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Monday, August 22, 2011

Newly-found deep Icelandic current could 'save' North America and Europe from climate change

The North Icelandic Jet feeds a giant pattern known as the 'great ocean conveyor belt', which regulates North American and European climates

A newly-discovered deep, cold current flowing off Iceland's coast may mean the North Atlantic is less sensitive to climate change than previously thought.

The North Icelandic Jet feeds the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - or AMOC - a giant pattern known as the 'great ocean conveyor belt', which regulates North American and European climates.

Scientists had previously believed that most of the cold water that formed that deep south-flowing stream came from off the Greenland coast and was made up of fresh glacier-melt water.

Hit movie The Day After Tomorrow showed how a new ice age overtakes America and Europe in the wake of a catastrophic climatic shift

However, the North Icelandic Jet appears to contribute more to the deeper part of the AMOC than the Greenland current does, according to scientists.

The 'conveyor belt' current was introduced in the Al Gore environmental film An Inconvenient Truth, and carries warm surface water from the tropical Atlantic toward the Arctic.

In the process, the water warms the air in high latitudes, then cools, sinks and returns towards the equator, flowing as a deep stream at lower ocean depths.

Because fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water, these specialists suggested that this fresh water from glaciers and other warming-related phenomena would get into the North Atlantic, where it could freeze and prevent the water from sinking to make up the bottom of the conveyor belt.

Man-Made Life Could Help Colonize Mars, Biologist Says | FoxNews.com

Man-Made Life Could Help Colonize Mars: Synthetic organisms engineered to use carbon dioxide as a raw material could help humans settle Mars one day, a prominent biologist says.

SPACE STATION ROBONAUT POWERED UP

Robonaut, the humanoid robot delivered to the International Space Station in February, is finally getting to work -- and tweeting about the experience.

So far, the droid's commentary is pretty dry -- "My power cable is plugged in and my status LEDs on my power backpack are on," Robonaut tweeted this morning.

"Around 56 minutes left in my power soak test," it added an hour later.

But Robonaut is responding to questions and even sent birthday greetings to one of its 35,000 followers.

USA becomes Food Stamp Nation but is it sustainable?

USA becomes Food Stamp Nation but is it sustainable? - Yahoo! News: NEW YORK (Reuters) - Genna Saucedo supervises cashiers at a Wal-Mart in Pico Rivera, California, but her wages aren't enough to feed herself and her 12-year-old son.
Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive because of government handouts in what has rapidly become a food stamp nation.
Altogether, there are now almost 46 million people in the United States on food stamps, roughly 15 percent of the population. That's an increase of 74 percent since 2007, just before the financial crisis and a deep recession led to mass job losses.

UFO over Rome Italy Saturday, 20th August 2011

Was the human race given an ever-lasting boost by breeding with Neanderthal man?

We like to think our superior brainpower means we survived while they perished. But we may not have been alive today, if it were not for the Neanderthals.

Studies show that we owe much of the power of our immune system to genes we picked up from our caveman cousins.

Interbreeding with Neanderthals gave our ancestors a ready-made cocktail of DNA invaluable in fighting diseases common in northern climates, research by immunologist Peter Parham suggests.

Ideal partner: Scientists believe interbreeding with Neanderthals boosted human beings' brainpower

This, in turn, vastly sped up our evolution, and gave us the strength and resilience needed to populate the world.

Research released last year revealed that our ancestors couldn’t resist the charms of the Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago.

As a result, there is a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us. In some parts of the world, up to 4 per cent of people’s DNA comes from the short, stocky cavemen.

Is Earth's DNA Unique or a Universal Constant?

"Life has been using a standard set of 20 amino acids to build proteins for more than 3 billion years," said Stephen J. Freeland of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii. "It's becoming increasingly clear that many other amino acids were plausible candidates, and although there's been speculation and even assumptions about what life was doing, there's been very little in the way of testable hypotheses."

"To the best of our knowledge, the original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times," said Paul Davies -leading authority in astrobiology, director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and co-director of the ASU Cosmology Initiative.

30 Questions That Children Should Be Asking Their Parents About The U.S. Economy

30 Questions That Children Should Be Asking Their Parents About The U.S. Economy: There are a whole lot of things about the U.S. economy that don't make any sense whatsoever. Sadly, most adults have been so programmed to accept the way that things are by years and years of relentless propaganda that they don't even bother to question the status quo any longer. But little kids are different. Many little kids are not afraid to say the darnedest things or ask really embarrassing questions. Have you ever been in a situation where a child asks an obvious question that did not even occur to any of the adults? That happens so often because the minds of little kids have not been completely warped by the world we live in yet. They are able to see things with honesty and innocence and with fresh eyes. Well, perhaps all of us should start looking at our economy and our financial system through the eyes of little children. There are a lot of things that we have been programmed to accept that we really should be asking some hard questions about.

The 25 Coolest College Labs in the Country | Popular Science

You Call This School? The 25 Coolest College Labs in the Country | Popular Science: Forget algebra homework: try building spaceships, operating a nuclear reactor or listening in to distant galaxies...

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Oldest Fossil on Earth Found

Oldest Fossil on Earth Found : Discovery News: The finding shows bacteria thrived on an Earth with no oxygen and boosts hope that life existed on Mars.

From the 'X-Files' Dept: NASA's Alien Contact Blueprint

Extraterrestrial beings monitoring Earth, might view changes in our atmosphere as symptomatic of a a self-destructing civilization– and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, according to a highly speculative scenario developed by scientists at NASA and Penn State University.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa's Planetary Science Division and his colleagues developed scenarios that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity "prepare for actual contact".
Their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis,divides alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/62743817/etfiles

Transhumanism & Genetic Manipulation - Tom Horn & Steve Quayle

Big Brother 2.0: 10 New Ways That The Government Will Be Spying On You And Controlling Your Behavior

Big Brother 2.0: 10 New Ways That The Government Will Be Spying On You And Controlling Your Behavior: The following are 10 new ways that the government will be spying on you and controlling your behavior....

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough: All of the smart-guys in the country who spent their time trying to make solar power more efficient were just outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old and a tree.

SpaceX Plans To Be Top World Rocket Maker

SpaceX Plans To Be Top World Rocket Maker | AVIATION WEEK: While many beleaguered U.S. aerospace manufacturers are trimming back amid continuing uncertainty over the nation’s long-term goals, California-based SpaceX is ramping up plans to become the world’s largest producer of rocket engines in less than five years, manufacturing more units per year than any other single country.

Solar storm tracked all the way from the Sun to Earth

Solar storm tracked all the way from the Sun to Earth: How a solar storm is tracked for 93 million miles...

Tiny Pocketbots Prepped for Combat

When the U.S. military first got serious about ground robots, it bought up a bunch of 42-pound machines called PackBots. The name implied that infantrymen would just throw the robots in their rucksacks. In reality, the things were too heavy for already-overloaded troops to carry around on the regular. The PackBot’s main competitor, the Talon, was even more of a burden. It weighed a whopping 125 pounds.

Now, there’s a new wave of reconnaissance bots being prepared for combat. And they are radically smaller than the previous generation; the tiniest of them weighs less than a pound-and-a-half. Which means they’ll not only fit inside a backpack, they might even squeeze inside a jacket or a pair of pants. Call them pocketbots.

Both the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are expected shortly to issue “urgent” battlefield requests for 3,500 to 5,000 of the micro machines. The idea that these new models can be tossed into a building or over a wall, allowing an infantryman to get a sense of what’s inside a room before he kicks down the door.

Three different bot-makers showed off their pocketbot models at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington this week. If they work as advertised, they could be the next big leap forward for military robotics.

Girl, 15, is youngest to receive bionic fingers

Chloe Holmes has becoming the youngest person in Europe to be fitted with bionic fingers Photo: SWNS

Chloe Holmes lost all her fingers to septicaemia as a toddler and has never been able to pick things up for herself.

But her parents have now forked out £38,000 for a full set of bionic left digits which are controlled by electronic signals from the nerve endings in her hand.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Credible UFO sighting by pilots and crew in new UK files

Credible UFO sighting by pilots and crew in new UK files | Openminds.tv: One of the most highly regarded UFO sightings in recent history was witnessed by the crew and passengers of two separate planes above the Channel Islands, in the English Channel, on April 23, 2007. The most recent batch of UK UFO files includes reports from the pilots of the planes, along with drawings of what they saw. One of the pilots estimates that the objects may have been a mile wide. Dr. David Clarke, a university lecturer on journalism and Ph.D. of folklore, serves as a consultant to the UK National Archives for their UFO file releases, and he says of this case, “This unexplained sighting remains one of the more intriguing puzzles in the MoD’s X-files.”

Mystery of UFO filmed flying over motorway close to where BBC reporter saw another disc-shaped aircraft

Mystery of UFO filmed flying over motorway close to where BBC reporter saw another disc-shaped aircraft | Mail Online: A UFO has been filmed speeding across the sky over a motorway - close to where a BBC reporter spotted another mystery object just days later.

The clear footage shows a white ball of light darting through the air over the road which is close to Stansted Airport, Essex.

Several orbs appear to dart away from the central light in different directions across at high speed.

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