You, your child, or your student have an awesome opportunity at your fingertips…24/7.
Robert Ballard, a deep-sea explorer who you may know for his discovery of the Titanic is bringing you “Nautilus Live.
The Nautilus and its team are on their way to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Israel.
Their mission:
Start date: September 4, 2010 End date: September 15, 2010
The eastern Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel is home to underwater landslides, deep-sea corals, ancient archaeological sites, gas seeps, and many other interesting features. During this part of the expedition, Nautilus team members will use sonar to survey this fascinating area…
Continue reading about the mission, read blog posts, see live video and photos, sign up for Facebook and Twitter updates here at Nautilus Live.
While other countries continue to build their programs, we continue to talk of trimming ours. So, we risk falling behind, instead playing big sister and working on outreach programs while those less powerful catch up.
Iran says they plan on sending their own astronauts into space by 2025. I see no reason we should doubt them. They also have a new, unmanned drone called, “an ambassador of death.”
from VOA -
Iran’s military has unveiled a new unmanned aircraft, saying the drone is capable of carrying out long-range missions.
Iran’s military displayed the drone Sunday at a ceremony attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and shown on live television.
Officials told Iran’s state-run Press TV that the drone, named the Karrar, meaning “striker”, can carry out long-distance bombing runs against ground targets at high speeds.
Tell me…exactly what is wrong with being a superpower? Don’t we have to continue to plan for the future in order to hold our power now?
April 13, 2010
President Obama today at a news conference closing his “Nuclear Security Summit,” where he made the odd statement that “whether we like it or not, we (United States) remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, we get pulled into it.”
This year we can’t win with our garden. We are being overrun with varmints. We want to send them packing.
Normally one year it will be rabbits or one year it will be chipmunks. This year it’s a combination of everything that is making it unpleasant to garden. I’m sure it’s due to the rain and humidity. The biggest pest is mosquitoes. Not only can we not enjoy our garden, but we can’t even sit outside midday to enjoy our beautiful backyard flowers.
I’ve talked to people who are trying to pick their garden produce by covering head-to-toe in sweat suits with hoods on, and one in another city who wears an official mosquito prevention outfit something like this when she walks her dog. Wow! A neighbor just walking by recommended putting out fans in the back yard.
After watching the following video, mosquitoes remain my number one outdoor enemy…
I’m looking forward to the first frost and hoping for a very long fall.
You wouldn’t ever have put your baby in danger from the sun, would you? Yet parents continually allow their teens to go to tanning beds. For what? Is that unnatural-looking tan that important? If you don’t believe what research says about sunbeds and the dangers they pose regarding skin cancers for the future, then at least look at the reality of what natural sun exposure has done to people over the years. Or ask some farmers, outdoor athletes, landscapers, or relatives or friends who have spent their lives in the south.
As a teen I spent all the time I could on a Florida beach (baking) or in the Florida sun, sometimes for recreation, sometimes for athletics, and as a part of daily life. Now, after seeing what the unforgiving sun has done to the skin of some of my relatives, I avoid the sun as much as possible. But I wait and wonder if I will pay a price for those years in the sun in the near future.
from the Daily Mail -
Teenagers who use sunbeds are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with the most dangerous form of skin cancer as those who have never been to a tanning salon, a study has found.
The research reveals that the earlier sunbed use begins, the greater the risk of developing a deadly melanoma before the age of 40.
It shows that those who start before they turn 20 are 88 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with a deadly melanoma than people who have never used a sunbed.
It’s cooperative feeding, not a “feeding frenzy.” But there sure were a lot of alligators! No, you would not find me in a boat in the middle of that sea of “gators.” Those “B” science fiction movies where the giant reptiles attack and turn the boat over would be on my mind. That would be cooperative feeding!
from National Geographic -
Cooperative feeding, by contrast, is pretty much what it sounds like.
Alligators “face into the current and arrange themselves side-by-side in a row across the flow of water”—the better to catch a flood of fish squeezed into a bottleneck in a free-flowing channel, the university site says.
That’s apparently just what happened in the Stephen C. Foster State Park canal in the video, where mudfish, or bowfins—common prey for Okefenokee alligators—are said to have been particularly plentiful on July 10.
I realize astronauts “even drink the stuff—after it’s purified.” The Chinese are big fans of drinking it, too. But I’m not ready to fertilize my garden this way.
from Scientific American -
The beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew were perfectly lovely: round and hefty; with their skin a rich burgundy; their flavor sweet and faintly earthy, like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were fertilized with human urine.
Not everyone can tolerate a high abundance “urine therapy.”
from the Skeptics Dictionary -
The Chinese Association of Urine Therapy warns that
Common symptoms include diarrhea, itch, pain, fatigue, soreness of the shoulder, fever, etc. These symptoms appear more frequently in patients suffering long term or more serious illnesses, and symptoms may repeat several times. Each episode may last 3-7 days, but sometimes it may last one month, or even worse over 6 months. It is a pity that many give up urine therapy because of such bad episode [sic]. Recovery reaction is just like the darkness before sunrise. If one persists and overcomes the difficulty, one can enjoy the eventual happiness of healthy life.
It’s been a long time since I’ve spun a globe (and it spins fast). It sure is pretty! Just look at all of those colors…I know I feel better about climate science now!
Photo: Google
from the Telegraph -
The Google Earth map shows how the world would be affected by a global average temperature increase of 4C in a bid to rebuild public trust in climate science.
It illustrates rising water levels and reduced crop yields in different parts of the world if temperatures are not curbed by cutting greenhouse gases.
It seems the “leading experts” called upon to solve the growing problem of an explosion of people on our planet are mostly “Sirs.” Of course, it is the British doing the study.
from The Independent -
Britain’s premier scientific organisation has launched a two-year study into global population levels. A growing body of scientists believe the time has come for politicians to confront the problems posed by the future increase in human numbers.
[...]
The working group includes the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, the environmentalist Sir Jonathon Porritt, who co-founded Forum for the Future, the Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta and the president of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, Professor Demissie Habte.
The announcement of the study comes on World Population Day, which will be marked by a meeting of science experts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
They include Sir John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientist, who has warned that population is one of several environmental issues that could produce a “perfect storm” of global events in the coming decades.
Yes sir, it should be an interesting study. Maybe it’s time to start talking about living in space again. Or under the ocean. Haven’t heard discussion about that in a while. Could it be people are finally getting tired of talking about global warming?
Guerilla warfare, territorial conquests, less peaceful than humans…I’m not talking about aliens here.
from the Economist -
PEOPLE are not alone in waging war. Their closest living cousins, chimpanzees, also slaughter their own kind—in brutal attacks that primatologists increasingly view as strategic, co-ordinated assaults rather than random acts of violence. But however tempting it is to see these battles through the lens of human warfare, the motives for chimp-on-chimp violence are poorly understood. In particular, researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for females.
“Sir David Attenborough narrates this violent and bloody natural history video recording the disturbing scenes of a real Chimpanzee territorial attack. Scenes from BBC natural history epic, ‘Planet Earth’.”
There always seems to besome warning of some type of revolution on the horizon. Here’s a new one. I don’t know if I would call it a “revolution.”
Is it a bird? Is it a plane (well, sort of…how about a drone…on U.S. soil)?
In the coming years, law enforcement agencies will seek to useUAVs to police borders, control crowds, track criminals, detect illegal narcotics activities, and spot crime. Other potential civilian uses include mineral and energy exploration, agricultural surveys, communications relay, and wildfire monitoring. The revolution is coming.
from Social Science Research Network, Rapp, Geoffrey Christopher, Unmanned Aerial Exposure: Civil Liability Concerns Arising from Domestic Law Enforcement Employment of Unmanned Aerial Systems. North Dakota Law Review, Vol. 85, pp. 623-648, 2010; University of Toledo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-08
