. . DATA ON 2005's GLOBAL WARMING!
2005 was the hottest year in recorded history!
1998 as the second hottest year.
2003 ties 2002 as the third hottest year.
2004 was the fifth hottest year.
2001 was the sixth hottest year.
(From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
. . 2004's deadly summer in Europe probably was the hottest on the continent in at least five centuries, according to researchers who analyzed ancient temp records. See the news-file.)
. . Since 1980: 19 of the 20 hottest years ever.
The 1990s: hottest decade of the millenium.
. . U.S. temperatures have risen at a rate of 0.9 degree F per century over the past 100 years. But for the past 25 years, they've increased at a rate of 1.6 degrees F, NOAA said. [A recalibration in 2007 reduced some US hottest-year figures, NOT global ones.]
. . In that time, global temperatures rose at a rate near 1.1 degree F, but this trend dramatically increased to a rate greater than 3.0 F per century during the past 25 years. Heat-trapping carbon, which had remained constant at 280 parts per million for 10,000 years, have escalated since the late 19th century to 379 parts per million.
. . Drought in '00 also made for one of the worst U.S. wildfire seasons in 50 years. More than 7 million acres of forests and grasslands were consumed by fire in 2000 with nationwide losses of more than $1 billion. There were more tropical storms and hurricanes than usual.
. . Global rainfall was also above-average in 2000. NOAA said 2000 was one of the ten wettest years on record.
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Jan 24, 06: 2005 was the warmest recorded on Earth's surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, NASA said today. All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004. 11 of the last 12 years have been among the warmest since 1850.
. . "Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years. That very anomalously warm year (1998) has become the norm. The rate of warming has been so rapid that this temperature that we only got when we had a real strong El Nino now has become something that we've gotten without any unusual worldwide weather disturbance."
. . Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed by 0.6 degrees C (1.08 degrees F), NASA said. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 0.8 degrees C (1.44 degrees F).
. . Shindell, in line with the view held by most scientists, attributed the rise to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, with the burning of fossil fuels being the primary source. The 21st century could see global temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees C, Shindell said. "That will really bring us up to the warmest temperatures the world has experienced probably in the last million years", he said.
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Nov 29, 06: LONDON -Gaia Scientist James Lovelock Predicts Planetary Wipeout. The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius, eventually making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives, he said. a traumatized earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of its 6.1 billion people.
. . "We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out", he told a news conference. "A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million.
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NEWS:
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Dec 16, 08: The year 2008 was the ninth warmest year since instrumental temperature measurements began in 1880, and all of the nine warmest years have occurred in the past 11 years, NASA reported.
. . By Britain's accounting, 2008 was the 10th warmest year on record dating back to 1850, and all 10 of the warmest years occurred since 1997.
. . The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summarized these and other trends, including:
. . * The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third costliest, after 2005 and 2004.
. . * The U.S. had nearly 1,700 tornadoes from January through November, which ranks second behind 2004 for the most tornadoes in a year since records began in 1953.
. . * Arctic sea ice in 2008 reached its second lowest level at the end of the melting season in September, following a record low in 2007. In 2008, the ice shrank to 1.74 million square miles, which was 0.86 million square miles below the average annual minimum from 1979 to 2000.
Dec 18, 08: A tidal turbine near the mouth of Strangford Lough in England has begun producing electricity at full capacity for the first time. The SeaGen system now generates 1.2MW, the highest level of power produced by a tidal stream system anywhere in the world.
Dec 18, 08: The electric grid may be able to handle more wind and solar power —-way more-— than previously thought, according to a new preliminary study.
. . The commonly accepted wisdom in the energy industry is that the grid could only draw something like 20% of its power from wind and solar resources before encountering major reliability problems. But the new power flow simulation (.pdf), presented for the first time this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting, shows that, at least in California, the power grid might be able to handle three times that much renewable energy without encountering major trouble pushing electrons around the state.
. . "This work has shown that at least 70% of the total projected California generation on a summer day in 2016 could be provided by renewable sources ... with relatively minimal upgrades to the transmission infrastructure", wrote Elaine Hart, a Stanford doctoral student, in her presentation.
Dec 16, 08: Global average temperatures in 2008 fell to levels not seen since 2000, though it was still one of the 10 warmest years on record.
Dec 16, 08: More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, which seems to be accelerating.
. . Parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe. As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice.
. . Arctic thawing is releasing methane —-the second most potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve says.
. . A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts.
. . Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer. The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said. That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."
Dec 1, 08: Diets and creams which claim their antioxidant properties could cheat the advances of time may be worthless, researchers suggest. Antioxidants 'cannot slow ageing'.
Nov 15, 08: A new model of the Earth's climate suggests that human-made CO2 emissions may prevent the onset of the next ice age. Based on geological history, the Earth would be expected to enter a new ice age in 10,000 to 100,000 years.
. . Researchers say even small changes in CO2 levels right now could prevent this from happening. They say this may not be good news as the planet could change in ways that are unprecedented. "In the last 100,000 years, global CO2 levels increased by around 1.5 parts per million --but now we put out this much every year. The natural process is 100,000 times slower than the way humankind is changing CO2 levels."
Jun 26, 08: "Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.
. . Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Phoenix so far has not detected organic carbon considered an essential building block of life.
Jun 26, 08: California today took a major step forward on its global warming fight by unveiling an ambitious plan for clean cars, renewable energy and stringent caps on big polluting industries. The plan, which aims to reduce pollutants by 10% from current levels by 2020 while driving investment in new energy technologies that will benefit the state's economy, is the most comprehensive yet by any U.S. state. It could serve as a blueprint not only for the rest of the US, but also for other big polluting nations like China and India.
Jun 16, 08: European researchers said they discovered a batch of three "super-Earths" orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well. They said their findings suggest that Earth-like planets may be very common.
. . The trio of planets orbit a star slightly less massive than our Sun, 42 light-years away. The planets are bigger than Earth --one is 4.2 times the mass, one is 6.7 times and the third is 9.4 times. They orbit their star at extremely rapid speeds --one whizzing around in just four days, compared with Earth's 365 days, one taking 10 days and the slowest taking 20 days.
. . More than 270 so-called exoplanets have been found. The team also said they found a planet 7.5 times the mass of Earth orbiting the star HD 181433 in 9.5 days. This star also has a Jupiter-like planet that orbits every three years.
Jun 13, 08: Planet Earth continues to simmer, with this year's spring the seventh warmest on record. The global ocean surface temperature for spring was 0.33 C above the 20th century mean of 61.0 3.1 C and ranked 10th warmest.
To rework Winston Churchill's line: monogamy is the worst form of sexual relationship, except all the others.
May 8, 08: Among his investigated traits is something he calls "uncertainty avoidance." This is an index of a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity, and its willingness to search for new truths.
. . When it comes to uncertainty avoidance, Americans score 15% lower than the Dutch. In other words, they truly seem to be more disposed to take on ambiguous projects. Actually, the Dutch are closer to the Americans in this regard then many of their European neighbors. The Greeks, French, Belgians, Italians, and Germans are even more inclined to avoid uncertainty then residents of The Netherlands. (Only the British do substantially better: In fact, their score is lower than the Americans'.) Both India and China score lower than the U.S. on Hofstede's index.
Apr 29, 08: Some top international food scientists recommended halting the use of food-based biofuels, such as ethanol, saying it would cut corn prices by 20% during a world food crisis.
. . But even as the scientists were calling for a moratorium, President Bush urged the opposite!!! . He declared the US should increase ethanol use because of national energy security and high gas prices.
Apr 28, 08: The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger —-often secret-— say, congressional investigators say in a report.
. . The administration's decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program's credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.
. . Cancer risk assessments for nearly a dozen major chemicals are now years overdue, the GAO said, blaming the new multiagency reviews for some of the delay. The EPA, for example, had promised to prepare assessments on 10 major toxic chemicals for external peer review by the end of 2007, but only two reached that stage.
Apr 18, 08: Planet Earth continues to run a fever. Last month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the US, however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported.
Feb 29, 08: In a blow to hopes for finding water and life on Mars, scientists think bright streaks detected inside Martian gullies after 1999 were not spurts of water, but rather avalanches of dust.
Feb 28, 08: Venus is made of the same stuff of Earth, but is bone-dry, hot enough to melt lead and has a chokingly thick atmosphere. It even spins backwards.
. . Now one scientist thinks the planet's formation may explain all: Two huge, protoplanetary bodies collided head-on and merged to form our planetary neighbor, but obliterated nearly all water in the process.
. . A majority of scientists think Luna formed when a protoplanet about the size of Mars smacked into the planet at an angle. Davies thinks Venus was born of a far worse cosmic train wreck. A mega-collision between two bodies of roughly equal size could have provided the energy necessary to rip water into pieces. The hydrogen would escape into space while oxygen would bond with iron and sink to the planet's core.
. . Alan Boss, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., thinks massive collisions —-including head-on mergers-— were the norm for terrestrial plants early in their histories. Boss explained that if a Venusian moon formed via a giant impact, its orbit could have decayed and spiralled the body into the planet's surface.
. . Davies thinks the simpler explanation is his own. Aside from planning to create a detailed computer model for the hypothesized mega-collision, as has been done for moon formation theory, Davies said another way to test his idea is to send a new spacecraft to Venus.
Feb 20, 08: A detailed map highlighting the world's hotspots for emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has been released. It uses data spanning 65 years and shows the majority of these new diseases come from wildlife. Scientists say conservation efforts that reduce conflicts between humans and animals could play a key role in limiting future outbreaks.
Jan 3, 08: 2007 was the second warmest on record in the UK, according to figures released by the Met Office.
. . Since UK-wide records began in 1914, nine of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1989. 2007 was no exception, despite a natural weather event known as La Nina, which usually reduces global temperatures. The year was also characterized by relatively warm conditions at night, bringing fewer frosts --18 days fewer than normal for the UK overall, and warmer sea temperatures.
. . The UK's top 10 warmest years on record (in order) are 2006, 2007, 2003, 2004, 2002, 2005, 1990, 1997, 1949 and 1999.
. . Globally, there is a similar trend --the top 10 being 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2001, 1997 and 1995.
Dec 13, 07: 2007 has been one of the warmest years since 1850, despite the cooling influence of La Nina conditions. Since the end of April, the La Nina event has taken some of the heat out of what could have been an even warmer year.
. . The UK's Hadley Center and U of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest. The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years. For the northern hemisphere alone, 2007 was the second warmest recorded.
. . Preliminary data by US federal scientists predict the annual average temp for 2007 across the contiguous US at near 54.3 degrees F —-making the year the eighth warmest since records were first kept in 1895. Worldwide, the average temp for the year, expected to be near 58 F, is on pace to be the fifth warmest ever, said the report by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "The annual temperatures continue to be either near-record or at record levels year in and year out." As the world warms, scientists fear an increase in disease, killer weather and the extinction of vast numbers of species.
. . Globally, seven of the eighth warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997.
. . Globally, the greatest warming took place in high altitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, the NOAA report said, & will update its data in early January to reflect the last few weeks of December.
Dec 17, 07: The world's sea levels could rise twice as high this century as UN climate scientists have previously predicted, according to a study. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposes a maximum sea level rise of 81cm this century. But researchers say the true maximum could be about twice that: 163cm.
Dec 10, 07: Rising temperatures caused ice to melt in Greenland at a record rate this year, climate scientists reported. "The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps or a layer of water more than one-half-mile deep covering Washington, D.C"
. . An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.
. . Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier.
Dec 6, 07: For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."
. . A petition from at least 215 climate scientists calls for the world to cut in half greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
. . In the past, many of these scientists have avoided calls for action, leaving that to environmental advocacy groups. That dispassionate stance was taken during the release this year of four separate reports by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
. . But no more. "It's a grave crisis, and we need to do something real fast", said petition signer Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "I think the stakes are way way too high to be playing around."
. . "Action needs to be taken and needs to be taken now", said Marika Holland, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who signed on. "The longer we wait, the worse it's going to become."
. . NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, who signed the petition, said "the time for half-measures and the time for voluntary agreements and the time for arguing about 1% here and 1% there —-those things are no longer relevant."
. . What's happening is people are agreeing "that the cost of inaction is on the high side and the cost of action is affordable", said Joseph Romm, an energy business consultant and trained physicist.
Dec 2, 07: Earth's tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows. To meteorologists the tropics region is defined by long-term climate and what's happening in the atmosphere. The newest study shows that by using the weather definition, the tropics are expanding toward Earth's poles more than predicted.
. . Independent teams using four different meteorological measurements found that the tropical atmospheric belt has grown by anywhere between 2 and 4.8 degrees latitude since 1979. That translates to a total north and south expansion of 140 to 330 miles.
. . "Every time you look at what the world is doing it's always far more dramatic than what climate models predict", Weaver said.
Nov 6, 07: Dinosaurs like Velociraptors owe their fearsome reputation to the way they breathed, according to a UK study. They had one of the most efficient respiratory systems of all animals, similar to that of modern diving birds like penguins, fossil evidence shows. It fuelled their bodies with oxygen for the task of sprinting after prey, say researchers at Manchester U.
Oct 29, 07: CFLs contain mercury which is also harmful to the environment, and you’ll need to recycle old CFLs properly. But mercury emitted from power plants during generating electricity to feed your incandescent light bulbs could be even higher.
Oct 29, 07: The leading international body responsible for formulating policy on climate change has dramatically upped the ante by announcing that climate crisis is looming several decades earlier than previously thought, requiring major infrastructure changes immediately.
. . Even if global warming is limited to the EU’s ‘difficult'’ target of a 2C rise, the world will still have to adapt to major consequences of climate change, the scientists warned yesterday, as they accused politicians of attempting to water down their findings.
. . Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the effects of climate change were happening faster than expected and many were already apparent. “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us”, said Professor Martin Parry, a scientist with the British Met Office.
Oct 24, 07: Whenever the world's tropical seas warm several degrees, Earth has experienced mass extinctions over millions of years, according to a first-of-its-kind statistical study of fossil records. And scientists fear it may be about to happen again —-but in a matter of several decades, not tens of millions of years.
. . Four of the five major extinctions over 520 million years of Earth history have been linked to warmer tropical seas, something that indicates a warmer world overall, according to the new study. "We found that over the fossil record as a whole, the higher the temperatures have been, the higher the extinctions have been", said U of York ecologist Peter Mayhew. Earth is on track to hit that same level of extinction-connected warming in about 100 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, according to top scientists.
. . A second study links high CO2 levels, the chief man-made gas responsible for global warming, to past extinctions.
. . The researchers examined tropical sea temperatures —-the only ones that can be determined from fossil records and go back hundreds of millions of years. They indicate a natural 60 million-year climate cycle that moves from a warmer "greenhouse" to a cooler "icehouse." The Earth is warming from its current colder period.
. . Every time the tropical sea temperatures were about 7 degrees warmer than they are now and stayed that way for millions of enough years, there was a die-off. How fast extinctions happen varies in length.
. . The warmer water had less oxygen and spawned more microbes, which in turn spewed toxic hydrogen sulfide into the air and water, killing species.
. . Ward examined 13 major and minor extinctions in the past and found a common link: rising CO2 levels in the air and falling oxygen levels. Those higher temperatures that coincided with mass extinctions are about the same level forecast for a century from now.
Oct 22, 07: Just days after the Nobel prize was awarded for global warming work, an alarming new study finds that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing faster than expected. CO2 emissions were 35% higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated. Alan Robock, associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers U, added: "What is really shocking is the reduction of the oceanic CO2 sink." He also thinks rising ocean temperatures reduce the ability to take in the gas. "But what has been wrong recently is that the climate is changing even faster than the models said. In fact, Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than any models predicted, and sea level is rising much faster than IPCC previously predicted."
Oct 12, 07: Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s climate change panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it.
. . Gore, whose film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth", won an Academy Award earlier this year, had been widely tipped to win the prize, which expanded the Norwegian committee's interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts that have traditionally been the award's foundations.
. . "We face a true planetary emergency", Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
. . Gore plans to donate his half of the $1.5 million prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan nonprofit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion worldwide about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.
. . In its citation, the committee lauded Gore's "strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
. . "It is a question of war and peace", said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
Oct 10, 07: With global warming, the world isn't just getting hotter —-it's getting stickier, due to humidity. And people are to blame, according to a study based on computer models. The amount of moisture in the air near Earth's surface rose 2.2% in less than three decades, the researchers report. "This humidity change is an important contribution to heat stress in humans as a result of global warming." A few regions, including the U.S. West, South Africa and parts of Australia were drier.
. . To show that this is man-made, Gillett ran computer models to simulate past climate conditions and studied what would happen to humidity if there were no man-made greenhouse gases. It didn't match reality.
. . He looked at what would happen from just man-made greenhouse gases. That didn't match either. Then he looked at the combination of natural conditions and greenhouse gases. The results were nearly identical to the year-by-year increases in humidity.
. . It will only feel *worse in the future, Gillett said. Moisture in the air increases by about 6% with every degree C. That would mean a 12 to 24% increase in humidity by the year 2100. "Although it might not be a lethal kind of thing, it's going to increase human discomfort", Willett said.
Oct 6, 07: The world moved into 'ecological overdraft' today, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New Economics Foundation think-tank said.
. . Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006 which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond its environmental means in the 1980s. "As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20 tons of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tons", said NEF director Andrew Simms.
. . If everyone in the world had the same consumption rates as in the US it would take 5.3 planet earths to support them, NEF said, noting that the figure was 3.1 for France and Britain, 3.0 for Spain, 2.5 for Germany and 2.4 for Japan. But if everyone emulated China, which is building a coal-fired power station every five days to feed its booming economy, it would take only 0.9 of a planet.
Sept 20, 07: Researchers said they had found more ways to activate the body's own anti-aging defenses --perhaps with a pill that could fight multiple diseases at once. Their study helps explain why animals fed very low-calorie diets live longer, but it also offers new ways to try to replicate the effects of these diets using a pill instead of hunger.
. . "What we are talking about is potentially having one pill that prevents and even cures many diseases at once", said David Sinclair, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School who helped lead the research.
. . "Theoretically, we can envision a small molecule (pill) that can increase levels of NAD, or SIRT3 and SIRT4 directly, in the mitochondria. Such a molecule could be used for many age-related diseases", he added. "Diseases like heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis --even things like cataracts. What we are aiming to do is to find the body's natural processes that can slow down aging and treat these diseases."
. . Sirtris is already working on such drugs. It has an experimental pill called SRT501, which it is testing in Phase 2a trials in patients with type-2 diabetes.
Aug 20, 07: A common virus caused human adult stem cells to turn into fat cells and could explain why some people become obese, U.S. researchers said. The research builds on prior studies of adenovirus-36 --a common cause of respiratory and eye infections-- and it may lead to an obesity vaccine, they said.
. . "We're not talking about preventing all types of obesity, but if it is caused by this virus in humans, we want a vaccine to prevent this."
July 12, 07: Scientists say they have seen one of the fastest evolutionary changes ever observed in a species of butterfly. The tropical Blue Moon butterfly has developed a way of fighting back against parasitic bacteria.
. . Six years ago, males accounted for just 1% of the Blue Moon population on two islands in the South Pacific. But by last year, the butterflies had developed a gene to keep the bacteria in check and male numbers were up to about 40% of the population.
. . Scientists believe the comeback is due to "suppressor" genes that control the Wolbachia bacteria that is passed down from the mother and kills the male embryos before they hatch. "To my knowledge, this is the fastest evolutionary change that has ever been observed."
Jun 15, 07: Scorching heat could spell more dangerous summers for the Mediterranean over the next 100 years, a new analysis finds. A 2003 heat wave took 15,000 lives in France and 3,000 in Italy as temperatures soared over 100 degrees F, but if greenhouse gases continue to build up in the atmosphere at their present rate, temperature rises could dwarf those in Europe during that summer.
. . Reduced precipitation could make the Mediterranean’s hottest days even hotter: as the land surface warms, it gets drier, and dry soil means less moisture in the area in general and less cooling from the evaporation of water.
Apr 26, 07: Mars is a very windy place --so windy, in fact, that bright, oxidized martian soil is being scoured away by martian winds and dust devils to reveal darker, sub-surface soil with the end result of making the whole planet warmer. Mars is experiencing its own brand of climate change. The mechanism for the warming is due to the change in brightness, or "albedo" of the martian surface. Is this related to planet earth's greenhouse gas driven climate change? No.
Apr 24, 07: An Earth-like planet spotted outside our solar system is the first found that could support liquid water and harbor life, scientists announced today. The newfound planet is located at the "Goldilocks" distance --not too close and not too far from its star to keep water on its surface from freezing or vaporizing away.
. . And while astronomers are not yet able to look for signs of biology on the planet, the discovery is a milestone in planet detection and the search for extraterrestrial life, one with the potential to profoundly change our outlook on the universe.
Mar 20, 07: Some experts predict that 2007 could eclipse 1998 and 2005 as the warmest on record.
Mar 18, 07: Siemens has developed Ostar, an LED that despite its 1 square millimeter size, can put out 1,000 lumens of angelic light. Siemens explains the significance: A 60-watt light bulb emits 730 lm, while a 50-watt halogen lamp has an output of approximately 900 lm.
. . The Ostar Lighting LED produces 75 lumens for each watt it consumes. Comparing this with the 730 lm emitted by a 60 watt light bulb, we get around 1/6 the electricity consumed for the same amount of light. Also, such an LED lasts 50 times longer than an incandescent bulb and 10 times longer than halogen products.
Mar 16, 07: This *winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the government said, in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the combined global land and ocean surface temperature from December through February was at its highest since records began in 1880.
. . The next-warmest *winter on record was in 2004, and the third warmest winter was in 1998. The ten warmest *years on record have occurred since 1995. Temps were above average for these months in Europe, Asia, western Africa, southeastern Brazil and the northeast half of the US, with cooler-than-average conditions in parts of Saudi Arabia and the central US.
. . Global temperature on *land surface during the northern hemisphere winter was also the warmest on record, while the *ocean-surface temperature tied for second warmest after the winter of 1997-98.
. . *Winter in the *Northern *Hemisphere this year has been the warmest since records began more than 125 years ago, a US government agency says. Weather experts predict that 2007 could be the hottest *year on record.
Feb 27, 07: The UK has experienced its second warmest winter on record, with a mean temperature of 5.47C.
Feb 22, 07: Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bush babies, U.S. researchers said in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives. "I saw the behavior over the course of 19 days almost daily." They'd watched the Fongoli community of savanna-dwelling chimpanzees in southeastern Senegal.
. . Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and fish for termites. Some birds use tools, as do other animals such as gorillas, orangutans and even naked mole rats. But the sophisticated use of a tool to hunt with had never been seen.
. . The chimps choose a branch, strip it of leaves and twigs, trim it down to a stable size and then chew the ends to a point. Then they use it to stab into holes where bush babies might be sleeping.
Feb 21, 07: Clever scrub jays can plan on saving tasty treats for the future and do it in a way that shows they are truly planning ahead, British researchers reported.
. . They set up a careful experiment to allow the birds to cache food in a certain way if they were indeed planning, and found the birds were up to the task. Their study adds to several others that show animals such as great apes and certain birds can plan ahead in much the same way as people do.
Feb 20, 07: The Australian government announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country.
Incandescent litebulbs may soon be illegal in California! About time!
According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2006 was the sixth warmest year since records began, with 1998 the warmest. All the 10 warmest years have been since 1994. Some meteorologists predict that 2007 will be the warmest year on record because of a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect of the El Nino event that warms the eastern Pacific. Jan 31, 07: Many European countries had their warmest January since records began.
Jan 24, 07: Archaeologists who found the remains of human "Hobbits" have permission to restart excavations at the cave where the specimens were found. "We'll probably be in there towards the middle of the year." Indonesian officials had blocked access to the cave since 2005, following a dispute over the bones --reportedly due to political sensitivities. "You've got to get there in the dry season."
. . The researchers claim that the remains belong to a novel species of human. Finding other specimens in the cave, particularly one with an intact skull, is crucial to resolving the debate over whether the Hobbit's classification as a separate species --Homo floresiensis-- is valid. Researchers found one near-complete skeleton, which they named LB1, along with the remains of at least eight other individuals.
Jan 19, 07: Parts of the world could heat up by over 10 degrees C (18 F) this century, with big areas becoming uninhabitable, according to a climate prediction experiment.
. . "We are very rapidly heading back toward the greenhouse world of the dinosaurs", Bob Spicer, one of the scientists who mounted the joint BBC/Oxford University study, said. "Back then, northern Alaska had mean annual temperatures of about the same level as we have in London --about 10 degrees (C)." The acceleration is massive", Spicer said. The European Union has said that even a 2 C rise would tip the world into "dangerous" climate change.
Jan 18, 07: As it takes more energy to catch a large prey than a small one, and that a carnivore size cannot really exceed one ton. Apparently, life was easier for herbivores who were able to reach 30 tons or more.
. . The result gives a fresh perspective on why large carnivores are particularly vulnerable to extinction, and brings more bad news for polar bears. Not only is the arctic ice melting beneath them, but today's largest land carnivore also lives on a metabolic precipice, barely able to catch enough food to support its bulk.
Nov 30, 06: Humans must colonize planets in other solar systems traveling there using "Star Trek"-style propulsion or face extinction, renowned British cosmologist Stephen Hawking said today. Referring to complex theories and the speed of light, Hawking, the wheel-chair-bound Cambridge U physicist, told BBC radio that theoretical advances could revolutionize the velocity of space travel and make such colonies possible. "Sooner or later, disasters such as an planetisimal collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe", said Hawking, who was due to receive the world's oldest award for scientific achievement, the Copley medal, from Britain's Royal Society. Previous winners include Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.
Oct 2, 06: Sometime this month, the number of Americans will surpass 300 million, a milestone that raises environmental impact questions for the only major industrial nation whose population is increasing substantially.
. . The U.S. Census Bureau predicts the 300 million mark will be reached in mid-October, 39 years after U.S. population topped 200 million and 91 years after it exceeded 100 million. This will make the United States No. 3 in population in the world, after China and India.
. . Most of the growth is taking place in the South and West, according to the Census Bureau. From 2004 to 2005, U.S. population had a natural increase --births minus deaths - of 1.7 million and international migration of 1 million.
. . The report's author, Victoria Markham, noted that the United States is the only industrialized nation with significant population growth. The vast majority of the world's population rise --about 98%-- is in poor countries, she said.
. . The report found:
. . -- *Each* American occupies 20% more developed land --housing, schools, shopping and roads-- than 20 years ago.
. . -- Each American uses three times as much water as the world average; over half the original wetlands in the United States have been lost, mainly due to urban and suburban development and agriculture.
. . -- Half the continental United States can no longer support its original vegetation; nearly 1,000 plant and animal species are listed by the U.S. government as endangered or threatened, with 85% of those due to habitat loss or alteration.
. . -- The United States consumes nearly 25% of the world's energy, though it has only 5% of the world's population, and has the highest per capita oil consumption worldwide.
. . -- Each American produces about 2.3 kg (5 pounds) of trash a day, up from about 1.4 kg (3 pounds) in 1960; the current rate is about five times that in developing countries.
Aug 2, 06: The older we get, the more we regret choosing virtue over vice, new research shows.
. . Everyone is familiar with the flip-flop between guilt and regret when it comes to decisions between indulgence or keeping your nose to the grindstone. Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan of Columbia University have now shown that the guilt that we often feel right after making "indulgent" choices flares up as quickly as it passes. However, regrets over missed opportunities for fun never fade. In fact, they increase over time. The upshot is that vices are regretted in the short-run, and virtues are regretted in the long-run.
July 19, 06: The first six months of 2006 were the warmest, on average, since the United States started keeping records in 1895, and global warming is a contributing factor, a U.S. climate expert said today.
July 5, 06: The increase in the number of large western wildfires in recent years may be a result of global warming, researchers say. An analysis of data going back to 1970 indicates the fires increased "suddenly and dramatically" in the 1980s and the wildfire season grew longer, according to scientists.
June 27, 06: The nation's top climate scientists are giving "An Inconvenient Truth",
Al Gore's documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy. The former vice president's movie --replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets-- mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.
. . While some nonscientists could be depressed by the dire disaster-laden warmer world scenario that Gore laid out, one top researcher thought it was too optimistic. Tom Wigley, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, thought the former vice president sugarcoated the problem by saying that with already-available technologies and changes in habit --such as changing light bulbs-- the world could help slow or stop global warming.
. . "They are quite literally afraid to know the truth", Gore said. "Because if you accept the truth of what the scientific community is saying, it gives you a moral imperative to start to rein in the 70 million tons of global warming pollution that human civilization is putting into the atmosphere every day."
Apr 11, 06: Leading scientists have warned against the teaching of creationism in schools, saying pupils must be clear that science backs the theory of evolution. The Royal Society statement comes after claims that some schools are promoting creationism alongside evolution.
. . The Department for Education said that creationism was not taught in schools. "...young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs." It added: "A belief that all species on Earth have always existed in their present form is not consistent with the wealth of evidence for evolution, such as the fossil record. Similarly, a belief that the Earth was formed in 4004BC is not consistent with the evidence from geology, astronomy and physics that the solar system, including Earth, formed about 4,600 million years ago."
. . The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said recently he was not comfortable with creationism being taught in schools.
. . A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said that neither creationism nor intelligent design were taught in schools.
In 10,000 years, the population has doubled at least ten times. Yet suddenly the doubling has ceased. It will never double again. The *end of humanity's population boom will happen in the lifetimes of people alive today. It is the moment when Malthus was wrong for the *last time.
Feb 3, 06: Two major glaciers in Greenland have recently begun to flow and break up more quickly under the onslaught of global warming, a new study said, raising the specter of millions drowning from rising sea levels. The report said the 2 glaciers had doubled their rate of flow to the ocean over the past two years after steady movement during the 1990s.
Jan 30, 06: Mounting evidence suggests obesity is contagious, scientists said. A human pathogen called the adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens, according to a new study. Previous research found that two related adenoviruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, cause obesity in animals. Adenoviruses typically cause respiratory infections. Importantly, Ad-36 has associated with human obesity in previous studies, and Ad-37 might be, too, but more research is needed. "It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity."
The NEW ETHICAL TEN COMMANDMENTS ~ by Bernard Gert:
. . Many people learn about morality from religion, which is why they think morality comes from religion. But people can be moral without believing in a higher power, so:
. . 1: Do not kill.
. . 2: Do not cause pain.
. . 3: Do not disable.
. . 4: Do not deprive of freedom.
. . 5: Do not deprive of pleasure.
. . 6: Do not deceive.
. . 7: Keep your promises.
. . 8: Do not cheat.
. . 9: Obey the law.
. . 10: Do your duty. (What is required by your job, social role, or special circumstances.)
. . (Paraphrasing...) Breaking one of the first five results in harm. Breaking one of the second five increases the chances of harm. It isn't *always immoral to break one of these rules, but do so only if you would allow everyone to do so under those circumstances.
. . Several biblical commandments have nothing to do with being moral. They do not prohibit slavery; they explicitly accept it (coveting neighbor's wife & slaves). It suggests people will behave morally only if threatened with punishment.
Jan 25, 06: Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years. Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors.
. . Writing in the British Dental Journal, the team took careful measurements of groups of skulls spanning across 30 generations. The scientists said the differences between past and present skull shapes were "striking".
. . They looked at 30 skulls dating from the mid-14th Century. "The astonishing finding is the increased cranial vault heights. The increase is very considerable. For example, the vault height of the plague skulls were 80mm, and the modern ones were 95mm --that's in the order of 20% bigger, which is really rather a lot."
. . He suggests that the increase in size may be due to an increase in mental capacity over the ages.
Sept 5, 05: About 50 million more people, most of them in Africa, could be at risk of hunger by 2050 due to climate change and reduced crop yields, scientists predicted today. Roughly 500 million people worldwide already face hunger, but rising levels of greenhouse gases could make the problem worse.
Aug 22, 05: Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers. [This gives insight to Zen, etc!! ]
Aug 23, 05: If the current warming trends continue in the Arctic, the region may have ice-free summers within 100 years, a new report concludes. The Arctic hasn't been without ice for a million years. But documented melting is accelerating. Scientists expect 2005 to be the warmest year on record, globally. The warmest four years since 1890s, when reliable record-keeping began: 1: 1998, 2: 2002, 3. 2003; 4: 2004
. . Come 2006, you can shove each of those down one, as 2005 will likely be #1.
Aug 15, 05: Researchers at Oregon State University have announced another finding linking sexual orientation to biology, as opposed to learned behavior. The scientists recently discovered biological differences between the brains of homosexual rams and heterosexual ones.
. . Fred Stormshak, distinguished professor of animal science at Oregon State, and one of the researchers in the project, said that his team found striking differences in the brains and hormones of certain rams. "The anterior preoptic area of the hypothalamus was about half the size of this part of the brain in heterosexual rams", he explained. Stormshak also noted that aromatase, an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, was much lower in the homosexual rams.
Aug 11, 05: [Important debunker!] For years, skeptics of global warming have used satellite and weather balloon data to argue that climate models were wrong and that global warming isn't really happening. Now, according to three new studies published in the journal Science, it turns out those conclusions based on satellite and weather balloon data were based on faulty analyses. The atmosphere is indeed warming, not cooling as the data previously showed.
. . But in a Science paper, scientists at the California-based Remote Sensing Systems, examined the same data and identified an error in Spencer's analysis technique. After correcting for the mistake, the researchers obtained fundamentally different results: whereas Spencer's analysis showed a cooling of the Earth's troposphere, the new analysis revealed a warming. Using the analysis from Mears and Wentz, Santer showed that the new data was consistent with climate models and theories.
. . "When people come up with extraordinary claims --like the troposphere is cooling-- then you demand extraordinary proof", Santer said. "What's happening now is that people around the world are subjecting these data sets to the scrutiny they need."
Aug 11, 05: The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting, which could speed the rate of global warming. The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago. The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to run-away, scientists fear.
. . The 11,000-year-old bogs contain billions of tons of methane, most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures called clathrates. But if the bogs melt, there is a big risk their hefty methane load could be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.
July 29, 05: BIG NEWS!! Astronomers have discovered an object in the solar system that is larger than Pluto! The new planet(?), known as 2003 UB313, has been identified as the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun. They are calling it the 10th planet, but already that claim is contested. The new world's size is not at issue --the very definition of planethood is. His best estimate is that it is 3,380 km wide, about 1-1/2 times the diameter of Pluto.
. . If it's not a planet, it is not No. 10, other astronomers say. Some astronomers view it as a Kuiper [KOY-per] Belt object and not a planet.
July 29, 05: Astronomers found a large object in the Solar System's outer reaches. It's being hailed as "a great discovery". Details are still sketchy. It never comes closer to the Sun than Neptune and spends most of its time much further out than Pluto. It is one of the largest objects ever found in the outer Solar System.
. . It also has a moon --one of several objects out there now known to have a satellite. The main object in the two-body system, designated as 2003 EL61, is 32% as massive as Pluto and is estimated to be about 70% of Pluto's diameter. The mass estimate is very firm, within 1 or 2%.
. . Brown figures 2003 EL61 has a diameter of around 1,500 km. Sedna is between 1,300 and 1,800 km in diameter. Pluto --so far the largest KBO-- is about 2,250 km across. [I'd hoped it was bigger than Pluto, just to quell the nonsense that Pluto was called a planet.]
. . It is significantly inclined to the main plane of the solar system where all of the planets travel. The moon around 2003 EL61 is small, making up only about 1% of the mass of the system.
Aug 10, 05: Scientists have spotted a planetisimal with more than one moon --the first discovery of its kind. Astronomers found a second moonlet orbiting 87 Sylvia, zooming around the sun in the "asteroid" belt. It was previously thought to be one of 60 with just one moon. It may even have more, smaller satellites.
Aug 3, 05: Scientists peering through a ground-based telescope say the surface of Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan appears dry and not awash in oceans of liquid hydrocarbons as is commonly believed.
The emergence of separate races happened relatively recently - by some estimates, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
July 19, 05: The Southwest has been gripped by a deadly heat wave. A new high for the date was set y'day in Las Vegas: 116 degrees. In Phoenix, where eight deaths have been blamed on the heat, the mercury hit 116 Sunday, eclipsing the date's previous record of 114 set in 1936. In Bullhead City, Arizona, the thermometer climbed to 124 on Sunday. Death Valley topped out at 128 degrees Monday, a level not reached for many decades. A similar high was expected Tuesday. Over the past few years, overnight lows in Phoenix have been climbing. This time of year, the coolest part of the early morning is sometimes still in the 90s. New York state, sticky-hot today, had its warmest June on record. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Vermont it was the second warmest June.
. . But... there are few summers when new record highs *aren't set. What about a wider area? The average temperature across the contiguous United States last month was 0.9 degrees above the 1895-2004 mean --actually a lot more significant than it seems. In June, the average global temperature for combined land and ocean surfaces was 1.1 degrees above the 1880-2004 long-term mean, according to NOAA. It was the second warmest global June since 1880. Planet-wide, 2004 was fourth warmest year ever recorded. And global climate mechanisms already in place led scientists to predict back in February that this year will likely be the warmest ever.
July 17, 05: Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce. Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce.
. . But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29% more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45% more energy; and for wood, 57%.
. . It takes 27% more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel; and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy. [Ahem!! ONCE AGAIN: HYDROGEN IS NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY!! ...any more than a battery is.]
. . The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, said Pimentel. The study also omitted $3 billion in state and federal government subsidies that go toward ethanol production in the United States each year, payments that mask the true [even higher] costs, Pimentel said.
July 16, 05: A new survey on religious beliefs found half of all American adults believe in ghosts, almost a third believe in astrology and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation. [What's wrong with us?!]
. . 51% of the public, including 58% of women, believe in ghosts, according to a Harris Poll. 31% of the public believe in astrology, including 36% of women, and 27% believe in reincarnation. Among the younger group, 65% believe in ghosts, while just 27% of the seniors hold that belief. 43% of those aged 25 to 29 believe in astrology, but only 17% of people aged 65 and over, and 25% of men.
. . Belief in reincarnation is held by 40% of people aged 25 to 29 but only 14% of people aged 65 and over. [ See /sci-nus.html -the psychology section.]
July 8, 05: A parrot has grasped the concept of zero [!] , something humans can't do until at least the toddler phase, researchers say. Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says "none." Zero is thought to be a rather abstract concept even for people. Children typically don't grasp it until age three or four.
July 6, 05: German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said. "Firstly, we will learn a lot about the Neanderthals. Secondly, we will learn a lot about the uniqueness of human beings. And thirdly, it's simply cool", Rubin said.
July 1, 05: The British government launched a series of tough anti-cigarette adverts Friday with the message that smoking is bad for your sex life because it makes men impotent and women ugly. The campaign is designed to target young Britons' fears about their sexual attractiveness --an area the government says is more effective than highlighting general health concerns.
. . "We know 70% of smokers want to stop smoking, however, with younger people, fears about attractiveness and fertility can be a stronger motivation to quit than fears about health", said Public Health Minister Caroline Flint. The government says smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by around 50% for men in their 30s and 40s and that up to 120,000 British men in this age group were impotent as a result of smoking.
. . A recent survey by NHS Smoking Helpline also found two-thirds of young men and women, and over half of smokers, said smoking reduced sexual attractiveness.
June 28, 05: Many scientists at NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for balancing hydroelectric dams against endangered salmon, say they know of cases where scientific findings were altered at the request of commercial interests, according to a survey released today by two watchdog groups --the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The survey posed 34 questions and was sent to 460 NOAA Fisheries scientists across the country. Responses came back from 124, or 27%.
. . "The conclusion is that political interference is a serious problem at NOAA Fisheries", Lexis Schulz, Washington representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said from Washington.
Among the findings:
. . - 58% of respondents said they knew of cases where high-level
Commerce Department appointees or managers inappropriately altered NOAA Fisheries determinations.
. . • 53% said they were aware of cases in which commercial interests inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of NOAA Fisheries scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.
. . • 13% said they knew of cases where environmental interests inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of NOAA Fisheries scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.
. . • 44% said NOAA Fisheries routinely makes determinations using its best scientific judgment, even when political pressure is applied, while 37% disagreed.
June 27, 05: A genetically engineered virus may offer the first effective vaccine against Lassa fever, a sometimes deadly hemorrhagic fever common in West Africa, U.S. and Canadian scientists said. The vaccine successfully protected four monkeys against Lassa.
. . Lassa is a hemorrhagic virus like Ebola, Marburg and yellow fever but is far less likely to be fatal. It is, however, far more common than Ebola or Marburg.
June 4, 05: Altering a single gene in a fruit fly can turn its sexual orientation around, causing male flies to lose interest in females, and females to display male mating rituals to other females, according to a study published in the journal Cell
. . The research by Barry J. Dickson and Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences into the workings of a "switch gene" touched on the scientific debate about whether genes or environment determine human sexual orientation.
Did you know that there was even a marsupial that looked like a Rhino?!! See Evolution news page for a pic!
DEVOLUTION --by H. ALLEN ORR
Why "intelligent design" isn't.
. . New Yorker, issue of 05-30, 05
See the file.
May 23, 05: A new map highlights spots where there is enough wind to provide electricity to the whole world --and then some. In putting together a global and U.S. map, researchers found wind power could provide 40 times more electricity than is needed worldwide. Scientists gathered wind speed data from about 8,000 locations on the planet - 7,500 surface stations and 500 balloon-launch stations.
May 12, 05: Many fish species in the North Sea are steadily moving northwards to escape warming waters. Commercially important fish such as cod, whiting and anglerfish have shifted significantly north, while some other species moved to colder depths. Scientists warn that some fish may disappear from the North Sea by 2050.
May 11, 05: This makes 47! The international Cassini spacecraft has spied a tiny new moon hidden in a gap in Saturn's outer ring, scientists said.
. . Jupiter is the planet with the most moons, 63 at the last count. Uranus has 27 and Neptune 13. With Mars' 2, = 150 even. (Luna not a moon; Pluto not a planet)
May 10, 05: A compound taken from male sweat stimulates the brains of gay men and straight women but not heterosexual men, raising yet again the possibility that homosexual brains are different, researchers in Sweden reported. It also strengthens the evidence that humans respond to pheromones --compounds known to affect animal behavior, especially mating behavior, but whose role in human activity has been questioned. The pheromone in question is a derivative of testosterone called 4,16-androstadien-3-one, or AND.
. . In a previous study, Ivanka Savic of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and colleagues found that the hypothalamus region of the brain became activated when women smelled AND and when men smelled a corresponding compound in female urine called EST.
. . This time, they compared the reactions of 12 women, 12 heterosexual men and 12 homosexual men. They let them smell EST, AND, and ordinary odors such as lavender, and used positron emission tomography to watch their brain responses. "In contrast to heterosexual men, and in congruence with heterosexual women, homosexual men displayed hypothalamic activation in response to AND."
. . A region of the brain called the anterior hypothalamus responded most strongly --an area that in animals "is highly involved in sexual behavior." But other smells were processed the same in all three groups. "These findings show that our brain reacts differently to the two putative pheromones compared with common odors, and suggest a link between sexual orientation and hypothalamic neuronal processes", Savic's team wrote.
Apr 15, 05: Mandatory limits on all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases would not significantly affect average economic growth rates across the country through 2025, the government says. That finding by the Energy Information Administration, an independent arm of the Energy Department, runs counter to President Bush's repeated pronouncements that limits on carbon dioxide and other gases that warm the atmosphere like a greenhouse would seriously harm the U.S. economy.
Mar 31, 05: Four tablets of regular strength aspirin each day do a better job at safely preventing small strokes caused by narrowed arteries in the brain than the potent blood thinner warfarin, researchers say. Patients on warfarin must have their blood tested regularly.
Nearly all (91% of) trash trucks in the United States get about 3 miles per gallon running on diesel fuel that produces highly toxic exhaust.
Mar 24, 05: A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dug out of a hunk of sandstone has yielded soft tissue, including blood vessels and perhaps even whole cells, U.S. researchers reported. Paleontologists forced to break the creature's massive thighbone to get it on a helicopter. "They're transparent, they're flexible."
. ...and in some cases, their contents could be squeezed out. "The microstructures that look like cells are preserved in every way. Preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before." Feathers, hair and fossilized egg contents yes, but not truly soft tissue.
Mar 17, 05: Even if people stopped pumping out carbon dioxide and other pollutants tomorrow, global warming would still get worse, two teams of researchers reported. Sea levels will rise more than they have already risen, worsening the damage caused by extreme high tides and storm surges, and droughts, heat waves and storms will become more severe, the climate experts predicted. That makes immediate action to slow global warming even more vital, the teams at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado report. "The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future."
. . Virtually no one disagrees human activity is fueling global warming. [note the change in phrasing lately!]
Mar 15, 05: The Bush administration issued the nation's first regulations to cut mercury pollution from electric utilities, relying on a market trading system that gives companies 15 years to reduce it nearly by half.
. . The Environmental Protection Agency's regulations are aimed at reducing levels of a toxic chemical that can severely damage nervous systems, especially in fetuses and children. They result from a lawsuit brought by an environmental group 13 years ago.
. . [So, by the time this emergency is HALF fixed the way it shuda been immediately, it'll be... what? 28 years?! ]
Feb 27, 05: There’s already indirect evidence that Jupiter-sized worlds have been ejected from some of the extrasolar planetary systems we’ve discovered in the last decade. The clue is that large planets in these systems often have highly elliptical orbits. (escape velocities are 41% higher than orbital velocities.)
. . How often does this happen? "I don’t know what fraction of planets will be tossed out", Lin admits. "But I would imagine the fraction is probably pretty high; in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 50%." If that’s the case, then orphan planets could be more numerous than stars! In our own galaxy alone, there would be hundreds of billions of these wandering worlds.
Sulfur hexafluoride, is estimated to be 23,900 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. It's used to give bounce to some sports shoes, tennis balls or car tires.
Feb 16, 05: Global warming may cost Spain many of its famous beaches and could push summer temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) by the end of the century.
Feb 7, 05: The Seven Deadly Sins --anger, gluttony, sloth, envy, pride, lust and greed-- are out of date and should include cruelty, adultery and bigotry, the results of an opinion poll suggest. Greed is the only one of the seven that should remain a sin in today's Britain, according to the poll for BBC tv's "Heaven and Earth" program.
. . Cruelty was ranked the worst sin by 39% of respondents, followed by adultery (11%), bigotry (8%), dishonesty (7%), hypocrisy (6%), greed (6%) and selfishness (5%).
. . Of the 1,001 adults interviewed, only 9% said they had not committed any of the sins. [yah, right]
. . 79% said they were guilty of anger --while 41% of men and 26% of women said lust was the sin they "most enjoy committing".
Feb 7, 05: Bird flu could kill 1.5 billion people! That's the worst-case scenario.
Feb 2, 05: Theoretical triggers are the apocalyptic side to global warming, giving the lie to the common perception of it as an incremental threat that will rise predictably, like a straight line on a graph, which means humans would have enough time to respond to the crisis and plants and animals have a better chance of adapting to its effects.
. . But scientists at a conference on global warming say there is also the risk of sudden, catastrophic, irreversible and uncontrollable climate change that could be triggered in as-yet unknown conditions.
Feb 1, 05: Research reveals a semantically complex rule that seems to guide adolescent sexual conduct. Here goes: A girl is loath to date her old boyfriend's new girlfriend's old boyfriend. Adults don't generally adhere to any similar rule.
Jan 24, 05: Global warming is approaching the point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea levels will be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned. The independent report was made by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the US, & the Australia Institute.
Jan 24, 05: San Francisco may become the first city in the nation to charge shoppers for grocery bags. The city's Commission on the Environment is expected to ask the mayor and board of supervisors Tuesday to consider a 17-cent per bag charge on paper and plastic grocery bags. While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution, paper was added so as not to discriminate. Officials calculate that the city spends 5.2 cents per bag annually for street litter pickup and 1.4 cents per bag for extra recycling costs.
Jan 12, 05: The normally ferocious Russian winter, the bane of invaders from Napoleon to Hitler, has been unusually mild this year with temperatures hitting record seasonal highs. The Winter That Wasn't. "In the year 2100, according to our climate models, there will be 50 fewer days of frost. In practical terms, we won't have winter anymore." Months of mostly dry, sunny weather have brought drought conditions to parts of Portugal, parching farmland and leaving some reservoirs at 15% of capacity. Belgium had its warmest Jan. 10 on record, when the mercury peaked at 57.2 degrees in Brussels. In normally chilly Norway, meteorologists said the first six days of January were the warmest on record since 1938 in Oslo.
. . Birds also seemed to have been tricked into thinking spring has sprung. One species that usually doesn't start singing until late February already was heard in the eastern Beskydy Mountains, and flamingos at a zoo in Jihlava, 75 miles southeast of Prague, were building nests — something they normally don't do until April.
Jan 4, 05: One indication of growing Human Rights acceptance comes from the California Department of Health Services, which is updating its birth certificates to replace the lines for "mother" and "father" with the gender-neutral "parent" and "parent."
. . Same-sex couples in California for the first time will have access to divorce court for dividing their assets, seeking alimony and securing child support. They also will have automatic parental status over children born during the relationship and responsibility for each other's debts. It guarantees domestic partners a say over what happens to their loved one's remains at death and means they cannot be forced to testify against each other in state courts.
Dec 23, 04: Johannesburg zoo plans to artificially inseminate a pair of female birds who appear to be lovers to help boost dwindling numbers of the endangered wattled crane species, it said. Staff at the zoo assumed Cherry and Amazona were lovers when they arrived earlier this year and charmed visitors with typical mating rituals --including dancing, serenading one another with song and tossing sticks into the air.
Dec 25, 04: Researchers have found a number of same-sex pairs of penguins at aquariums in Japan. A research group led by Keisuke Ueda, professor of behavioral ecology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, found about 20 same-sex pairs at 16 major aquariums and zoos. It is not known if the frequency of homosexuality is higher than in the wild, where telling penguin sexes apart is tough. Many of the gay male pairs and two of the female pairs were seen performing mounting behavior.
Dec 17, 04: Richard Smalley, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1996, believes that the global energy situation "may be a greater challenge for us than the Cold War" and that the consequences of ignoring the problem will be terrorism, pestilence, famine.
. . Earth's 6 billion people now consume about 14.5 terawatt/hours of energy a day --the equivalent of about 150 million barrels of oil. By 2050, the world's population will rise to 10 billion, and energy demand will rise to between 30 terawatts and 60 terawatt/hrs/day (450 million to 900 million barrels of oil a day), according to United Nations data. Unfortunately, oil production will likely peak by 2020 and start declining. Without a change, developing countries will ultimately be left in the dark, and developed countries will struggle to keep the lights on. Conflict is inevitable.
. . None of the roughly 500 scientists in the room voiced disagreement with Nur's view of the potential for war. If the world is sliding toward global conflict over oil, the skids may be pretty well greased, politically speaking.
. . Governments do not have the political will to prepare for the end of oil, says Goodstein, the Caltech physicist. "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime this century, when the fuel runs out", Goodstein said, adding that "I certainly hope my prediction is wrong." See the file.
UK researchers have collected the first hard evidence of monkeys using tools.
According to U.N. estimates, about 2.3 billion people in about 50 nations will be saddled with severe water shortages by 2020 because of global warming. The growing water crisis will only be aggravated by the melting of mountain glaciers across the world, which experts say can account for as much as 95% of water in river networks.
Work in early '04 showed that our sense of disgust has evolved to protect us from disease. That sense of hygiene, said Greene, might be the basis for so-called higher senses, such as moral feelings.
. . "Everything that evolves is a modified version of something else that already evolved", said Greene.
Nov 29, 04: The weather predictions for Asia in 2050 read like a script from a doomsday movie. Except many climatologists and green groups fear they will come true unless there is a concerted global effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. In the decades to come, Asia --home to more than half the world's 6.3 billion people-- will lurch from one climate extreme to another, with impoverished farmers battling droughts, floods, disease, food shortages and rising sea levels. Already, changes are being felt in Asia but worse is likely to come.
Nov 24, 04: India has dropped a plan to bar politicians with more than two children from fighting elections for parliament or state legislatures, saying it does not want to use force to control the population. The health ministry will withdraw a bill pending in parliament for more than a decade and aimed at encouraging new elected representatives to limit their families, so setting an example for the rest of the country.
Nov 24, 04: Gas-guzzling "sport" utility vehicles should be forced to sport labels just like cigarette packs announcing their terrible health and environmental impact, a British think tank said.
Nov 12, 04: Earlier this year, science teachers howled when state Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed a new science curriculum that dropped the word "evolution" in favor of "changes over time." That plan was quickly dropped, but comic Jimmy Fallon still cracked wise on "Saturday Night Live": "As a compromise, dinosaurs are now called `Jesus Horses'."
Oct 27, 04: Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island. The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave, is of an adult female that was a meter tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans. It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. They expect to discover more new species of hominids on neighboring islands. See the news-file.
Oct 12, 04: The world faces a surge in extreme weather events because of global warming and governments must act immediately to avert disaster, Britain's chief scientist said. "Already we are witnessing increased storms at sea and floods in our cities", David King said. "Global warming will increase the level and frequency at which we experience heightened weather patterns. Action is affordable. Inaction is not."
Sept 23, 04: Glaciers in West Antarctica are discharging 60% more ice into the sea than they are accumulating from snowfall. The glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea are thinning twice as fast as they did in the 1990s. Global sea level rise has been estimated at 1.8 millimeter per year.
Sept 21, 04: Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are peering into the atomic world with record clarity, their electron microscope image can distinguish the individual, dumbbell-shaped atoms of a silicon crystal.
Sept 20, 04: A court in China's southern boomtown of Shenzhen has fined a couple $94,250 and sealed off their house for having more than one child. The pair were among nine couples who were fined "social fostering fees" for their extra children, the newspaper said. They had their first boy in 1997 and last year had twin boys.
. . With approximately 1.3 billion people, China is the world's most populous nation. It has stringent rules on family planning that allow couples usually to have just one child, at least in cities, and limit numbers elsewhere.
Sept 17, 04: Mussels have been found growing on the seabed just 800 miles from the North Pole in a likely sign of global warming, scientists said. The blue mussels, which normally favor warmer waters like off France or the eastern United States, were discovered off Norway's Svalbard archipelago in waters that are covered with ice most of the year.
Sept 9, 04: Conservationists concerned about the extinction of plants and animals may be overlooking the danger to thousands of other species that depend on the threatened ones. A team of researchers in Singapore studied some 12,200 plants and animals considered threatened or endangered, and calculated that an additional 6,300 dependent insects, mites, fungi and other species could be considered endangered.
. . If the 114 endangered primates were to go extinct, they said, there could also be the loss of 20 types of nematodes, 12 lice and nine fungi to depend on the primates.
Sept 6, 04: Beauty may not be just in the eye of the beholder after all because a sense of visual attraction is hardwired in the brain at birth, a British scientist said. Psychologist Alan Slater told a science conference that babies can recognize their mother from as little as 15 hours after birth and also show a preference for looking at photographs of physically attractive people.
. . Infants show several spontaneous visual preferences. They like to watch moving rather than stationary objects, prefer to look at 3-D stimuli, and find faces fascinating. When given a choice of two facial photographs to look at, babies usually prefer and spend more time gazing at the person who is better-looking. [I must say that there's still the Q of what standard the researchers used to define looks!]
Sept 2, 04: An explosion of soyabean farming in South America is threatening huge areas of forest and grassland containing some of the world's richest and most diverse wildlife, a leading conservation group said. The Swiss-based WWF said on current trends 54 million acres --the natural habitat of the jaguar and anteater-- would be plowed by 2020 and planted with the crop, which is used mainly for animal feed.
Aug 27, 04: Warmer temperatures in North America since 1950 were likely caused in part by human activities, the Bush administration said in a report that seems to contradict the White House position there was no clear scientific proof on the causes of global warming. "North American temperature changes from 1950 to 1999 were unlikely to be due only to natural climate variations", the report said.
Aug 26, 04: Revenge feels sweet, and Swiss researchers said they have the brain scans to prove it. Investigators said might help explain how social norms arose and regulate behavior, brain centers linked to enjoyment and satisfaction lit up in young men who punished others for cheating them.
. . That instinct probably evolved to grease the wheels of human social interaction, the researchers said. "For thousands of years, human societies did not have the modern institutions of law enforcement --impartial police and impartial judges that ensure the punishment of norm violations such as cheating in an economic exchange, for example", they wrote. "Thus, social norms had to be enforced by other measures, and private sanctions were one of these means."
July 29, 04: Two strange new species of worms, without eyes or stomachs or even mouths, have been discovered living on the bones of dead whales in California's Monterey Bay. The unexpected discovery was made about 9,400 feet below the surface
. . All the worms found eating the whale bones were females, BUT...they discovered tiny male worms living inside the females. There were as many as 50 to 100 males within each female. The males still contained bits of yolk, as if they had never developed past their larval stage, but they also contained large amounts of sperm. The female worms, regardless of size, were full of eggs.
July 25, 04: Changes in the Dutch climate because of global warming have meant dozens of plant types normally found in warmer areas are now growing wild in the country. A catalog of plants growing wild found 50 varieties introduced here over the last seven years --some from as far away as Africa.
. . Global warming and the accompanying rising oceans is a particularly significant issue to the Netherlands, as half of it lies below sea level.
July 6, 04: A scientist is studying what she calls the "cross-dressing" sexual antics of cuttlefish off the coast of southern Australia. The smaller cuttlefish change their body color —-making larger males believe they are females-— to avoid being chased away. The larger males do not consider them a threat, giving the smaller cuttlefish a chance to quickly revert to their normal color and mate with females.
July 6, 04: Old people may hold the key to human civilization, U.S. researchers said today. They found evidence that, around 30,000 years ago, many more people started living into old age, in turn fueling a population explosion. They believe that groups in which old people survived better were more successful, in turn allowing more people to live into old age. [positive feedback & synergy. See evolnuz.html]
July 1, 04: A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said. The little skull clearly belongs to an adult and was found last summer at a site where much larger hominids classified as Homo erectus lived, said Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution.
. . It is the smallest adult fossil found, dating back to the time of Homo erectus, the species of pre-human that dominated between 500,000 and 1.7 million years ago.
June 29, 04: Marc Imhoff, lead researcher on a study at NASA, found that the global population consumes about 20% of the world's plant life annually, which includes agricultural products for food and lumber for fuel, paper and other goods. North America, for example, consumes the amount it can produce locally --about 24% of its annual plant production. Highly populated Western Europe and South Central Asia, on the other hand, each consume 70% of the greenery they produce. North Americans, for example, consume up to four times per person than their counterparts in China.
. . Increased efficiency in food harvesting, as well as wood processing and paper recycling, could prevent excessive over consumption of resources. For example, industrialized nations can produce one ton of milled lumber from 1.3 tons of raw trees, whereas developing nations require at least two tons of raw materials due to less efficient technology.
]June 21, 04: Farmers of the world must shift quickly to growing plants for industrial uses such as oils and plastics to replace petrochemicals as the climate warms and crude supplies run out, British scientists said. "In the next 20 to 50 years, we have to reverse our dependency on fossil fuels." Not only is oil running out, but the world's population is predicted to grow sharply over the next half century and has to be fed. This will put huge strains on the world's economy.
June 16, 04: A doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere could triple the intensity of the heat island effect, according to a new study.
June 16, 04: The world is turning to dust, with lands the
size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the UN says.
. . One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk,
driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in
vast swaths of Africa. 31% of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert —-an area the size of Indiana-— since the 1950s.
"In the next 100 years, unless immediate action is taken, carbon dioxide levels will rise to between 800 and 1,000 ppm. The last time CO2 was that high was 55 to 36 million years ago", Schrag added. At that time, "palm trees
lived in Wyoming, crocodiles lived in the Arctic, Antarctica was a pine forest and sea level was at least 300 feet higher than today."
May 19, 04: A thawing of vast ice-like deposits of gas under oceans and in permafrost could sharply accelerate global warming in the 21st century, British-based
scientists said. Rising temperatures could break down buried mixtures of water, methane and other gases --called gas hydrates-- and release them into the atmosphere where they would trap the sun's heat, they said.
. . A big release of methane could speed up global
warming far beyond the levels already forecast in current models.
May 10, 04: The Indian Ocean could lose most of its coral
islands in the next 50 years if sea temperatures continue
to rise and reefs badly damaged by global warming do not
recover, a marine scientist said. Many coral reef organisms
can only tolerate a narrow range of environmental
conditions. Global warming triggered the death of between
50 and 98% of coral reefs in a region stretching
from northern Mozambique to Eritrea to Indonesia in 1998 [The hottest year yet].
Apr 30, 04: Women in South Africa whose partners are
violent and domineering have a 50% increased risk of
being infected with AIDS, scientists said. More than one in
five pregnant women are infected with HIV in most countries in southern Africa.
Apr 10, 04: About one-sixth of Brazil's Amazon forests
have been destroyed since the 1970s.
Apr 15, 04: Delicate shell beads dating back 75,000 years
are the latest evidence that humans started to act modern
almost as soon as they started to look modern, scientists
said. The findings nearly double the era of intellectually modern humans.
Apr 7, 04: Men who ejaculate frequently may be protecting
themselves against prostate cancer. The study, which
involved more than 29,000 healthy men and covered sex of all kinds including masturbation and nocturnal emissions, confirms a smaller Australian study.
. . (July 17, 03: Research by Australia's Cancer Council
Victoria found that the more often men ejaculate between
the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to suffer
the disease that kills more than half a million men each year.
. . The survey of 1,079 prostate cancer patients and
1,259 healthy men found that those who masturbated or had
sex at least once a day in their 20s were a third less likely to develop the malady.)
Mar 18, 04: Chee!! Half of all Bulgarians believe in black magic,
telepathy and the ability to read the future in dreams,
according to the results of a survey by the Gallup institute.
20% believe that ghosts exist, that black cats are unlucky
and that it is possible to make contact with the dead. 33%
said they believed in horoscopes, that the number 13 has
special powers, and that a broken mirror brings bad luck.
. . Respondents in their 30s and 40s, who experienced
the switch to a market economy, are among the most psychologically vulnerable and therefore most likely to hold superstitious beliefs, she added.
Mar 8, 04: Researchers who found homosexual rams in a herd
of sheep said they had found changes in the brains of the
"gay" animals. The results, published in the latest issue
of the Journal Endocrinology, tend to support studies in humans that have found anatomical differences between the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual men.
. . "This particular study, along with others,
strongly suggests that sexual preference is biologically
determined in animals, and possibly in humans."
. . Animal experts have found that about 8%
of domestic rams display preferences for other males as sexual partners. "Same-sex attraction is widespread across many different species."
. . They found a densely packed cluster of nerve
cells in the hypothalamus of the sheep brain, which they
named the ovine sexually dimorphic nucleus or oSDN.
The hypothalamus regulates sex hormone secretion, blood
pressure, body temperature, water balance, and food intake,
and also helps regulate complex behaviors such as sexual behavior.
. . The oSDN in rams that preferred females was
"significantly" larger and contained more neurons than in
male-oriented rams and in ewes. There were also hormonal
differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual sheep.
Mar 1, 04: They've found that the queen ant coats her eggs with a chemical called a pheromone that prevents worker ants from laying their own eggs.
. . The researchers analyzed the surface of the queen-laid eggs and found they contain a special hydrocarbon blend, very similar to that found on the body of the queen herself. Adding the chemical blend to the surface of worker-laid eggs prevented the ants from destroying these eggs.
Feb 22, 04: A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater threat than
terrorism. The report was ordered by an influential US
Pentagon advisor but was covered up by "US defense chiefs"
for four months, until it was "obtained" by the British weekly The Observer.
. . The Pentagon report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, predicts that "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a
nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water
and energy supplies."
. . The report concluded: "Disruption and conflict
will be endemic features of life.... Once again, warfare
would define human life." Its authors said climate change
should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue.
Feb 22, 04: Australia's Great Barrier Reef will lose most
of its coral cover by 2050 and, at worst, the world's largest coral system could collapse by 2100 because of global warming, a new study said.
Feb 13, 04: All dogs originated from a single species, probably an East Asian wolf seeking the warmth of the human hearth and an easy meal. "We think there was a series of domestication events in East Asia", said Norine E. Noonan, at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. "It happened a lot longer ago than anybody once thought —-at least 100,000 years ago."
Feb 12, 04: Brain imaging studies suggest that the same genetic variations that give people hostile personality traits may also make them more likely to become addicted to
nicotine, the team at the University of California Irvine
reported. "We call this brain response a 'born to smoke' pattern."
Feb 4, 04: The population of oceanic whitetip shark, once among the world's most common tropical sharks, has plummeted by 99% since the 1950s and the species is
nearly extinct in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists reported.
The study blamed overfishing, and called for new restrictions.
Jan 13, 04: The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on
Earth —-levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues
of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste!
Jan 12, 04: "Borneo and Sumatra, home to the world's last orangutans, have lost a staggering 91% of their populations over the past 100 years", WWF-UK said. (World Wildlife Fund) "There are now fewer than 30,000 orangutans left and it is likely that they will become extinct in the wild in as little as 20 years' time if this decline
continues." Almost 80% of the orangutans' forest habitat in Malaysia and Indonesia has been destroyed by commercial logging and clearance for oil-palm plantations.
Dec 28, 03: Neandertals were shedding their sturdy physique and evolving in the direction of modern humans just before they disappeared from the fossil record. (See /evol-nuz.html)
Dec 20, 03: Failure. The U.S. population grew by 2.8 million in the past year and is edging toward 300 million, a threshold that should be reached within four years.
Dec 11, 03: Almost half of Germans are cheating on, or has cheated on, their partner, according to a new survey. A November survey of 1,059 men and women aged between 20 and 60 by the Hamburg-based GEWIS research institute for "Stern" magazine showed 51% of men and 43% of women said they had cheated at least once on their partner.
. . Of the self-confessed cheats, some 61% of women and 47% of men said their transgressions came from a lack of love or interest shown by their partner.
Dec 11, 03: Global warming killed 150,000 people in 2000,
and the death toll could double again in the next 30 years
if current trends are not reversed, the World Health Organization said.
Dec 5, 03: French women continued to be among the most
fertile in Europe, giving birth to an average 1.89 children per couple, just behind the contraceptive-shy Irish with 1.97 children. [Still... not bad.]
Dec 5, 03: A French legal contract that allows two people --of the same sex or not-- to enjoy nearly the same rights as under marriage, has proven wildly popular, with the
number signed this year soaring, the state demographics institute said.
. . More than 15,000 of the contracts --called PaCS, for Civil Solidarity Pacts-- were signed in the first half of this year.
. . The number of traditional marriages, in contrast, has fallen in recent years.
Nov 26, 03: An American surgeon who has patented a device that triggers an orgasm has begun a clinical trial approved by the FDA in the U.S. and is looking for female
volunteers. So far, only one woman has completed the first
stage of the trial, but with apparently breathtaking results. He stumbled on the unexpected side-effect while using a spinal cord stimulator a few years ago. When Meloy placed the electrodes into a specific spot on her spine to
find nerve bundles carrying pain signals to the brain, she moaned with delight.
Oct 24, 03: There were 562 tornadoes in the United States
in May '03, more than any month on record.
Oct 10, 03: The lives of Roman Catholics in some of the
countries worst hit by HIV/AIDS are being put at even
greater risk by ignorant advice from their churches that the use of condoms does not prevent transmission of the disease, according to a British television program.
. . The World Health Organization, guardian watchdog
of global well-being, rejected the Vatican view. "These
incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous
when we are facing a global pandemic which has already
killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million."
Sept 30, 03: About 160,000 people die every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said. The study, by scientists at the
World Health Organization (WHO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing nations seemed most vulnerable.
July 8, 03: Gary Brase --University of Sunderland, UK--
looked at jealousy in many countries and found the expected
differences between men and women. He found that the
biggest difference between men and women was in Brazil; the
smallest in Japan. Another finding was that Swedish women
were the most concerned about their partners having sex with someone else.
. . Looking deeper into his survey, Brase noticed that the fertility rate of the country seemed to make a big difference. In countries with high rates, like Brazil, men were very jealous about their partners having sex with others. Men in countries with a lower overall fertility rate, such as Japan, were less bothered. Brase believes the results support the evolutionary view of the origin of jealous behavior.
May 22, 03: A study of a common wild mouse in the Chicago
area suggests evolution can occur surprisingly fast, in
about 150 years. Because the evolutionary change coincides with the urbanization of the Chicago area, the researchers said humans may have changed the local environment, spurring the high-speed evolution. Such fast evolutionary change has been shown in fruit flies, but this is the first time it's been shown to occur in mammals.
May 28, 03: Handsome men produce the best quality semen
and beautiful women seem to have good voices, according to scientists. See /sex.html
May 2, 03: Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing who said God called her to her work, "heard voices" & suffered from bipolar disorder, a mental health expert said. Dr. Kathy Wisner, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, cited the note as evidence that Nightingale suffered from a bipolar disorder that caused long periods of depression and remarkable bursts of productivity.
. . Since 1995, the University of Maryland School of
Medicine has had a conference to diagnose the ills of historic figures.
Apr 30, 03: Horrible news: they may develop a new rice
that'll provide food for more people in Asia. (What we DON'T need are more people!!)
About 6 to 7% of the electricity generated in the United States gets lost along the way to consumers, partly due to the resistance of transmission lines.
Of the 1,170 human societies cataloged in Murdock's
Ethnographic Atlas, over 72% permit multi-spouse relationships.
Mar 6, 03: Richard G. Klein of Stanford University said modern studies of mitochondrial DNA from Neandertal fossils suggest that the modern humans and the Neandertals had a common ancestor about 500,000 years ago. But he said
the studies do not support the notion that there was interbreeding after modern humans evolved in Africa and invaded Neandertal habitats, starting about 45,000 years ago.
. . He said modern humans may have evolved a gene promoting speech and language that the Neandertals lacked, but this is a theory without substantial proof.
85% of natural gas consumed in the United States is produced domestically; nearly all the rest is from Canada. The 130,000 CNG vehicles on U.S. roads last year displaced 124 million gallons of gasoline. The Sierra Club calculates
that if the fuel economy average of 20.8 mpg were raised to
40 mpg, it would save upwards of 3 million barrels of oil a day. Largely because of the popularity of gas-guzzling "sport" utility vehicles, the average fuel economy of the 2003 fleet of cars sank 6% below the peak set 15 years ago.
Drops of liquid light -—an entirely new form of matter—- would have many of the properties of liquid water, including surface tension.
10% of our oil supply goes to jet fuel!
. OIL. Look at the chart in the May-00
Popular Science mag, p56. It shows how drastically world
oil consumption will have to drop come 2015. It's sudden &
precipitous! Plan when you'll buy what car! Any gasoline
car, especially a S.tupid U.seless V.ehicle, bought a month
before the collapse, will be doubly Useless! An ugly driveway ornament.
. Oil-field discoveries peaked in the 60s. More than
90% of today's oil comes from fields found more than 20 years ago.
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