Month: October 2018

  • It's Alive

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    “Rocks are not nouns, but verbs,” Marcia Bjornerud writes in her superb new geology book “Timefulness.” The ground beneath our feet, the mountains looming overhead, are not static objects, but visible evidence of the processes that shape our planet. The whole story of Earth, from its accretion out of a swirling dust cloud around the sun, through epochs of asteroid bombardments and volcanic explosions and heat and ice and heat again, is inscribed in the layers of rock that have been accumulating like the pages of an unfinished manuscript for 4.6 billion years.

    Against these impassive witnesses to history, life can seem puny and unimportant. The entire human species has existed for less than 1 percent of the age of the Rocky Mountains. Compared with the billion-year-old marble that makes up the Washington Monument, the whole fraught history of the United States has been little more than a blink of an eye.

    And yet, Bjornerud writes, life has altered the course of this planet’s history. The invention of photosynthesis by ancient microorganisms completely transformed the planet’s atmosphere from a methane and carbon dioxide rich haze reminiscent of the exhaust from an SUV, into the oxygen-rich air we now know and love. The colonization of land by plants 400 million years ago slowed the pace at which wind and weather wear down mountains and wash bits of rock into the sea. This shift in global erosion rates transformed the way rivers work, creating waterways that carve deep channels through the Earth that exist today. Though only a dozen minerals existed among the ingredients that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, Earth now boasts more than 4,000 mineral species — almost half of which are the result of biology’s interactions with rocks.

    I find these facts poetic and deeply comforting. Tiny, tenacious microbes, working in concert over a billion years, made our planet a more livable place (for oxygen breathing organisms, anyway). A single stubborn pine clinging to some rocky mountainside helps slow its erosion and shape the course of a mighty river.

    Life is not just a product of Earth — Earth is a product of us. As astronomers gaze into the galaxy and beyond, no matter how many small, terrestrial planets orbiting yellow dwarf stars they might find, none of them will be truly Earthlike because none will have had this place’s particular history of being inhabited.

    We live in a world we built for ourselves, the only place like it in the universe.

    — Sarah, of The Washington Post

  • Martin Rees: The posthuman future

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    Cosmologist Martin Rees addresses humanity’s prospects in the 21st century and beyond and asks what comes after us. Watch the talk now

  • Huge online Trolley Problem survey reveals people’s cultural bias

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    Driverless cars may soon have to make life-and-death decisionsDAREKM101/Getty
    By Chelsea Whyte of  NewScientist

    A SELF-DRIVING car is travelling along a two-lane road when its brakes fail. Should it stay in lane and hit a pregnant woman, a doctor and a criminal on a pedestrian crossing, or swerve and hit a barrier, killing the family of four in the vehicle?

    This derivative of the classic Trolley Problem is the kind of scenario that makes up the Moral Machine experiment, an ethics survey of millions of people from 233 countries and territories around the world. Participants were asked to consider different scenarios in which those who might be saved could be, say, fit or fat, young or old, pets, criminals or those with high-status jobs. In all, 40 million decisions were collected.

    Click here to read the complete article:

  • Supercharged geothermal energy could power the planet

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    Steam rises from the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland

    The next generation of geothermal plants will unlock more of Earth's bountiful, underground energy and could allow the technology to finally fulfil its promise.

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    By Julia Rosen of NewScientist

    THE Reykjanes peninsula juts out of the south-western tip of Iceland like a hitch-hiker’s thumb. Most visitors glimpse it from a plane, as they swoop down onto the runway at Keflavík airport, or through the mist at the Blue Lagoon – a popular hot spring. It is an otherworldly landscape of rumpled volcanic rocks and stout cinder cones. The most common signs of life: tenacious mosses in varying shades of green, and the odd wandering sheep.

    Here, the tectonic seam that runs along the bottom of the Atlantic, belching out new ocean crust between North America and Europe, runs aground. That’s what makes this place so attractive to people like Guðmundur Olaf Friðleifsson, chief geologist at Icelandic energy company HS Orka. Just a few kilometres beneath their feet, the staggering heat of a volcano bubbles away. All they have to do to harness its power is drill.

    Click here for the complete article from the NewScientist:

  • As NASA’s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space

    4YXYHWGLB4I6RLIKBYA67OR4YEThe giant Hubble Space Telescope is seen as it is suspended in space following the deployment of part of its solar panels and antennae in April 1990. The Hubble Space Telescope has been sidelined this month by a gyroscope difficulty. (NASA/AP)

    America’s Great Observatories — the Hubble, Chandra, Compton and Spitzer space telescopes — have peered into the unknown and made breakthrough discoveries about newborn stars, dark matter and the age of the universe itself.

    But these telescopes, whose era began in 1990, are aging, if not already dead, and there is no budget or political will to replace them. That sobering reality was underscored this month when two, including the Hubble Space Telescope, were beset by technical problems that temporarily halted their science.

    Shrinking budgets and delayed projects means astronomers will lose some of their key eyes in the skies before NASA can launch new telescopes. It will make some research impossible.