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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Showing posts with label Environmental science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environmental science. Show all posts

Friday, November 19, 2010

19 November - Morning News Alerts

19 september 11, 2006Image by rafaelm via Flickr

 World Toilet Day?

Nov. 19. It's the brainchild of a nonprofit that wants to raise awareness of a global sanitation problem.

Nearly-homeless face 'hidden emergency'

  Some new tracking of people who are one step away from being homeless reveals a large population rife with mental illness, hunger and chronic health problems : approximately 400,000 people across Canada.

( 'New' ? The tracking may be new - the basic information certainly isn't )

UK coalition to downgrade scientific advice

Chi Onwurah MP, shadow minister for Business, Innovation and Skills ( Opposition )
The government has confirmed that the position of director general of science and research has been abolished, and the role of science research downgraded within the organisation.

Comet caught throwing basketball-sized snowballs 

Measurements made with an infrared spectrometer on the spacecraft suggest that the objects are not solid chunks of ice. Instead, they are porous clumps of microscopic ice grains. "What we are seeing are fluffy aggregates of very small pieces of ice," said team member Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland in College Park.

Fight Waterborne Disease "Die Hard" Style (VIDEO)

 Tarnished Earth street gallery - Birmingham Centenury Way Bridge

SEE A PREVIEW on the Tarnished Earth website - http://tarnishedearth.co.uk/see This is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EF...Image via Wikipedia

 

Radio for Pagans

Bill would give U.S. new power against foreign websites

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, have attacked it as "Internet censorship" that could harm the credibility of the United States as a steward of the global domain name system

( Copyright is blamed for stifling innovation wherever it is upheld - and for organized legal fraud based attacking innovators : organized crime which overloads the courts. Nor would one expect any pretense of impartiality.  )

 

After John Tyner: A Five-Step Plan to a Sane Airport Security System

( Where did the original initiative come from ? I'd rather give the boot to incompetent empire-builders intent on harassing the public than speculate on the way out of  unnecessary procedures which ignore who has the greatest stake in the safety of the aircraft they are on...and it's not the bureaucrats.  )

It’s Always Sunny at Kaplan Daily

While you dirty hippies and evil leftists are focusing on the lives destroyed, what you are overlooking is that if you put on your neocon warface, you’ll realize that when we bomb civilians, kill their family members and friends, destroy their homes, their crops, and their livestock, sure there may be some hard feelings. But let’s not overlook the value of the government meet and greet!

 Why is NYC Taking Away Bike Lanes...to Make Room for Cars?

What remains to be seen is how local cyclists react. Last winter, when 14 blocks of the bike lane on Brooklyn's Bedford Avenue were removed, outraged cyclists took the matter into their own hands, repainting the lane (and filming it). So keep an eye out for a guerrilla video from Staten Island in the near future.

 Why Do Republicans Oppose Food Safety? Looking north along Bedford Avenue at Parkside...Image via Wikipedia

( Comment #6 is mine - and refers to files available at this blog. Aug 13 2009 in Archives and Topical Index in sidebar Corporate Farming. 

I think the proposition that this is another way to harass small farmers/businesses more than reasonable - having been familiar with the destruction of 110 small cheese plants in Ontario years ago when Ault Foods / Kraft had laws regarding the time 'industrial' milk could  be held before processing changed - something that favoured continuously operating plants -themselves at risk from phage and other airborne organisms cultured by constantly available food.  

Shutdowns favoured starving the invaders and controlling them without chemicals!  It's another case of ignoring natural science and 'selling' specious argumentation which focuses attention on part of the picture cherrypicked to support an otherwise unreasonable argument. Salesmen and advertisers are not impartial advisors - ever.  )

E. coli O157:H7 and Campylobacter Infections may have long-term impacts on Heart and Kidneys

A prospective cohort study was set up in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada to investigate any long-term health problems following contamination of the town’s water supply in May 2000 with E. coli O157:H7 and Campylobacter.Escherichia coli O157:H7, cell with flagella, ...Image via Wikipedia

MIT researchers create super efficient 'origami' solar panels

Dolphins' Bubble Nets Inspire Better Sonar

When it comes to "bubbly areas" such as where waves break around reefs and shores, standard sonar doesn't work. Professor Leighton and his colleagues have developed a new sonar concept called twin inverted pulse sonar (TWIPS), which exploits the way that bubbles pulsate in sound fields. 

( That reminds me of the concepts underpinning binocular vision and depth perception. ) 

NATO summit looks at future in and out of Afghanistan
Prime Minister Stephen Harper joins U.S. President Barack Obama and other NATO leaders as they set the stage for a post-combat partnership with Afghanistan at a summit Friday and Saturday in Lisbon, Portugal.
Leaders of NATO's 28 member countries are poised to endorse a European missile defence system, embark on fat-cutting reforms and, along with non-NATO countries who've been pouring troops and money into Afghanistan for a decade, outline a transition plan from foreign troops to Afghan control over security by the end of 2014.
They are expected to adopt a "strategic concept" that gives the North Atlantic Treaty Organization a new mission of protecting European territory and populations from ballistic missile attacks.


Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/NATO+summit+looks+future+Afghanistan/3850413/story.html#ixzz15kXrdplg
( 'Star Wars'...the proposition for technologically impossible responses to an impotent 'enemy'. )
Endoume SunsetImage by marcovdz via Flickr

 

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Thursday, July 1, 2010

1 July - Selected Articles


Traumatic Brain Injuries and Statistical Manipulation

By denying TBI and PTSD claims the Pentagoons can handle a lot of the symptoms of both as crimes, to be punished, rather than as symptoms of damages caused by the Pentagon Mission.
They can also punish the soldiers for “malingering” – faking illness to get out of performance of their duties… if they report the symptoms to Medical Personnel and Medical, who are under orders from their “superiors” (which would make themselves “inferiors”, something the military discourages you mentioning) and if those orders pointedly Exclude diagnosing PTSD or TBI, that means the Medical Personnel themselves would be required to report the soldier for “malingering”.
They did that crap with Agent Orange victims too, and still do. File an A.O. claim and they’ll investigate YOU as a criminal rather than Monsanto, Dow and Union Carbide…
That leads to the Other Interpretation of the statistic. If “Soldiers” is limited to the Army, possibly the Marines, that’s still the largest chunk of Military personnel and would mean possibly 37% of returning Army and Marine Corps being affected. That’s one in three instead of one in five.
Be All That You Can Be, as the lying ass recruiter slogan used to say.


The Real Agenda


Obama: Train my Gestapo in Afghanistan. U.S.Next?Much of the thuggery used in the United States today was experienced tried out outside the U.S. first.  The use sound cannons is one



example of those.  Monitoring large areas with drones and blowing up innocent people is another example.  But a third a most important is the U.S. president’s Gestapo armed forces.  Department of Defense Directive 1404.10, dated January 23, 2009, set up a “Civilian Expeditionary Workforce” that would “be organized, trained, cleared, equipped, and ready to deploy in support of combat operations by the military; contingencies; emergency operations; humanitarian missions; disaster relief; drug interdiction; and stability operations
Of course Obama does not identify this paramilitary force as a Gestapo. He prefers to call it a civilian military force.
  • Choosing healthy foods now called a mental disorder
  • The Military Industrial Complex’s Scheme to Control the Internet


    Propaganda Disguised as Journalism



    As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment—objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.
    For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories—domestic and foreign—you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism.

    “If the United States looks increasingly like a police state Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit”

    Since 9/11, the independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the “global war on terror” which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.

    Since 9/11, the independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the “global war on terror” which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.

    On 11 October 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Lieberman introduced S. 1534, a bill to establish a  Department of Homeland Security. Since then, he has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and theproposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans suspected of terrorism. And now the senator from Connecticut wants to kill the internet.
    How much faith would American voters have in the likes of Lieberman, who claims that the Jewish state is their greatest ally, if they knew that Israeli agents planted firebombs in American installations in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to undermine relations between President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the United States; that Israel murdered 34 American servicemen in a deliberate attack  on the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967; that Israeli espionage, most notably Jonathan Pollard’s spying, has done tremendous damage to American interests; that five Mossad agents were filming and celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on 11 September 2001; that Tel Aviv and its accomplices in Washington were the source of the false pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and about countless other examples of treachery?



    On 11 October 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Lieberman introduced S. 1534, a bill to establish a      Department of Homeland Security. Since then, he has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and theproposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans suspected of terrorism. And now the senator from Connecticut wants to kill the internet.
    How much faith would American voters have in the likes of Lieberman, who claims that the Jewish state is their greatest ally, if they knew that Israeli agents planted firebombs in American installations in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to undermine relations between President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the United States; that Israel murdered 34 American servicemen in a deliberate attack  on the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967; that Israeli espionage, most notably Jonathan Pollard’s spying, has done tremendous damage to American interests; that five Mossad agents were filming and celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on 11 September 2001; that Tel Aviv and its accomplices in Washington were the source of the false pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and about countless other examples of treachery?



    Free the Scientists

    There is too much pressure on climate scientists.  The way Mann attacked everyone in the climategate emails for not presenting the consensus view was disgusting.
    Typically, in my experience, scientists enjoy the imagining of something different to the status quo, even more than publishing the standard.  It’s in the nature of these people that something new and different is exciting.  It’s no fun repeating the same stuff over and over,  and nothing is gained.  My guess is that climate scientists often find the global warming politics tedious but what choice do they have.

    Becoming a Successful Scientist


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Saturday, November 21, 2009

21 Nov - Science & Ecology News


Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World's  Rainforests





According to the United Nations's Food and Agriculture Organization, overall tropical deforestation rates this decade are 8.5 percent higher than during the 1990s

Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day—or some 50,000 species a year—as the forests fall.
 
According to researcher and writer Rhett Butler, who runs the critically acclaimed website, Mongabay.com, tropical rainforests are incredibly rich ecosystems that play a key role in the basic functioning of the planet. They help maintain the climate by regulating atmospheric gases and stabilizing rainfall, and provide many other important ecological functions.

Rainforests are also home to some 50 percent of the world’s species, Butler reports, “making them an extensive library of biological and genetic resources.” Environmentalists also point out that a quarter of our modern pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, but less than one percent of the trees and plants in the tropics have been tested for curative properties. 
Scientific American




Adapting To The Freshwater Crisis


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Astronomy

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory investigates the Sun's cycle of highs and lows














Updated: November 19, 2009
How intense will the next solar cycle be? Can we predict when a violent solar storm will blast Earth with energetic particles? Could a prolonged period of inactivity on the Sun plunge Earth into a prolonged winter? These are a few of the questions that scientists anticipate the new Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will help to answer.
Scheduled to launch this winter on an Atlas V rocket, SDO will peer into the Sun's atmosphere and probe the Sun's inner workings. SDO is the first mission of NASA's Living With a Star program, which seeks to reveal how solar activity is generated and to understand the causes of solar variability and its impact on Earth.
"Contrary to popular belief, the Sun is a magnetic variable star," Says Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead program scientist for Living With a Star at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "SDO will show us just how variable the Sun really is and will reveal the underlying physics of solar variability."
To accomplish the ambitious goals of the science team, "SDO will take full-disk, high definition images of the Sun all of the time," says project manager Liz Citrin at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Previous missions could not capture images at as rapid a cadence as SDO will, nor did they have the bandwidth to transmit all of the data back to Earth for processing. "These advances will provide the data to better understand how the Sun works and will allow us to develop the tools to predict its behavior."
Where Do Magnetic Fields Come From?
The Sun's magnetic field powers all solar activity. Flows of hot, ionized gases in the Sun's convection zone — the region inside the Sun where hot gas parcels rise and transport energy toward the surface — act as electrical currents to generate the Sun's powerful magnetic fields.
SDO will examine these fields at the surface and infer from where they originate inside the Sun to where they are expressed as active regions, sunspots, and coronal loops, to when they eject particles into space as coronal mass ejections and solar flares.
The goal is to determine how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and to study how stored magnetic energy changes into kinetic energy (the energy of motion) in the form of the solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance. If solar physicists can get a better understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, they can predict how the effects of that field move into the solar system and near-Earth space to create space weather.




Record-breaking radio astronomy project to measure sky with extreme precision
Close-up movie shows hidden details in the birth of super suns
Shuttle Atlantis headed for delivery stop at International Space Station


Center for Biological Diversity


US to step up control of wolf recovery program



Laura Schneberger of the Gila Livestock Growers Association said in a written statement that she hopes the settlement means the service will become stricter in its handling of problem wolves.
"It is our hope that the Fish and Wildlife Service will comply with the original recovery rule that requires removal of wolves that are defined as problem wolves under that rule. Failure to follow the rule has allowed problem wolf behavior to become pack behavior under SOP 13 management," she wrote.
Arizona Game and Fish and the Fish and Wildlife Service said the service had never given up as much control as the environmental groups argued, retaining a final say in wolf management decisions.
Said service spokesman Tom Buckley: "We will continue to examine on a case-by-case basis depredations (of cattle) and decide whether the wolf needs to be removed."
Suit challenges Utah company mining near Grand Canyon - Deseret News




A coalition of environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging a Utah company's plans to begin uranium mining operations within 10 miles of Grand Canyon National Park.
The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Trust claim the Bureau of Land Management is using an old environmental assessment from 1988 in allowing Denison Mines to begin operations at the "Arizona 1" mine.
"The Bureau of Land Management's refusal to redo outdated environmental reviews is as illegal as it is unethical," said Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigns director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "It should be eager to protect the Grand Canyon and its endangered species; instead, it has chosen to shirk environmental review on behalf of the uranium industry."
The mine was partially constructed in the late 1980s and early 1990s but was closed due to market conditions in 1992 without producing any uranium ore.
New conditions have driven Denison Mines Corp. to seek approval for the mining activity through various regulatory authorities, including the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, which issued an air quality permit that would allow uranium ore mining at a rate of close to 110,000 tons a year, according to the complaint.
The complaint, which also names the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, asserts "the recommencement of uranium exploration and mining operations at the Arizona 1 mine may cause environmental impacts that have never been considered," including consequences to groundwater, fish, wildlife, and threatened and endangered species.
The suit cites violations of National Environmental Policy Act provisions that require the land-management agency to consider new information regarding the hydrology, spring ecology and biodiversity of the area.
Despite the mine's location in the same area that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar placed off-limits to new mining claims and operations earlier this year, the BLM has refused to exercise renewed scrutiny of the corporation's plans.
Salazar's prohibition of new mining activity on more than 1 million acres of federal land near the park says such actions can only occur if they are the result of a valid pre-existing claim in which a "valuable mineral deposit" has been discovered, according to the complaint.
The suit contends that neither the Department of the Interior nor the BLM have bothered to "verify" the existence of mineral deposits and has repeatedly ignored the groups' requests for a new assessment.
Filed in Arizona's federal court, the suit seeks to set aside any authorizations of exploration and mining operations at the mine and a mineral examination report to verify valid existing claims.


The Center for Biological Diversity submitted condemning evidence to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection today demonstrating that Lake Mead, Las Vegas Bay, and Las Vegas Wash are being polluted by unregulated endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The Center is requesting that the state include these waterbodies on Nevada’s list of impaired waters pursuant to section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act and establish and enforce limitations.
Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that alter the structure or function of the endocrine system, which uses hormones to regulate growth, metabolism, and tissue function. They have been shown to damage reproductive functions and offspring in animals such as birds and alligators, as well as in humans and their babies. Endocrine disruptors are entering Lake Mead’s water at costly concentrations via wastewater effluent and urban and agricultural runoff.
Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, part of a beloved national recreation area, and the sole source of Las Vegas’ drinking water. It is also federally designated critical habitat for the razorback sucker and home to many other rare species. Unfortunately those vital waters are now being poisoned by endocrine disruptors.

PhysOrg.com - Science Express



UCSB physicists move one step closer to quantum computing











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