BBC Science Documentary – 60 minutes
Once again the Brits excel in explaining the unexplainable. This time it’s all about numbers and infinity. Sounds boring? Think again.
Watch it before it disappears – and if your bandwidth allows it watch it directly in HD.
This years extreme winter has encouraged many (American) doubters to say "Global Warming" doesn’t exist. "Hey it’s so COLD and so much SNOW outside, how can there be global WARMING …"
First of all: it should be called Climate Change – and Climate Change only!
Second: Actually more heat causes more water in the Oceans to evaporate. All that water has to come down somewhere. So in winter that water comes down as snow. It’s that easy to understand …
Click image for more cuddles …
Experiments with baby apes have shown that they prefer fake furry mothers with no food over fake non-furry mothers (just a bleak wireframe model) that offered food.
So we primates need warmth, closeness and love more than anything else when we are small and vulnerable.
Nature is not just cruel, it also knows the benefit of love.
BBC Documentary about those little buggers that can kill us. Highly recommended!
Crittercams are not just for our pets, but can be used to serious science as well. I love this example – watch the video.
On the 24th of December 1979 the first Ariane rocket took off from the French Guyane Space Centre.
It is one of the greatest space programs so far with a 190 successful launches and only 9 failures.
Yes, Europe can tackle big projects and be a top player in high tech.
Let’s hope that the Brits (who finally get their own Space Agency just recently to replace the old one) rejoin Ariane soon.
New Scientist: Microbes survive 30,000 years inside a salt crystal
Microbes can survive in outer space, extreme cold, saltiness and even a crash down to a planet when they hitch hike on an asteroid.
Now it has been shown that they can survive extremely long with little food – from the article:
Brian Schubert, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues studied salt crystals in a sediment core taken from Death Valley in California. The crystals contained tiny pockets of liquid, and the team found that they could grow live colonies of archaeans from samples of it. The team dated the liquid at between 22,000 and 34,000 years old (Geology, vol 37, p 1059).
Colonies of archaeans were grown from liquid within salt crystals that was up to 34,000 years old
This is not the first time microbes have been cultured from pockets of liquid trapped inside salt; one team has reported doing so with liquid they dated as being 250 million years old. Their results were questioned, however, as the salt crystals could have dissolved and recrystallised over time, trapping modern microbes.
I think life started somewhere out there in the universe and our ancestors really came from the stars – as microbes on an asteroid!
The organic movement has infiltrated our minds and told us for years that all those pesticides on "normal" apples are bad and dangerous for us.
The truth us that you hardly find truly untreated & un-sprayed apples in organic markets.
Most unsprayed apple would have very ugly looking brown spots and often a peel – not the healthy and shiny natural look we are used to.
Many organic orchards use copper spray to keep their apples in shape. Copper is not a pesticide, but certainly not beneficial for humans either and our water supply.
Mass Food Production is a tricky thing and we might have to accept that almost all forms of mass production will put a strain on nature.
In the usual predictions about Climate Change we hear two scenarios over and over again:
1. … more people will face hunger thanks to lower yields or destroyed crops …
2. … and we will see millions of climate change refuges.
In our modern and humanistic view of the World we like to see all people as equals. Everybody should also have the same chances to lead a prosperous and happy live anywhere.
So much about the idealism.
But not all countries are "created" equal and can offer the same resources to their people to "grow and "develop" like in other so called richer countries.
Or to rephrase my argument: It’s all about location, location, location!
Some regions have better soil, more clean water, a more moderate climate and resources (forests, minerals, fossil fuels etc.).
If you compare let’s say North Africa with (Western) Europe you need to take one look at satellite images and you see the profound difference (you can click each for a larger version).
Europe is mostly green and fertile (apart from Spain) and there are many great rivers streaming across Europe (Rhine, Danube, Tiber, Arno, Po, Oder, Don, Volga, Tagus, Thames, Shannon, etc). Not only provide these many rivers fresh water for people, forests and agriculture alike, but also a network for cheap long distance transportation.
In comparison North Africa has only the Nile –and not many green spots on it’s map.
Europe has overall better soil quality and higher ground water levels thanks to more mountains, rivers and lakes.
The only serious advantage North Africa has is it’s oil.
So the conclusion is simple: some places are simply better to built an civilization, feed many people and start an industry than others.
If you don’t have certain resources you have to import them or create better conditions by using technology.
In our crazy (and unsustainable) thinking we want all nations to develop equally and create the same conditions everywhere.
Ah lovely Europe, we have good soul, plenty of water and charming cottages …
North African nations have sucked their grounds dry, by trying to provide enough water for millions of people and farms to grow food all year around. Countries like Saudi Arabia invest Billions to create small island of green in their deserts.
But it is utter nonsense to recreate for example European Conditions in Saudi Arabia. Terra forming is a VERY long process takes many decades if not hundreds or thousands of years to transform a desert into a rain forest. And it was actually climate change that has transformed the former lush jungles of North Africa into Deserts – and the ice covered plains of Europe into pleasant lands.
Creating "good conditions" for about a Billion people that live in North Africa and the Middle East is not a sustainable nor reachable goal for many generations.
Consider this: there are almost seven billion earthlings and already one billion of us don’t have access to fresh and clean water.
For how many decades have you been trying to turn this desert into a farm?
But the developing nations as well as the rich nations have spent many decades wasting foreign aids to make deserts into green meadows. They try to make inhospitable or low quality lands into highly productive agricultural powerhouses.
Comedian Sam Kinison once made a true, but nasty joke: "Why don’t you starving people move to where the food is?"
This perfectly sums up the problem.
We currently see each other only as Nations with fixed borders. Instead of working on a global settlement policy and using resources in a smart way, each nation tries to squeeze as much out of their lands as possible. While Europe pays farmers to put arable land on hold, North Africans try to make a living out of very bad farmland.
Don’t bring the food to the people – bring the people to the places that grow food.
We should stop wasting precious resources and move people to greener pastures, instead of flying and driving food "into the fucking desert were people for obvious reasons starve".
So we really need a new thinking: Don’t try to turn shitty places into paradise. It’s a waste of resources. Don’t wait for hunger marches and millions of climate change refuges.
We need smart resettlement plans and the truly global sharing of the few good spots we have.
But since we still cling too much to our national (and often religious) identity we have a hard time sharing "our land" with "foreigners". But the concept of "residents" vs. "strangers" is a deadly luxury we can no longer afford.
Scene from Fuerteventura: an African refugee crawls to the beach, while tourists picnic in the background. (click for larger version)
It is cheaper to share than to supply starving people and millions living in refuge camps. We also need better planning where people live and were we grow our food.
For example: It makes no sense to grow tomatoes in the desert in special plantations (which need huge amounts of water) and export (transport = fossil fuel) them to rich countries that could grow them as well.
It is utter madness that many developing nations try to squeeze even more food out of bad soil for an ever growing population … which brings us to the second ugly fact …
I am sick and tired of seeing image of starving children in Western Media to appeal for funds to buy food. We should send them sex educators and condoms instead.
The fight against overpopulation is a harsh and bitter one. Nations like India and China have tried almost all ideas ranging from sterilization to allowing only one child per family to stop from exploding.
The simple truth is that even people hardly able to feed themselves love to fuck and therefore produce babies – which they usually can’t feed either.
Blame the stupidity of the parents and cultural idiosyncrasies for these starving kids.
The consequence is less food for the whole family, which leads either to death or serious male nutrition. And undernourished kids suffer from bad health as well as underperforming brains – because they lacked the proper nutrients to develop their grey cells. Apart from the lack of education many poor people suffer, they also suffer from "stupidity" by male nutrition.
It is utter stupidity to have a bigger population than you can actually feed. The same stupidity applies to parents in developing nations who "breed", but can’t afford their own home or enough food for all. Often these parents are forced to leave their kids with the grandparents and work in far away cities to make a meagre living.
Having fun while wasting a huge amounts of resources, because WE CAN!
You can blame such poor parents equally for their irresponsible behaviour as well as Soccer Moms in the US driving a bad ass SUV.
We humans are genetically wired for breeding – so stopping us from having sex is a "mission impossible".
But we have the technology to "stop having babies". So we need cheap contraception as well as education. Plus if we get women into the "workforce" and give them equal rights in developing nations they also will breed less – like their richer, snottier and more educated sisters in rich nations.
Can you breed responsibly?
I doubt that we currently have the will and openness to resettle people on one side and pursue more aggressive birth control in already overpopulated nations on the other.
Places like Russia or Ukraine have HUGE unused and very fertile areas that are ideal for farming – so has North America. Europe is already pretty crowded, but could certainly use some more immigrants to bolsters it’s greying population.
But once again: I doubt that we as a global society are really ready to share and breed responsibly. Instead we prefer to let others suffer and waste huge amounts of money and resources to "help" them …
We humans can see much better than dogs, but they "out-sniff" us. Maybe smells are for dogs as sensational as colours are for us? (not counting all the bad odours out there)
Compared to the overall size of our planet our atmosphere and the habitable outer shell are extremely thin layers.
This biosphere is very vulnerable and took millions of years to evolve.
For example: It took plants and trees millions of years to create an Oxygen-rich atmosphere.
That is why we have to monitor the atmospheres composition so carefully: any change can have an huge impact on the planet’s biosphere and therefore our lives.
So it works! Congratulations NASA – finally some good news. But I guess America has currently more important projects than to use these news rockets to fly to the moon and establish a base.
All our Gadgets currently rely on lithium-ion-batteries. But it’s not only the gadgets industry that relies heavily on Lithium, also the Electro-Cars need this material in HUGE quantities.
The only problem is that Lithium is a very rare element and the worlds reserves are pretty limited. China is emerging as the biggest producer and is seriously considering limiting the export of this precious material.
So either we have to find a substitute or a new way to produce huge amounts of Lithium.
Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women
Thank you so much mother nature:
… to see if other men were affected in the same way, they recruited 40 male heterosexual students.
Each one performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last.
The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team before repeating the test.
The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
But when the task was repeated with a group of female volunteers, they did not get the same results. Memory scores stayed the same, whether they had chatted to a man or a woman.
In a report on their findings the researchers said: ‘We conclude men’s cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.’
Source: Spiegel Online (German)
The volume of the Arctic ice has shrunk a whopping 57% from 2004 till 2008. This is incredible and defies almost all forecasts how fast climate change will impact our lives.
Still one of my greatest heroes: he was smart, kind and fiercely curious. We need more people like him so we can progress as a species and see the cosmos like it is without the fog of myths and religion.
If you can than watch this amazing video on HD on YouTube. I love space pr0n like this …
Business Week: The Great Ethanol Scam
Turn food and greenery into fuel seems to be a loosing idea. Food prices have risen thanks to biofuels and too much other important resources are used to produce it (water and fertilizer – also made from oil):
Not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers.
Ouch!
BBC News: Women ‘fight off disease better’
So we guys are indeed poor little bunnies, need a lot of care and medicine to get back to full macho power:
Men really do have an excuse for supposedly being wimpy about coughs and colds – their immune systems are not as strong as women’s, research suggests.
A Canadian study indicates that the female sex hormone oestrogen gives women’s immune systems added bite at fighting off infection.
Oestrogen seems to counter an enzyme which blocks the inflammatory process.
Cars used to be much smaller and used a lot less petrol. Compared to SUVs these old Autos look like toys, but they were much less thirsty.
Today’s cars spend most fuel on moving themselves forward – the passengers weight make hardly a difference.
The 1967 VW Beetle weight a mere 840 kg and a Toyota Prius NHW20 Hybrid 1,317 kg. Just for fun: the Hummer H2 weighs an amazing 2903 kg.
Each kg saved makes a difference and especially today we have so many tough , but amazingly light materials. So lighter cars should be no problem at all.
New Scientist: Spanking ‘brings couples together’
Quote:
SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.
So beating each other up can be a good thing – if it’s for pleasure and fun. NOT for solving your anger and angst
Spiegel Online: Energy of the Stars, With No Emissions
According to the article in the Spiegel scientist have made some serious advancements in figuring out how to pack the power of the sun into a small reactor.
If Cold Fusion ever works as advertised it could deliver huge amount of energy for almost nothing. Most of all it runs with hydrogen – which is the most common element in the Universe. So no fear we will ever run out of hydrogen …
Let’s keep our fingers crossed and our scientists well funded. Cold Fusion power could really save our world and combat climate change very effectively, because it produces no emissions at all.
The ATV was a very successful mission for ESA. Well done! Maybe we can expand the program to bring not just cargo, but also Astronauts into space?
The Space Shuttle program is kinda old and no replacement is in sight. And we can’t rely on the Russians forever …
Telegrapgh.co.uk: Photographing meals ‘could help weight loss’
Slimmers began to eat healthier food when they were asked to take a picture of what they were eating, scientists found.
The pictures appear to have concentrated the dieters’s mind at just the right time, before they were about to eat, the researchers who carried out the study believe.
Photographs were also more effective at encouraging volunteers to watch what they ate than traditional written food diaries.
To test if encouraging slimmers to photograph everything they eat might also encourage them to change their diet, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked
43 people to record what they ate for one week in pictures as well as in words.
When the volunteers were later quizzed the photo diary appeared more effective at encouraging them to change their eating habits to more healthy alternatives.
The photographs also acted as a powerful reminder of any snacking binges, the researchers found.
If this helps I’ll make even TWO snaps of every bite I’ll take.
By the way: the Mousse and the Sacher Torte were brilliant – but so far I have experienced no weightloss from the photos I have taken.
Money.uk: ‘Sexist’ Men Earn £4722 ($8,800) More Than ‘The Modern Man’
New Scientist: Bad boys can blame behaviour on their hormones
Sometimes I wonder how little we know about ourselves – or how little we integrate scientific insights into our daily lives?
Instead we are more influenced by simple urges and chemistry we like to admit or like to deal with. Aggressive and anti-social behavior is often tolerated or brutally suppressed with even more violence.
Emotional Intelligence should be as normal as treatment for “bad chemistry”. We do treat depressions much more willing than aggression, because we still consider aggression a “good” character trait in boys and good canon fodder for the military.
Sounds like an idea of a 12 year old scientist, but it’s actually true. Argentina like to know how much gas their 55 million cows produce and science wouldn’t be science if you wouldn’t measure it correctly.
In my mind I only see floating cows over Argentina, causing a panic when they cross over to the Falklands and capture the islands once and for all …
More? Telegraph – Cow farts collected in plastic tank for global warming study
I love wellness, to be pampered, massaged and oiled.
But I like my alternative medicine unleaded please.
New Scientist: Ayurvedic medicines laden with toxic heavy metals
Do Ayurvedic medicines cure or cause harm? That’s the question raised by a study showing that 21% of 193 traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicines bought on the internet from US or Indian sources contained high amounts of lead, mercury or arsenic.
One sample of a preparation called Ekangvir Ras had 26,000 parts per million of lead. This compares with a US legal limit of 2 ppm in pharmaceutically produced calcium tablets for the elderly.
In a subset of preparations called Rasa Shastra medicines, minerals with heavy metals are deliberately added. “Ayurvedic practitioners think that if these are mixed properly, they are non-toxic, but that conflicts head-on with conventional scientific thinking,” says Robert Saper of Boston University School of Medicine.
I still haven’t heard any good news about the Bees and their Colony Collapse Disorder.
So we still face a serious Bee problem here. If the numbers keep dropping like in recent years we lack enough buzzers to pollinate OUR crops and therefore keep our food production running.
We still don’t understand the CCD – and we are far from a "cure". And even if we find the reason for their disorder – it’s still not sure if we can "heal" our little friends. Vaccination is complicated to say the least …
L.A. Times: Math scores for girls and boys no different, study finds
I wonder how many more decades and centuries we have to work on all these stupid UNTRUE stereotypes to disappear?
New Scientist: The world’s most successful bug hits dolphins
How does a parasite found in kitty litter get into whales and dolphins? By hitching a ride down the sewage pipe and into anchovy guts, say researchers.
Gloeta Massie and Michael Black of California Polytechnic State University say this could explain why one of the most prevalent parasites in humans is now popping up in marine mammals. They presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Microbiology Society on Monday.
"Toxoplasma gondii is the most successful protozoan pathogen on the planet," says Michael Grigg of the US National Institutes of Health. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that nearly one in four people aged 12 or older in the US have been infected with the parasite.
This is another great example how little we often about the consequences about our actions. Nature is a complex system and even small & stupid acts can have serious consequences.
A lot of science is "wasted" by finding out these often destructive connections and their consequences.
Documentary / Fiction – 1hour 46minutes – 1990 – the sound is a bit out of sync in the second half
I am a huge fan of James Burke – he is one of the great writers and thinker who can connect the dots and explain it all to mere mortals like myself. A science historian and TV producer with an impressive resume.
The first part is an excellent analysis of human history and how the weather influenced human development and history – and he we have influenced the weather. The second part is more fictional – a docu drama if you will – how a global climate watchdog battles global warming and which measures have to be done to change our current unsustainable lifestyle.
This two part series "After the Warming" was produced 1990 – and it freaked me out.
First – it shocked me, that he had already such an insight and clear suggestions in the year 1990, when hardly anyone – and certainly not the mass media – was talking about climate change and global warming.
Second – his "predictions" or better say insights are spot on, especially watching it now almost 20 years after it has been produced.
Third – we have already wasted so much time to change our lifestyle and we are still far behind what would actually be possible to re-balance the weather system.
Although the quality of the video isn’t brilliant – the content is. So please watch it.
Several years ago a cargo ship lost thousands or rubber ducks in the ocean. Fifteen years they arrived at the English Coast.
But the ducklings long journey actually helped scientists to track the currents of the oceans.
Maybe I start a science project like this myself – the next time my rubber duck and I go for a swim …
"Overpopulation refers to when an organism’s numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat."
I would love to see some hardcore numbers how many inhabitants our "habitat" can support in an sustainable way?
Our oil reserves won’t last much longer and within fifty years our petrol based lifestyle and food production will simply collapse, because the supply won’t last. At least it seems production rates already can’t keep up with demand.
But we all as a world community have to figure out how many people this planet can support – so we can plan and adjust. We will need to once again have to look seriously on family planing, productions numbers and available resources – but in a scientific way.
More? Overpopulation @ Wikipedia
This is how we do science in Europe – those religious nuts don’t know what they are missing!
This video is part of the Marie Curie Actions – a program designed to promote research and obviously science.
And you know how Madame Curie was – dontacha?
BBC News: Formula ’secret of perfect voice’
Researchers say they have worked out a mathematical formula to find the perfect human voice.
Interesting article – make sure to listen the male and female computer voices. They sounds very posh – and a bit gay to me.
I am wondering if the "perfect voice" is as much a "trend" as are certain looks?
BBC News: WWF urges Brazil biofuel projects
Brazil has been on the forefront of the biofuel revolution. But once again it shows that industrial production of anything we humans need always causes some problems.
Overall the Brazilian’s experience with sugar cane has been VERY good. But they have to watch out to keep nature’s balance, water supply and bio diversity to make this a long term success.
But in that respect I have more confidence in Brazil that I have for example in the US obsession with Corn and making Ethanol from it. What a stupid idea – since corn produces a LOT LESS fuel than sugar cane.
Congratulations to NASA and their Phoenix mission – it’s a great success! I am looking forward to many more breath taking images like this one (check out the small BBC slide show here).
PS: Look at the sky – we should rename Mars into Pinko. 
*Thanks to Edosan for sending me this one*
Jason has sent me this amazing article about the varieties of cotton and how we are once again losing bio diversity thanks to greed.
Like white breed or white sugar people simple want they goods "clean" and in a virgin-like colour. But brown bread like brown sugar is usually much better or at least equal to the white – often bleached – industrial stuff …
Click image for a larger version.
I think the Russians built beautiful rockets. The Soyuz series is just fascinating – they really look like space rockets!
New Scientist: ‘Sexy’ voice gives fertile women away
The pair recorded women counting from 1 to 10 at four occasions during their menstrual cycle. They then replayed the recordings at random to male and female students and asked them to rate the attractiveness of the voices. Both males and females judged the women’s voices to be most attractive if they were recorded during the peak fertility period of the menstrual cycle, and less attractive if they were recorded during non-fertile periods (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.02.001).
The results are in line with evidence that the female voice box, or larynx, is under the influence of sex hormones, says Gallup. He says the changes in the female voice during peak fertility support the view that women are “different” at that point in the menstrual cycle – in other words, that they experience oestrus.
“Changes in the attractiveness of a woman’s voice during peak fertility support the view that women experience oestrus”
The theory of human oestrus remains controversial because its effects are subtle; human females show none of the distinct genital swellings seen in other female mammals “in heat”. But there is increasing evidence of more subtle changes. “Other differences include changes in sexual receptivity and odour sensitivity,” Gallup says.
Anyone surprised? Nope. When will we finally accept that our biology plays and important part in our social life’s. Many aspects of human behavior are influenced by our urge to procreate. We need a Sexual Revolution 3.0 that includes, respects and integrates such insights into our society and lifestyle.
Plus for the Ladies: For Some Women, ‘Deep, Manly’ Voices Go a Long Way (According to Study, Deeper Vocals Attract More Women).