a grain of sand - TRAILER

BRIAN GREENE: IS OUR UNIVERSE THE ONLY UNIVERSE?

What is self?

World needs to stabilise population and cut consumption, says Royal Society

Economic and environmental catastrophes unavoidable unless rich countries cut consumption and global population stabilises

World population will reach 9 billion by 2050. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills", warns a major report from the Royal Society.

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston.

The assessment of humanity's prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.

"The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption ... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future", it says.

Richard Dawkins vs Cardinal George Pell on Q&A (10-4-2012)

The Stars as Viewed from the International Space Station.

The Stars as Viewed from the International Space Station. from AJRCLIPS on Vimeo.

Global Collapse: MIT researchers predict the end of the world as we know it

If the Mayans prove to be nothing more than a bunch of liars, don’t be too upset. Researchers at MIT predict that Earth will experience a whole other Armageddon-like scenario by 2030, when they expect a global economic collapse to occur.

Researchers at the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say that, at this rate, the planet is likely to be plagued by a “global economic collapse” in fewer than two decades if humans continue to gobble up natural resources at the same rate they are today.

The report was led by MIT’s Jay W. Forrester’s Institute and used a computing model to examine the correlation between global developments and their affect on the Earth. Variables involving the amount of available resources, different level of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection were taken into account to examine what the future holds for the human race and, according to the researchers, it isn’t very good.

EcoAlert: "Climate Change Dictated Fate of Easter Island" --Is it a Message for the Planet?

.

Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.  “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island," he says.

If past is prolgue, 70,000 years ago the human population was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis by researchers at Stanford University. The estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.

Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA." Wells is director of the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using genetics. 

2001-2010 warmest decade on record: WMO

Paul Lavers salvages the laundry from his flooded backyard after heavy rains caused flash flooding across Sydney on March 8. The UN weather agency noted that during the decade, "numerous weather and climate extremes affected almost every part of the globe with flooding, droughts, cyclones, heat waves and cold waves."

Climate change has accelerated in the past decade, the UN weather agency said Friday, releasing data showing that 2001 to 2010 was the warmest decade on record.

The 10-year period was also marked by extreme levels of rain or snowfall, leading to significant flooding on all continents, while droughts affected parts of East Africa and North America.

"The decade 2001-2010 was the warmest since records began in 1850, with global land and sea surface temperatures estimated at 0.46 degrees Celsius above the long term average of 14.0 degrees Celsius (57.2 degrees Fahrenheit)," said the World Meteorological Organisation.

Nine of the 10 years also counted among the 10 warmest on record, it added, noting that "climate change accelerated" during the first decade of the 21st century.

Cold War, part II? Armies from around the world circle Arctic

Not until every last village is burned, not until every last drop of water is contaminated with pollution of our own creation, not until every last tree is cut down, not until every last thing that we need biologically to survive is gone will mankind be happy; charging forth with trumpets blazing into our own demise. Most intelligent species my @ss!

~FoE

Rising temperatures will open up a treasure trove of resources

U.S. Navy crew members look out from the USS Connecticut, a Sea Wolf-class nuclear submarine, after it surfaced through ice in the Arctic Ocean.

YOKOSUKA, Japan -- To the world's military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.

By Arctic standards, the region is already buzzing with military activity, and experts believe that will increase significantly in the years ahead.

Last month, Norway wrapped up one of the largest Arctic maneuvers ever - Exercise Cold Response - with 16,300 troops from 14 countries training on the ice for everything from high intensity warfare to terror threats. Attesting to the harsh conditions, five Norwegian troops were killed when their C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed near the summit of Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain.

The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers - Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland - gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.

None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon. But as the number of workers and ships increases in the High North to exploit oil and gas reserves, so will the need for policing, border patrols and - if push comes to shove - military muscle to enforce rival claims.

THE HOLI FESTIVAL OF COLORS

Life brought to Earth by comets

Life on Earth may have been sparked by comets carrying with them the key ingredients for our existence, scientists claim.

The combination of water, energy and amino acids – which bind together to form proteins – could have caused the first chemical reactions which are believed to be the origin of life Photo: ALAMY

NASA scientists have replicated the impact of a comet and demonstrated that amino acids, a building block of life, could have survived the intense heat and shock waves given off in the collision.

The combination of water, energy and amino acids – which bind together to form proteins – could have caused the first chemical reactions and created proteins, the researchers said.

The Six Habits of Highly Empathic People

People behave socially and 'well' even without rules: study

January 16, 2012

Fundamentally people behave in a social and rather compassionate and "good" way rather than aggressively, even without specified rules. That is the result of a study from the Institute for Science of Complex Systems at the MedUni Vienna under the leadership of Stefan Thurner and Michael Szell. They analysed the behaviour of more than 400,000 participants of the “Virtual Life” game “Pardus” on the Internet. The findings are that only two percent of all actions are aggressive, even though the game would make it easy for war-like attacks with spaceships, for example.

A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CARL SAGAN

(And don’t you forget it.)

--Excerpt from: Erich Fromm " Psychoanalysis and Religion"

“Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the “harmony” which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accident place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive – and his body makes him want to be alive.

“Reason, man’s blessing, is also his curse; it forces him to cope everlastingly with the task of solving an insoluble dichotomy. Human existence is different in this respect from that of all other organisms; it is in a state of constant and unavoidable disequilibrium. Man’s life cannot “be lived” by repeating the pattern of his species; he must live. Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of himself.

“The emergence of reason has created a dichotomy within man which forces him to strive everylastingly for new solutions. The dynamism of his history is intrinsic to the existence of reason which causes him to develop and, through it, to create a world of his own in which he can feel at home with himself and his fellow men. Every stage he reaches leaves him discontented and perplexed, and this very perplexity urges him to move toward new solutions. There is no innate “drive for progress” in man; it is the contradiction of his experience that makes him proceed on the way he set out. Having lost paradise, the unity with nature, he has become the eternal wanderer (Odysseus, Oedipus, Abraham, Faust); he is impelled to go forward and with everlasting effort to make the unknown known by filling in with answers the blank spaces of his knowledge. He must give account to himself of himself, and of the meaning of his existence. He is driven to overcome this inner split, tormented by a craving for “absoluteness”, for another kind of harmony which can lift the curse by which he was separated from nature, from his fellow men, and from himself.”

--Excerpt from: Erich Fromm " Psychoanalysis and Religion"

Spring Arrives With Equinox Tuesday, Earliest in Over a Century

This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012.

CREDIT: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring  

Across much of the United States, this has been an unusually mild winter, especially for those living east of the Mississippi. Not a few people have noted that spring seems to have come early this year. Of course, in a meteorological sense that could be true, but in 2012 it will also be true in an astronomical sense as well, because this year spring will make its earliest arrival since the late 19th century: 1896, to be exact.

Weird weather: heat, twisters, 250K tons of snow

March 16, 2012 By SETH BORENSTEIN , AP Science Writer

In this combination photo, Doug Hamrick shovels snow off of his family's roof in Anchorage, Alaska on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012, left, and Katie Cramer looks over the front of her destroyed house in Dexter, Mich. on Friday, March 16, 2012 after a tornado touched down on Thursday night. America's weather is stuck on extreme. Nearly 11 feet of snow has fallen on Anchorage this winter, where the city has already hauled away 250,000 tons of snow. Yet not much snow dropped on the Lower 48. The first three months of the year have seen twice the normal number of tornadoes, killing 55 people. And 36 states broke or tied daily high temperature records on Thursday, March 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Loren Holmes, Carlos Osorio)

(AP) -- America's weather is stuck on extreme.

Nearly 11 feet of snow has fallen on Anchorage, Alaska, this winter. That's almost a record, and it's forcing the city to haul away at least 250,000 tons of snow. Yet not much snow has dropped on the Lower 48 this year.

New Study Lowers Estimate of Ancient Sea-Level Rise

ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2012) — The seas are creeping higher as the planet warms, but scientists have not yet reached a consensus about how high they may go. Projections for the year 2100 range from inches to several feet, or more. The sub-tropical islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas contain important sites where researchers have gone looking for answers. By pinpointing where shorelines stood on cliffs and reefs there during an extremely warm period 400,000 years ago, they hope to narrow the range of global sea-level projections for the future.

Scientists offer a new explanation for why ancient beach deposits on these cliff tops in Eleuthera, Bahamas, are nearly 70 feet above present day sea level. (Credit: Paul Hearty)

How to Erase Fear--in Humans

To get rid of a bad memory you may need to relive it first

By Daniel Lametti  | March 23, 2010

“Memory”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the diary that we all carry about with us”. Perhaps, but if memory is like a diary, it’s one filled with torn-out pages and fabricated passages.

In January, a group of New York University neuroscientists led by Daniela Schillerreported in the journal Nature that they had created fearful memories in people and then erased them. Besides being rather cool, the result provides new insight into how to treat traumatic memories in people.  

TED2012 remixed: It's Time for TED

Granted I really don't love it when people use voice modulation on vocal tracks what so ever, but I do love TED and The Symphony of Science!

‘Creative right brain’ myth debunked

March 7, 2012 by Amara D. Angelica

Yet another brain myth bites the dust, joining “we only use 10 percent of our brain,” and other pseudoscience nonsense that tries to cram people in nice neat boxes.

The left hemisphere of your brain, thought to be the logic and math portion, actually plays a critical role in creative thinking, University of Southern California (USC) researchers have found, at least for visual creative tasks (and musical, as previously found).

“We need both hemispheres for creative processing,” said.Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor of neuroscience.

I regard's to the viral Joseph Kony video

Yes, everybody is watching the video in-regards to the Ugandan guerilla group leader Joseph Kony and I do hope he is stopped. The problem is, he is not the only "mad man" out there in this world, there are far, far worse. Lets say the Bush family for starters, it is a shame that people were not more up in arms, or lets say aware of the other merchants of death out there that are or were far, far worse then Joseph Kony. I do hope he is stopped and hopefully this viral video will help and make people aware of this psychopath. But, I do have to say that it is very sad that the big time murderers don't usually get stopped, for time goes bye, there trails get covered and they live happily ever after with the blood of the world on their side..

~~Andy Foehsel

Michael Kiwanuka - "Lasan" (live from Brussels)

Thank god for people that can actually make good music these days for they are few, far and in-between..

Michael kiwanuka's Web Site

Michael Kiwanuka's Myspace page

Michael Kiwanuka 's Facebook page

andy foehsel

Can Humans See 'Spooky' Quantum Images?

What do you think the world would look like if we could see such higher-order images, in which two tiny particles are entangled even when separated by large distances in space?

CREDIT: optimarc | Shutterstock 

View full size image

Date: 04 March 2012

Jesse Emspak, LiveScience Contributor

Quantum physics deals with the realm of the very small, and most of us never expect to see the weird world it describes. But could we? Recently, scientist Geraldo Barbosa of NorthwesternUniversity designed an experiment to answer that question.

News Science Space Massive solar storm heading for Earth

Airlines and energy suppliers are on alert as the largest solar storm in five years threatens to disrupt flights and power linesHow do solar storms work?

• David Batty and agencies
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 March 2012

Nasa footage shows two solar flares erupting on the sun Link to this video

Airlines and energy suppliers are on alert as the largest solar storm in five years heads toward Earth, threatening to disrupt flights and power lines.

The eruption on the surface of the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has led to a "massive amount of solar particles heading towards Earth", which are due to hit the planet between 6am and 10am on Thursday morning, a Met Office spokesman said. But he added that the phenomenon was likely to go unnoticed by most.

The forecaster has advised airlines that they may reroute planes from near the polar regions where the radiation caused by the storm is likely to be most intense, while energy suppliers have been warned that the National Grid could also be affected.

Solar storms can also cause communication problems, such as radio blackouts, as well as affecting satellites, disrupting oil pipelines and making global positioning systems (GPS) less accurate.

The Most Astounding Fact (Neil DeGrasse Tyson)

ANDY FOEHSEL

This is all so retarded: Nasa prepares for $2.5bn gamble on Mars landing

I have a crazy @ss idea, how about we take this 2.5 BILLION, feed, house and clothes everyone in this country.. This is all so retarded..

"Nasa prepares for $2.5bn gamble on Mars landing"

I could see spending the money if Mars was a live planet inclosed by a vibrant biosphere, but its a dead planet that can not support the needs of organic life forms. The powers at be on this planet that control the majority of this planets society-assets in a whole have the most deluded priorities.. That is why billions suffer and why billions will keep on suffering.

Andy Foehsel

Sport hunters are all a bunch of pansies!

I wish that for a few days a year all sport hunters were stripped of modern weapons and that animals were given hunting permits to hunt human sport hunters.. I really do mean that, as much as I dislike violence, I think its a great idea..
Run down an animal bare handed and fight it to the death for sport, now thats another story (I guess). Hunt and take the life of an animal to feed your flock, now thats another story as well.
But in my eyes sport hunters are all a bunch of pansies!!!

Once again, as much as I hate violence: I would love it if this polar bear woke up, stood up and bunched this broad right in the face.. Then we could make an animated GIF that we could watch over and over again.. That would be fun


Apparently this retards name is Michelle Ligve, what a shit head!! I hope a plane falls out of the sky and lands on her...

~Andy Foehsel

stupid women kills murders polar bear bow arrow

Beyond DNA! Prions Point to a New Form of Evolution in Nature

In 2010 scientists from the Scripps Research Institute showed for the first time that 'lifeless' organic substances with no genetic material — prions similar to those believed responsible for Mad Cow disease and similar, rare conditions in humans — are capable of evolving just like higher forms of life, a discovery that could reshape the definition of life and have revolutionary impacts on how certain diseases are treated."

Powerful Solar Flare May Be Signal of More to Come

by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer

Date: 06 March 2012 

An active region on the sun that unleashed a powerful solar flare Sunday (March 4) does not appear to be quieting down, and may have more surprises in store over the coming week, scientists say.

Natural Design with Constructal Theory

Fundamental principles shape the patterns of nature; they can guide the engineer, as well.
By Adrian Bejan and Sylvie Lorente

The hottest frontier in science today is stimulated by observable design in nature: self-organization, self-optimization, animal design rules, and the many scaling relations in geophysics, biophysics, social dynamics, and technology evolution. Design in nature has always provided central and highly stimulating images for scientific inquiry. Images are what gave birth to science, as “geometry” in ancient Greece. Michelangelo Buonarroti said it this way: “Design … is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture … and the root of all sciences.”

Design in nature is captivating, useful, and misunderstood. “Design” in this article means discernable configurations, images, patterns, rhythms, and motifs that we see and hear all around us. This is the original meaning of the word (disegno = drawing, outline, in Italian), and it is universal and unifying.

All nature, from rivers to lungs, flows in patterns and rhythms. The occurrence of visible and audible designs is a natural phenomenon, which must not be confused with the human activity represented by the verb “to design.” Science is the search for the principle that captures the natural phenomenon. Science is not the search for the designer.


The line-to-line trees (bottom image) illustrate the two sides of constructal theory. One is the prediction that alternating trees are the natural design for providing flow access between two lines or two planes. The other is the strategy for how to bathe a body volumetrically, with a single stream flowing in and out. Natural porous media (e.g. soil) exhibit multiscale (hierarchical) flow structures consistent with the scales and performance of the line-to-line architecture.

Engineering is the science concerned with developing scientific knowledge for practical uses. This is a key observation because the modern diversification of science and education has produced the impression that science and engineering are different, so different that “engineers” just implement the ideas generated by “scientists.” This is not true, as the names Carnot, Gibbs, and Prandtl testify. These giants were engineers by training (mechanical engineers, in modern terminology), yet their contributions to physics have been so great that centuries later they are thought to have been physicists, not engineers. The engineering student needs to know that we are all scientists, or scientists by other names: geometrists, designers, and trackers (hunters) of form.

The configuration of a useful process or device is essential to its performance. The common approach to configuring fluid flows and solid components in a working whole is by hunch, talent, and trial and error. Images occur in the mind, and later they are tried in practice. This approach is so common that we do not question it, and most of us equate it with the activity of designing. 

"No Empty Space in the Universe" --Dark Matter Discovered to Fill Intergalactic Space

Feb 13. 2012

New research concludes that instead of "edges," galaxies have long outskirts of dark matter that extend to nearby galaxies and that the intergalactic space is not empty but filled with dark matter.Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) and Nagoya University used large-scale computer simulations and recent observational data of gravitational lensing to reveal how dark matter --which makes up about 22 percent of the present-day universe --is distributed around galaxies  in a clumpy but organized manner. 

I never get invited to parties any more

March 3rd, 2012-

The older I get, the less parties I get invited too it seems..

Oh well, I bet it was a fun night.. But then again I am not a big fan

of trumpets; they give me a head ache.. So I guess its not the end

of the world that I didnt get invited then I guess.

~FoE

Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Maize Fields

by SHELLEE TYLER on JULY 21, 2011

In an effort to rid the country of Monsanto’s GMO products, Hungary has stepped up the pace. This looks like its going to be another slap in the face for Monsanto. A new regulation was introduced this March which stipulates that seeds are supposed to be checked for GMO before they are introduced to the market. Unfortunately, some GMO seeds made it to the farmers without them knowing it.