A selection of the greatest photos from 2011.
John Steiner: National Geographic Celebrates Life
Earth IntelligenceKoko: Another Earth Found – This is Good
Earth Intelligence
Potentially Earth-Like Planet Has Right Temperature for Life
Govert Schilling, ScienceNow
WIRED, 5 december 2011
For the first time, astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life. “If this planet has a surface, it would have a very nice temperature of some 70° Fahrenheit [21°C],” says William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center here, who is the principal investigator of NASA’s Kepler space telescope. “[It's] another milestone on the journey of discovering Earth’s twin,” adds Ames director Simon “Pete” Worden.
Unfortunately, the true nature of the planet, named Kepler-22b, remains unknown. It is 2.4 times the size of Earth, but its mass, and hence its composition, has not yet been determined. “There’s a good chance it could be rocky,” Borucki says, although he adds that the planet would probably contain huge amounts of compressed ice, too. It might even have a global ocean. “We have no planets like this in our own solar system.”
. . . . . .
Forty-eight of these planet candidates orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars. Most are substantially larger than Earth, but 10 are about the same size as our home planet. Some of these are in multiplanet systems. “It’s conceivable that any — or many — of these 48 habitable zone candidates, or their moons, could have life,” Borucki says.
See Also:
extraterrestrial Disclosures Increase….
Journal: Humans Living 50% Beyond Earth Capacity
OOPS. Extra-Terrertial Life Compounded…
Reference: Summary of Earth’s Terminal Conditions & Radical Necessary Changes
Reference: Water, Earth, and We
Reference: WATER–Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls
Science: The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a New Online Database of Habitable Worlds
David Brin: Three-Quarters Climate Change Man-Made
Earth Intelligence
Three-Quarters of Climate Change Is Man-Made
An independent study quantifies the human and natural contributions, with solar radiation contributing only minimally
Quinn Schiermeier and Nature Magazine
Scientific American, 5 december 2011
Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modelers in a paper published online December 4. Most of the observed warming—at least 74 percent—is almost certainly due to human activity, they write in Nature Geoscience.
Phi Beta Iota: Yes BUT! First off, Environmental Degradation, high-level threat number three, includes Climate Change, which is less than 10% of Environmental Degradation (and within Climate Change, carbon is vastly less important than mercury or sulpher). Secondly, the real looming catastrophes are man-made increases in the frequency and severity of weather. We have destroyed the earth's natural feedback loops and self-correcting mechanisms.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Climate Change
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disease
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Environmental Degradation (Other than Emissions)
Mini-Me: US Gasoline Exports–Reason for Tar Sands Fraud
03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Gasoline: The new big U.S. export
Steve Hargreaves
CNN Money, 5 December 2011
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.
The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.
The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it produced here plus had to import gas from places in Europe.
But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.
Phi Beta Iota: The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public. In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.
Koko: Mammoth find raises hopes of successful cloning
Earth IntelligenceKoko Sign: Like diversity.
Mammoth find raises hopes of successful cloning
Emma Woollacott
TG Daily, December 5, 2011
A Japanese team which has been hoping to clone a mammoth says that a specimen discovered this summer looks likely to yield up the necessary DNA.
The team, from Japan's Kinki University and the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, announced its plans last January before setting off for Siberia in search of frozen mammoth tissue.
And they've now announced that one of their finds – a thigh bone discovered in northern Sakha – contains well-preserved bone marrow with intact cell nuclei.
Global warming has decreased the proportion of the Siberian tundra that's covered with permafrost, meaning that new mammoth carcases have increasingly been coming to light. However, past efforts to recreate the mammoth – which have been going on since the 1990s – have failed as cell nuclei have been in too poor a condition.
This latest specimen, though, is reported to be in very good condition, and scientific techniques for extracting viable DNA have improved. As a result, according to Japan's Kyodo News, the Japanese team is now confident that it can replace the nuclei of egg cells from an African elephant with nuclei taken from the mammoth bone marrow.
This would create create embryos which can be implanted into elephants' wombs for gestation.
Any resulting baby mammoth would be the first to walk the earth for thousands of years. The species is believed to have largely died out at the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago, with a dwarf species hanging on for another 5,000 years.
Mini-Me: World Revolting Against US Economic Model [Full Text Online for Google Translate]
Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call, Policies, ThreatsDear friends and colleagues,
The world is riveting toward a possible turning point and we hope that you are able to stand with us in this call to action.
We, the undersigned, have co-authored the document noted below. We are now writing to seek your endorsement. Please if you wish to support our statement and are willing to stand in solidarity with us, then, by return of this email, add your name and affiliation to the signatories. As the current global crises have clearly shown, the whole world is waking up to the value of co-creation and harnessing of knowledge from diverse sources, disciplines, experience and expertise.
We plan to publicise this document widely and forward it to many relevant national and international agencies and bodies tasked with formulating new policies for a new type of world economy.
Event: 10 December Occupy London: P2P for All
Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call, Policies
Introduction to P2P and the Commons as the new paradigm of change
When: Sat, December 10, 10am – 11am
To succeed in social change, I believe we need 3 things.
* a genuine mass movement. As the first native movement and great hope of the digital age that is what #ows is all about.
* concrete alternatives that can change our lives and allow us to live our values right now. This is what commons-based peer production provides – a new way of producing value.
* the ability to be able to stop bad policies, and propose new ones that allow alternatives to survive and thrive, for which we need true democratic processes.
A ‘commons’ rather than ‘market state’ orientation is a fruitful way to think about solving humanity’s problems in a new way.
Michel Bauwens is founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives , a global collaborative researching peer production that maps the thousands of p2p projects being created to achieve mutual alignment and a growing counter economy that can co-exist and perhaps even supersede the today’s dysfunctional one. He is also a partner of the Commons Strategies Group which seeks to seed conversations around the new commons paradigm.
