| By day, the engineers work on NASA’s new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle. |
They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it’s a brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA facilities. The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts.
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A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as little more than a sketch on a napkin that won’t work.
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A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can’t speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.
See more at www.physorg.com |
After years of being attacked by crows, a colony of seabirds nesting in Tokyo is getting an unlikely ally: the tiny honeybee.
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Conservationists hope bees will repel the crows, based on the insects’ tendency to attack anything dark-colored that approaches their hives.
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This year beehives from rural areas were relocated to the top of a large water-treatment facility near Tokyo’s international airport, where as many as 4,000 birds known as little terns nest after a long migration from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea.
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Although they are not endangered internationally, little terns are listed as “vulnerable” in Japan’s Red Data Book of threatened species.
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That’s because the terns’ nesting sites in the country are being destroyed by construction work and other human activities, so the birds are considered potentially at risk in the future.
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| Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns. |
The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas.
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A companion report documents poor progress in reforming land ownership and governance in developing countries.
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“Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.
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“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”
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Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.
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Contrary to the moans of many dieters, being hungry may make you happy. Or, at least, it can be a serious motivator whose evolutionary intent was to help you find dinner instead of becoming dinner.
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When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster.
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Researchers manipulated ghrelin levels in mice through a variety of methods, including prolonged calorie restriction, ghrelin injection and a genetic modification rendering the mice numb to ghrelin’s effect.
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Mice who had limited ghrelin activity seemed depressed. If pushed into deep water they made no effort to swim. When introduced to a maze, they clung to the entryway. And when placed with other mice, they tended to keep to themselves. (These behaviors were reversed when the mice were given a low-dose antidepressant commonly prescribed to humans.)
See more at www.livescience.com |
We often emphasize the importance of keeping cool in a crisis. But sometimes coolness can give way to detachment and apathy. |
We saw a perfect example of this in the response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the agencies charged with managing the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that they needed to snap to action. The victims’ pain was exacerbated by such indifference to their suffering. So as we prepare for the next Katrina-like disaster, what can the science of social intelligence”especially research into empathy”teach policy makers and first responders about the best way to handle themselves during such a crisis? |
| The differences between these forms of empathy highlight the challenges we face in responding to other people’s pain. But they also make clear how the right approach can move us to compassionate action.See more at www.sharpbrains.com |
SAN FRANCISCO ” The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets. |
This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment. |
Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car. |
| “If the San Francisco experiment works, no one will have to murder anyone over a parking space,” |
Many of the products designed for altruistic reasons, such as the XO Laptop, turn out to be just good products because of the amount of innovation required to pull off the job. Products designed for the limitations of the developing world are of higher quality because of those limitations. |
When I first read about the computer designed for the One Laptop Per Child project, I wanted one. Not because it was adorable, cheap or a means of doing good (to buy one you had to buy a second for a child in a poor country). I coveted its screen, designed for use in full daylight. Even my Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)  MacBook Pro, with all its clever tricks, can’t manage that. |
Add the LifeStraw water filtration system to the list of do-gooder objects I crave. This little wonder, a water filter outfitted with a straw, made the cover of the Design for the Other 90 percent show catalog at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum last year. It could as easily have graced the cover of an REI mailer. See more at www.technewsworld.com |
| LSU scientist Huiming Bao, along with colleagues from UCLA and China, recently discovered some of the first atmospheric evidence in support of the “Snowball Earth” hypothesis, which suggests that Earth was entirely covered by ice during the Cryogenian period, which took place from about 790 to 630 million years ago. |
| Bao and his group used a new parameter called “sulfate oxygen-17
anomaly” to measure atmospheric records found in mineral sulphate
deposits. “My group specializes in measuring these anomalies ” very few
other groups do,” said Bao. “This puts us in an extremely good position
for uncovering previously unknown information.” |
| These oxygen-17 anomalies are usually not measured by scientists who
study Earth rocks because they were originally believed to be
exclusively extra-terrestrial in nature, coming only from specific
types of asteroidsSee more at www.dailygalaxy.com |
A proposal to place mirrors in the sky to reflect sunlight away from earth won’t give back the climate we had before, says a new study. |
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom applied global climate models to predict the effect of using reflective sunshades to reduce the amount of sunlight that enters the earth’s atmosphere back. |
They compared two future scenarios, both with CO2 levels four times the pre-industrial baseline. In one scenario nothing was done, and in the other, sunlight intensity was reduced to a level that would reduce the global average temperature to pre-industrial levels |
The second scenario simulated the use of sunshades, which reduced sunlight by about 4.2%. |
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