venus, which, until the mid-1990's, consisted of storms larger than our entire planet. We don't have helium condensation dripping on our heads, or oceans of ethane blanketing our meteor-battered landscape. Our atmosphere isn't blisteringly hot and poisonous, nor freezing and whipped with…
cevans | January 31, 2006Definitely the final essay in this series. And no more politics.
In a Universe first, I received in my cool email "box" yesterday a piece of rebuttal about the political implications of the tokes on String Theory in my last essay. What my correspondent pointed out to me was that my comparison of Intelligent Design and String Theory gave me away as an unabashed leftist (duh), and that, furthermore, positing ST as the intellectual's antithesis to ID is only a detriment to critical thinking, since all I am doing is enacting a typically American (my correspondent is a European) structure of polar…