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POPSSolving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees This is a fascinating story. It is not the life of bees which is fascinating, but the vast complexity and interconectedness of life it exposes. From humans to beehives to plants to microbes, fungi, viruses, genes, metagenomics and what not. All are partaking in one orchestrated intelligent whole. This is a must read
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POPSGaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? Recent interesting research shows that life on earth may have distinct suicidal inclinations. Human destruction of the environment is but the most recent episode. If true it has interesting implication on forming of exobiological theories, and the evolution of civilizations outside our precious planet.
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POPSHumanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution If we recognize humanity is an integral part of the planet and begin working for a healthy Earth, then planetary evolution could move forward to some unknown future. On the other hand, Langmuir said, if we continue to view the Earth as something that is separate, that we merely use, then the resulting practices could damage the environment enough to stall planetary evolution, even causing it to fall back to a level where it supports just microscopic life. “The story of the Earth is our story. We are intimately connected in every fiber of our being, in every breath we take. We’re inseparable from the Earth,” Langmuir said.
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POPSIs a zero-carbon city on the horizon? As part of their Masdar Initiative (masdar meaning "the source" in Arabic), an effort to further the research and implementation of sustainable construction, the Abu Dhabi government will build this city on a nearby 2.3 square-mile site (six square kilometers), adjacent to its international airport at an estimated cost of $22 billion. It projected the city will eventually be able to sustain 50,000 residents and more than 1,000 businesses. It broke ground in construction of the city and hopes to complete the project by 2016.
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POPSHumans are endangered while ignorant of truth and reality. There are a number of links,which are to different fields. Some information be fact, some can be philosophical, or speculative, but it will modify any opinion. Any fact doubted should be verified but these days people are learning to do that as a matter of course. If we're going to get out of this hole, we n eed a bigger ladder.
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POPSSocial Networking for Zebras Ecologists have turned to computer scientists to develop dynamic graphs of social behavior among Zebra populations, revealing why some are thriving while others are endangered: The difference showed that the Grevy's zebras tended to hang out in cliques, whereas the onagers spent time with different buddies on different days. The methods developed turn out to applicable to human networks, too: In the meantime, Berger-Wolf is testing her methods on other datasets, including the records of e-mails exchanged at Enron that became available after they were subpoenaed. She has found some surprising connections between the two kinds of networks. "We can see that our method to detect when a lion was in the area of zebras detects very well when the subpoena was issued at Enron," she says. When faced with a lion, the zebras flee and follow one lead zebra. Similarly, after the subpoena was issued, e-mail traffic to the lawyers increased dramatically.
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POPSWatching Whales Watching Us
The question of sonar’s catastrophic effects on whales even reached the Supreme Court last November, in a case pitting the United States Navy against the Natural Resources Defense Council. The council, along with other environmental groups, had secured two landmark victories in the district and appellate courts of California, which ruled to heavily restrict the Navy’s use of sonar devices in its training exercises. The Supreme Court, however, in a 6-to-3 decision widely viewed as a setback for the environmental movement, overturned parts of the lower-court rulings, faulting them for, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, failing “properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” thereby jeopardizing the safety of the fleet and sacrificing the public’s interest in military preparedness by “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force.” In his decision, Roberts went on to minimize, in a fairly
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POPSSave the Holocene! "I get the utility of using the idea of the Anthropocene to provoke recognition of the mind-bending reality that we are transforming the very planet on which we walk. (emphasis mine) Where the Anthropocene as a concept breaks down, it seems to me, is in the implications it raises, particularly among certain crowds who seem to be saying with increasing frequency, "well, dude, we're in the Anthropocene, anything goes." A worthwhile and important read
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POPSHOME... The full movie can be watched: http://www.youtube.com/homeproject
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POPSYosemite's giant trees disappear One of the most shocking aspects of these findings is that they apply to Yosemite National Park," says Lutz. "Yosemite is one of the most protected places in the US. If the declines are occurring here, the situation is unlikely to be better in less protected forests."
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POPSSacred plants of the Maya forest more (through link): "By determining what plants were of importance to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic and ceremonial uses. More should be done to conserve large tracts of forest in order to properly study theses plants for their value to mankind," he continues. "This research has already been of interest to pharmaceutical companies that are looking to extract alkaloids from plants that were important to the ancient Maya."
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