Someone please tell me if I'm missing something.
The New York Times reported last week that on October 22, India launched its first unmanned spacecraft to orbit the moon.
The craft is expected to remain in space for two years. During that time, it will do something undeniably cool:
prepare a 3-D atlas of the moon.
The other part of its mission, however, is something I find pretty unsettling:
and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.
Because the Times piece focuses so much on the accelerating competition between India and China for their shares of space race-related prestige and economic opportunity, that surreal sentence seems to fade into the...
Dennis Meadows, in an email discussing computer models, suggested that beyond their obvious functions, computer models often have one or more of the following purposes:
#1: Provide useful information about the future behavior or the future coefficient values of some system.
#2: Attract money that is mainly going to be used for purposes other than building a model - overhead, salaries, proposal writing.
#3: Cause the model builder to become respected as an expert by others, so they will ask his or her advice. This often involves publishing the model in some respected journal.
#4: Provide a disciplined learning environment within which the model builder actually does become an expert.
#5: Generate results and computer output that can be used to justify or illustrate ideas and...
A shipment of forest timber traveled around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean before it arrived at the Hong Kong dockyards two years ago. During a routine X-ray examination, customs officials discovered an even more lucrative cargo hidden behind a false wall: 605 elephant tusks.
The $8 million seizure was the largest ivory catch in Hong Kong since a 1989 agreement banned the international ivory trade. Ivory seizures are on the rise, particularly in Southeast Asia; the Hong Kong catch was only about half the size of the largest in recent years. At least 68 tons of ivory have been confiscated over the past decade. The cause: illegal ivory has quadrupled in value since 2004, and anti-poaching resources are typically stretched thin.
Law enforcement officials...
Several things I've meant to blog on and haven't:
The Bonobo Conservation Initiative, which is not only saving our awesome laid-back, sexed-up little cousins, but is being smart about it, by building a network of local bonobo-supported villages, with outreach, jobs, microenterprise programs, a local technical college, cultural preservation help and a free clinic. And it's working: they've been instrumental in the designation of the Reserve Naturelle du Sankuru, a new 11,803 square mile reserve in the Tshuapa and Lomami river basins of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These folks deserve your money.
Wind-fueled supergrid could cut Europe's CO2 emissions by a quarter: "The supergrid would draw power from massed turbines in a band of countries to Europe's south and east that have...
by Clark Williams-Derry
Brain research suggests a link between money and social standing., from Sightline Daily
I've been trying to work this tidbit into a post for weeks, but I haven't found an opportune moment. So here's the news straight up: new studies suggest that a single part of the brain evaluates both money and social status.
Sadato and colleagues conducted fMRI scans of the brains of 19 subjects
while they engaged in two different exercises. The first task was a
simple game in which participants had to choose one of three cards in
the hope of winning a cash prize. In the second game, fictional
evaluators appraised volunteers' characters based on the results of
personality trait questionnaires. The researchers found that the
striatum activated in...
One of the Worldchanging slogans is "We've inherited a broken future." That is to say, mainly, that the direction in which we're headed leads right over a cliff. But it might be read a different way: that many of the biggest legacies left humanity by our parents, grandparents and more distant ancestors are broken systems, ruined places, vanished species, antique climates. Much of our inheritance is destruction.
Perhaps the craziest part of this legacy is that we don't really have any idea what it is or where it is. Thousands of pieces of broken satellites streak by in orbit around our planet. It could be tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. We don't know.
Millions of species are on their way out, as we plow and log and mine and dump on the habitats on which they...
John Brockman has a new question: What have you changed your mind about? Why?
Here are some interesting answers:
LAURENCE C. SMITH
Professor of Geography, UCLA
[The Impossibility of] Rapid climate change
The year 2007 marked three memorable events in climate science: Release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4); a decade of drought in the American West and the arrival of severe drought in the American Southeast; and the disappearance of nearly half of the polar sea-ice floating over the Arctic Ocean. The IPCC report (a three-volume, three-thousand page synthesis of current scientific knowledge written for policymakers) and the American droughts merely hardened my conviction that anthropogenic climate warming is real and...
I love space exploration -- the promise of new science and new information about the world(s) around us is so bracing! -- so I'm happy to note today's successful launch by Japan of a Moon exploration satellite around 10:30 local time from the Tanegashima Space Center. According to news@nature.com, "The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is calling it the biggest lunar mission since NASA's Apollo programme. The JPY 32 billion (US$279 million) satellite, called the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE), will survey the Moon's mineralogy, topology and gravity gradients." What most Americans don't know, and perhaps other nationals as well, is that the Apollo missions did not fully map the Moon. So SELENE will be sending back a lot of new data via 15 different devices on...
A lot of grain gets used in the brewing of most beers and liquors. Few seriously suggest or expect that the world would give up its bourbon, vodka, sake or ouzo to allocate those resources differently -- and it's certainly unclear that any grain not used for these (arguably) luxury goods would get to hungry people or animals. (See Francis Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet on how world hunger is more about distribution than shortage). Whatever residual guilt for this one might feel over one's beer, now you can cheer up a little: researchers in the School of Contemporary Sciences at the University of Abertay Dundee, in Scotland, have been awarded a year-long Carnegie Trust Research Grant to look for new ways to transform the spent grain from beer and whisky generation into...
Folks in the US with cable tv should check out a great series this week on the Science Channel: Eco-Tech, featuring really detailed yet entertaining profiles people using existing technologies and developing new ones to create the kinds of solutions we love: right now I'm learning about a green chemist using polyphenols, a substance found in tea to replace a toxic chemical used to polish hard drives during computer manufacturing.
I don't know if Science Channel programs make it onto the dial in other countries; it would be great if a DVD or online streams of the show were made available. Tell the Discovery Channel if you agree.
(more)
(Posted by Emily Gertz in New Science at 5:25 PM)...
In Nepal, forests are re-generating across the mid-Himalaya -- not due to fencing them off or new reforesting techniques, but thanks to community-by-community stewardship of a common resource. The infant death rate has been halved since 1990 -- not because state-of-the-art hospitals were brought in, but thanks to an active radio campaign to spread awareness about safe drinking water. Its impact was magnified by higher literacy rates and increased vaccination. Micro-hydropower kits and and village plants that harness the methane from farm waste are bringing electricity to millions. These and other simple, cheap approaches and technologies are succeeding where huge aid development projects tend to fail because they've been developed locally, with local social and economic conditions in...
A significant limiting factor in pushing new technologies forward is often the size of the batteries needed to keep them electrified. Mobile phones have been around since the mid-1980s -- but they swept across the globe and became one of the most transformative technologies ever in part because their batteries became small and powerful instead of chunky, clunky and weak. So this development is interesting: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic University in Troy, New York have found a way to create small, thin, incredibly flexible batteries by impregnating cellulose (i.e., wood pulp, the same stuff paper's made from) with carbon nano-tubes, which act as the battery's electrodes: It sounds simple, but proved tricky to do; cellulose is insoluble in almost all solvents, making it...
As we inch closer towards a post-carbon economy, the future mix of energy sources is slowly bubbling to the top. One potential addition to this mix is the large-scale production of oil-containing algae. Jamais brought GreenFuel to our attention last year, but, as with most things in the sustainability realm, the momentum behind algae has grown tremendously since then. New companies, new methods, and a changing landscape indicate that biofuel from algae is poised to play a larger role. Unlike other plants that are currently being using for oil production such as soy, palm, corn and jatropha, some strains of algae contain as much as 50% oil. Once algae is grown, harvested and pressed to extract the oil, the remaining residue can be processed into ethanol, or burned directly in a power...
Tesla never quite pulled it off, but a group of contemporary physicists are developing wireless energy transmission using "'resonance,' a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied." They're considering something similar to a phenomenon you can see in musical instruments with the same acoustic resonance – play a tune on one, and the another with the same resonance will pick it up. Exploit the resonance of electromagnetic waves, and "energy can tunnel from one object to the other." Focusing the energy and getting viable efficiency are still challenges, and it's not clear that this will be a long distance solution. [Link to "Wireless Non-Radiative Energy Transfer," a paper establishing "that such a non-radiative scheme could indeed be...