Copyright Novamir.org 1999 -
"To see the future you must look backwards," ~ The Book of Isaiah.
Ancient Seagrass Holds Secrets of the Oldest Living Organism On Earth
It's big, it's
old and it lives under the sea -
Ancient giant Posidonia oceanica reproduces asexually, generating clones of itself.
A single organism -
"Clonal organisms have an extraordinary capacity to transmit only 'highly competent' genomes, through generations, with potentially no end," said Director of UWA's Oceans' Institute Winthrop Professor Carlos Duarte.
Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite observations of Earth's heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to evidence of "missing energy" in the planet's system.
Where was it going? Or, they wondered, was something wrong with the way researchers tracked energy as it was absorbed from the sun and emitted back into space?
An international team of atmospheric scientists and oceanographers, led by Norman Loeb of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and including Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., set out to investigate the mystery.
They used 10 years of data -
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Despite low solar activity, Earth’s energy budget out of whack
A new NASA study underscores
the fact that greenhouse gases generated by human activity—not changes in solar activity—are
the primary force driving global warming.
The study offers an updated calculation of the Earth's energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth's surface and the amount returned to space as heat. The researchers' calculations show that, despite unusually low solar activity between 2005 and 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy than it returned to space.
....
Total solar irradiance, the amount of energy produced by the sun that reaches
the top of each square meter of the Earth's atmosphere, typically declines by about
a tenth of a percent during cyclical lulls in solar activity caused by shifts in
the sun's magnetic field. Usually solar minimums occur about every eleven years and
last a year or so, but the most recent minimum persisted more than two years longer
than normal, making it the longest minimum recorded during the satellite era.
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Grape Seed Extract Kills Head and Neck Cancer Cells, Leaves Healthy Cells Unharmed
Nearly 12,000 people will die of head and neck cancer in the United States this year and worldwide cases will exceed half a million. A study published in the journal Carcinogenesis shows that in both cell lines and mouse models, grape seed extract (GSE) kills head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.
“It’s a rather dramatic effect,” says Rajesh Agarwal, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
It depends in large part, says Agarwal, on a healthy cell’s ability to wait out damage.
“Cancer cells are fast-
Age-
The research suggests a number of naturally-
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Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.These scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe -
"This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use it for reconstructing imagined conversations, these principles would have to apply to someone's internal verbalizations," cautioned first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-
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MOSCOW — After more than two decades of drilling, Russian scientists have reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake in Antarctica that had been hidden under miles of ice for 20 million years, potentially holding life from the distant past and a clue to the search for life on other planets.
Reaching Lake Vostok is a major discovery avidly anticipated by scientists around the world hoping that it may allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age. It may also provide precious material that would help look for life on ice-
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When Worlds Collide: Harnessing Supercomputers to Understand Solar Storms
If the sun
is anything, it is reassuring. It rises, sets and rises again, allowing us to grow
crops, get tan, and power homes, just to name a few of humanity's most important
life-
Like many other things, however, our sun is prettier at a distance. Turns out that the sun is a violent place where magnetic fields and fusion energy spew plumes of radiation into outer space and at Earth, a phenomenon referred to by space physicists as space weather.
Fortunately for us, Earth's magnetic dipole creates a type of shield known as the
magnetosphere. Unfortunately, though, it's not perfect. The radiation unleashed by
the sun in the form of an ionized gas known as plasma can occasionally sneak past
Earth's defenses in a process known as magnetic reconnection, creating the northern
lights and wreaking havoc on electronics and our daily lives. These solar storms
can knock out whole power grids, rendering entire regions without electricity and,
ironically, light.
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A trip to the museum often involves absorption and reflection. Never more so than at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof at the moment, where Ryoji Ikeda’s exhibition demonstrates the effects of the visitor’s presence upon sound and light waves in a spectacular interactive installation.
Spread across two immense, identical halls of the former railway station, one in each wing, the exhibition, entitled dB, is an architecturally and conceptually creative exploration of the Japanese artist’s fascination with music, physics and mathematics -
In one hall the walls, floor and ceiling are painted black, the space cut through by a 6-
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CAIRO (AP) — Archaeologists on Monday began restoration on a 4,500-
The boat is one of two that were buried next to the Pharaoh Khufu, spokesmen for a joint Egyptian-
Khufu, also known as Cheops, is credited with building the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest of the pyramids. Khufu, son of Snefru, was the second ruler of the 4th Dynasty around 2680 B.C. and ruled Egypt for 23 years.
Both boats, made from Lebanese cedar and Egyptian acacia trees, were originally discovered in 1954. One of the boats is on display at a museum near the pyramids.
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Creatures in chloroform, musty maps, and navigation by brass instruments. That was ocean exploration 18th-
The España Explora. Malaspina 2010 exhibition juxtaposes two Spanish expeditions launched over 200 years apart: between 1789 and 1794, commander Alessandro Malaspina led Spain's imperial survey of its global holdings. In 2010, the Spanish government launched the high-
Tucked into a pavilion at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, the exhibit offers visitors a choice between immersing themselves in Spain's imperial past, or its oceanographic present.
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Don't blame fracking for environmental problems associated with extracting gas from shale. That's the message of a new report from the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, released on the opening day of the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Canada.
The US is riding the wave of a shale gas boom driven by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing -
Other nations are keen to follow this lead, and lead author Charles "Chip" Groat hopes the report will help regulators worldwide separate "fact from fiction". Reviewing existing studies, Groat's team could find no evidence linking groundwater contamination to fracking operations many hundreds of metres below.
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