Biomagic 2020

Miyoko Shida

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:22:00 +0000

For once, I am at a loss for words- but perhaps here none are needed.
Miyoko Shida performa with Rigolo, Swiss Nouveau Cirque.

One More Must-See Space Station Video

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:52:00 +0000

Space Oddity, David Bowie 1969, comes home to roost in the Space Station, 2013. Astronaut Chris Hadfield is the soulful talent.

Where have all the seasons gone?

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Yesterday it was summer, but I didn't go out because I was working

and I didn't need any supplies;

today it was winter, so I didn't go out either.

Departing Space Station Commander Sunita Williams Gives a Tour

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:20:00 +0000

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Visualizing: The 2,299 Kepler Candidate Planets Around a Single Star

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:50:00 +0000

Animation by Alex Parker showing the 2299 high-quality (multiple transits), non-circumbinary transiting planet candidates found by NASA's Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They are drawn to scale with accurate radii, orbital periods, and orbital distances. They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to -110 C at the coldest - red indicates warmest, and blue/indigo indicates coldest candidates. Three white rings illustrate the average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, and Earth on the same scale. (More to the story here)
The current list of planet candidates can be seen here.
Watching in full screen HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!
By Alex Parker - Postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fossil-fuel Divestment Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:01:00 +0000

Bill McKibben and Christian Parenti discuss the Disinvestment Campaign and how best to confront the role of the fossil-fuel industry- what McKibben calls, "Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization."
And this:

R.I.P. Rebecca Tarbotton, Head of Rainforest Action Network

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 06:17:00 +0000

Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, tragically drowned in rough surf in San Pancho, north of Puerto Vallarta, on December 28, 2012. Above, she addresses the 2012 REVEL Conference in October.

Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:10:00 +0000

In Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, butterflies sip a yellow-spotted river turtle's tears. The mineral-rich liquid helps the insects reproduce. In exchange, the reptile gets a good eye-cleaning. (ref) Photo by Pete Oxford/Minden Pictures

Doha COP18 Ending in Failure as Super-Typhoon Bopha Ravages the Philippines

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:03:00 +0000

As hopes for progress fade at COP18 in Doha, in spite of much talk about the devastation of Hurricane Sandy a few weeks ago in the U.S. and it's impact on both scientists and the general public, another super-storm, Typhoon Bopha, is devastating the Philippines, with 1000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless at last count. Bopha is the strongest typhoon ever to hit Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Phillipines. Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes.

Remember how Sandy, moving in a northeastern direction up the US coast, stopped opposite New Jersey, gained strength and wind-speed, and then punched directly west? As the projected storm track (above right) shows, after having battered the southern lands, Bopha is expected to do a similar jujitsu- after strengthening in the China sea again, it will spin down to the east and hit the northern island of Luzon, the most populous island of the Philippines.

The Phillipine's delegate to the Doha COP118 Conference broke down while pleading for action:

World Bank Now Warns of Climate Catastrophe

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:48:00 +0000

"A shocking new report commissioned by the World Bank is warning temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, causing devastating food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought — even if countries meet their current pledges to reduce emissions. If these promises are not met, the increase could happen even sooner." -DemocracyNow, Dec 4, 2012

New York City: Carbon Emissions Visualized

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:41:00 +0000

NYC carbon footprint: At standard pressure and 59 °F a metric ton of carbon dioxide gas would fill a sphere 33 feet across (density of CO₂ = 1.87 kg/m³ (ref). If this is how New York's emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds.
54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second.
Emissions in 2010 were 12% less than 2005 emissions. The City of New York is on track to reduce emissions by 30% by 2017 - an ambitious target. By Carbon Visuals and The Environmental Defense Fund.

Superstorm Sandy and Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:18:00 +0000

Dumbo District Flooded Oct 29, 2012

From Tom Zeller on HuffPo: "Hurricane Sandy's Storm Surge Wreaks Havoc As Its Energy And Trajectory Stun Experts":
"As Andrew Freeman at the website Climate Central noted last week -- even as Hurricane Sandy was still gathering strength in the Caribbean -- it is rather uncommon for hurricanes with Sandy's origins to move inland into the U.S. this late in the year. 'Normally, hurricanes that form in Sandy's location do head seaward, particularly in October, when strong cold fronts moving off the East Coast tend to sweep tropical weather systems away from the mainland,' Freeman said. 'In fact, there may only have been a couple of cases in the historical record dating back to the 19th century when a hurricane took a track in October similar to the one Sandy may ultimately follow.'
"Sandy followed the path it did in part because an unusual high pressure system has been parked over Greenland. That system is acting like a block, preventing anything from pushing northward through it, including Sandy, which instead took a devastating westward turn into New Jersey and onward into Pennsylvania.
"Meanwhile, the jet stream -- the steady, eastward-moving air current that undulates around the Northern Hemisphere, including across Canada and the U.S., and which would normally sweep storms along -- has been losing speed. In some areas, the drop-off has been as much as 14 percent, according to Jennifer Francis, a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. That loss of speed, Francis recently noted, could lead to storms in the East appearing to get stuck, not unlike what is now happening to Sandy over Pennsylvania.
One theory for the drop-off in jet stream speed? The steady loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming.
"'There is evidence that Arctic sea ice loss might be responsible for that sort of behavior of the jet stream,' Masters said. 'Whether it was the case for this particular block, we don't know. Our sea ice losses are a relatively new phenomenon, and we don't have a lot of years of data to study. But there certainly is a lot of potential for climate change to affect a storm like this.'" (full article here)

2012: Hottest Year Ever for the US, Arctic Sea-ice at Record Low

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:38:00 +0000

Some effects of sea-ice loss in the Arctic:

Heating of the arctic ocean and contiguous land masses:
-Release of methane and CO2 from permafrost areas
- Increased melt of the Greenland ice-cap. In terms of sea-level rise, this is the big one- the Greenland ice-cap, in some places 3 kilometers thick, is melting rapidly. If all that ice melts and drops into the ocean, sea-levels will rise by 7 meters.
- Reduced salinity in the North Atlantic is weakening the Atlantic conveyor circulation at the northern end, destabilizing climate in Northern Europe
- Open seas in the arctic have oil and gas exploiters planning major drilling and extraction, the burning of this additional carbon will itself increase atmospheric CO2 and global heating

-Reduced heat differential between Arctic and mid-latitudes: reduced strength of jet stream;
- which allows arctic air to pour down into mid-latitudes and remain there for a longer time (extreme winter cold snaps, US and Europe 2010, 2011)
- and allows very warm air to pour into arctic areas and remain for longer (2012 flash melt of greenland ice surface)

Update, Oct 26. One of those above-mentioned arctic outpourings is underway, with our local daytime temperatures dropping 30 degrees in 2 days. This arctic blast will collide in a few days with Hurricane Sandy, a huge storm moving up the coast toward New York City. Sandy is blocked from a normal northeasterly trajectory by a high pressure mass sitting over Greenland, and is expected to lurch westward directly into the most heavily populated area of North America; the resulting hybrid storm could produce severe damages and flooding. The penetration of the arctic air mass, the late season hurricane, and the high pressure mass stuck over Greenland are examples of weather effects expected to accompany climate change, and here they may hybridize and produce a real mess on the East Coast.
At the same time, the last debates of the presidential campaign of 2012 are over, and for the first time since 1988, the subject of climate change was not even broached. Instead both candidates competed in promising more drilling and oil production.

Designer Slugs- The Beautiful Nudibranch

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:21:00 +0000

Extreme Skydive Felix Baumgartner Oct 8 2012

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:31:00 +0000

Felix Baumgartner will skydive from 120,000 feet over New Mexico on October ~~8th~~ (postponed due to high winds- see Stratos website for updates).
Felix's skydive will be broadcast live online at the RedBull Stratos site.

Update: He did it! Videos and info at the website-

First long-term study of GMO consumption gives alarming results

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Professor Gilles Eric Seralini and Doctor Joel Spiroux explain why this study is the first of its kind. It goes much further than all other studies in terms of the research period (two years instead of the three-month maximum limit). We are shown the method and the flagrant results in the graphs. The mortality rate is six times higher with transgenic food, as well as with Roundup alone. We see the many glaring tumors with which the rats are affected. The images are shocking. It is asked that these studies be replicated for all GMOs that have already been licensed.

HD Curiousity Mars Landing- Luke Fitch / Bard Canning

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:01:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:44:00 +0000

From the "Who says we can't be friends?" department.

Sloan Survey 3: 400,000 Galaxies Mapped in 3D

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:26:00 +0000

Each speck you see in this animation is a galaxy, and each contains several hundred billion stars. Almost all the stars are thought to have planetary systems. These are actual photographs of these galaxies and their relative positions, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 3. But this is a small slice of the visible universe, with only 400,000 galaxies mapped. There are thought to be at least a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe.

Space Gopher at the Cosmodrome

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

A gopher lives under the rocket rails at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan. Russian Space Agency technicians set up a camera to observe him. (See an 8 minute version, different sound track)

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:48:00 +0000

Blue Ribbon Eel free swimming, Lembeh, Sulawesi, Indonesia

A trillion planets- what now for SETI?

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 01:45:00 +0000

Based on the findings of the Kepler planet-finder mission so far, it is now believed that there are at least 1 trillion planets in our galaxy. (There are estimated to be in excess of a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe). If even only 1 out of 1,000 planets were inhabited, that's still a billion living worlds in the Milky Way alone. While all biospheres may develop intelligent species, not all intelligent species may be of the techno-industrial space-faring type (think dolphins, for example). But those that are, are going to be much older than ours- and presumably also more advanced- because ours is at the very dawn of its space-faring age, and other planetary civilizations might be as much as a billion years old.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI, gave a talk at TED in May about SETI's new scope, the likelihood of contact, and what might happen when we do make contact.

British Zoologist Gets Shagged By Rare Parrot

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:50:00 +0000

David and Severn Suzuki on Rio+20 Conference

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:11:00 +0000

DemocracyNow did two recent shows with the Suzukis to review the Rio+20 Conference-

June 21:

June 25:

Bonobo Genome Mapped

noreply@blogger.com (sm/dvmx) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:29:00 +0000

Researchers have assembled the complete genome of the bonobo. Some details learned so far:
"Bonobos and chimps — which are very closely related but behave in strikingly different ways, with bonobos relying on sex and chimpanzees relying on aggression to resolve conflict — split from each other about 1 million years ago.
"Ancient humans split away from our common ancestor with bonobos and chimps about 4.5 million years ago.
"Perhaps the three species' shared ancestor was more like a chimp — and humans and chimps share genes, say, for aggression. Or perhaps the shared ancestor was more like a bonobo, with some other consequence for human traits.  "What branch do humans come from? Is it 'Make love, not war,' or 'Make war, not love'?" wondered John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin."
(Read the full report at LATimes.com)