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Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:54:50 GMT

clipped by: syncopath

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

June 16, 2008—Another large plate of ice has broken off the rapidly disintegrating Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula, the above satellite images show.

While the ice shelf, located directly below South America, shrank significantly in previous months (see March images), this is the first documented occurrence of an ice shelf collapsing during the Southern Hemisphere's winter.

A trend of "extraordinary warming" over the past 50 years in Antarctica has caused the loss of several ice shelves

The researchers also warned that the last strip of ice on Wilkins would disappear soon.

"The remaining plate has an arched fracture at its narrowest position," they said, "making it very likely that the connection will break completely in the coming days."

great Images of the Contemporary Mind (2)

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:34:07 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: … thanks to the illustrators David Plunkert and Leigh Wells .
Enjoy

Clip Source: www.spurdesign.com

Clip Source: folioplanet.com

Clip Source: www.spurdesign.com

The 100 year old photo blog

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:42:55 GMT

clipped by: CarnivalBorn

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Buster and Eldridge: 1912

Regular Lubrication: 1942

Party Girl: 1942

Strange Leaf: 1908

A Distant Shore: 1925

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

The Good Old Summertime: 1923

A Swell Soiree: 1942

Acetylene Annie: 1942

Bye, Y'all: 1939

Canoe Rental: 1925

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Four Belles: 1923

Back at the Diner: 1939

A Day at the Beach: 1924

My New Olds: 1922

X-Man: 1909

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Beer for Rent: 1943

T-Bone 50 Cents: 1939

Hamburgers 5 Cents: 1941

White Tower: 1941

Teen Spirit: 1926

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

No. 2: 1909

Pieface Boy: 1923

Branding: 1939

Model Citizens: 1924

Bottle Break: 1909

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Dubya: 1939

Everyone Was There: 1938

International Harvester: 1943

Ride Like the Wind: 1902

Jerusalem Dodge: 1925

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

On Walden Pond: 1937

Manned by Women: 1942

Not a Cloud in the Sky: 1942

Lollipop Beach: 1923

A Little Off the Top: 1917

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Meet the Neighbors: 1920

Modern Dance: 1920

Build-a-Buick: 1924

Gasoline Alley: 1912

Army Camp: 1917

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

Naked Buick: 1924

Follies of the Day: 1925

Song Catcher: 1916

Rice Princesses: 1938

Step Right Up: 1917

Clip Source: www.shorpy.com

The Travelers: 1943

Burning Sands: 1932

Minute Service Station: 1925

Too Much Excitement: 1913

Giant Solar Tsunami Viewed from NASA's STEREO Spacecraft

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:27:47 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Just as earthquakes can set off huge tsunami waves on the surface of our oceans, a coronal mass ejection or flare can cause a tsunami on the Sun's surface—and it did on May 19, 2007. The waves generated by the explosions can travel at over a million kilometers per hour. The event was captured by NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and was observed by a team at Trinity College, Dublin.

The event lasted for about 35 minutes and ultimately covered almost the full disk of the Sun. “The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal, about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second,” stated Long.

“We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere,” said Dr. Gallagher, a colleague of Long.

Tags: nasa, sun

Mass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:19:31 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs.

As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.

Clip Source: www.nsf.gov

Ebb and flow of the sea is the primary cause of the world's mass extinctions over the past 500 million years

If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.

But a new study, published June 15, 2008, in the journal Nature, suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions over the past 500 million years.

View a video interview with geoscientist Shanan Peters.

Tags: mass extinctions, geology, ocean, science

Mathmatics Surfaces Gallery

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:06:25 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator

Clip Source: gallery.wolfram.com

Tags: mathmatics, surfaces, gallery, wolfram, math, science

Clip it Green!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:28:59 GMT

clipped by: NS-Clips

Clip Source: addons.mozilla.org

Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you'll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment.

"language as a window into human nature'. -

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:32:32 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: "language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly hardwired into our brains and partly learned"..Steven Pinker un his new book

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

The rules of language may reveal how our brains really work.

Steven Pinker

a linguistics explorer, hunting around the sentences and syntax of human language for clues

to the inner world of the human brain

how they are used in sentences,

Why so much attention to verbs?

part it’s simply because he finds them fascinating.

Pinker has been a driving force in linguistics theory, analyzing language in labs at MIT, Stanford University

testing to what extent language is biologically programmed. His research suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly hardwired into our brains and partly learned

This work led Pinker to develop his theory of the evolution of the mind and the source of language

the brain at birth is not simply a blank slate to be shaped by culture and experience. Rather, it comes programmed with many behavioral dispositions and talents

human nature is to some extent innate and shaped by natural selection

Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:21:46 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: This is an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps it is connected to the steady rise in life expectancy.

Clip Source: www.time.com

Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that's because he's kept his part-time job — as a porn star.

Tokuda stresses the appeal of his work to an audience of his peers: "Elderly people don't identify with school dramas," he says. "It's easier for them to relate to older men and daughters-in-law series, so they tend to watch adult videos with older people in them." The veteran porn star plans to keep working until he's 80, or older, as long as the industry will cast him — and given the bullish market for his work, he's unlikely to go without work.

Tags: culture, aging

New Research On Octopuses Sheds Light On Memory

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:39:13 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: It is not completely understood how these two systems are interconnected, if at all. However, the organization in the octopus demonstrates a sophistication that was not described yet in other animals. In the octopus, the short-term and long-term systems are working in parallel, but not independently. This is so because the long-term memory area -- in addition to its capacity to store long-term memories -- also regulates the rate at which the short-term memory system acquires short-term memories. This regulatory mechanism is probably useful in cases where faster learning is significant for the octopus' survival in emergency or risky situations.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Research on octopuses has shed new light on how our brains store and recall memory,

Why octopuses?

Octopuses and other related creatures, known as cephalopods, are considered to be the most intelligent invertebrates because they have relatively large brains and they can be trained for various learning and memory tasks, says Dr. Hochner.

Their behavior repertoire and learning and memory abilities are even comparable in their complexity to those of advanced vertebrates. However, they are still invertebrate mollusks with brains that contain a much fewer number of nerve cells and much simpler anatomical organization than that of vertebrate brains. This unique constellation was utilized to tackle one of the most interesting questions in modern neuroscience, which is how the brain stores and recalls memories

Tags: octopuse, memory

Could you do this at 12?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:58:27 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

What We'll Miss About Bill Gates — a Very Long Good-Bye

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:50:39 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Bill Gates, we'll miss you. Not just because you're the ultimate geek-villain-pioneer-entrepreneur-monopolist. But because you've always been there for us. To love. To hate. To envy. To pick on. So this month, your last as a full-time Microsoft employee, we realized it was only right and proper to look back on your storied career. (Or we just love your mug shot from the Albuquerque arrest.)

1950s
October 28, 1955
William Henry Gates III is born in Seattle. His grandmother Adelle nicknames him "Trey," the cardplayer's term for a three. He later becomes an avid poker player.

1960s

1967

Gates, a difficult sixth grader, asks his mother, "Have you ever tried thinking?"

Fall 1967

Gates' parents enroll him in Lakeside School, an exclusive boys school in Seattle. He is the smallest kid in the class, yet has size 13 feet.

Tags: bill gates, microsoft

Why the pursuit of happiness naturally includes melancholy

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:33:13 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: "Obviously that opening is a bit hyperbolic for rhetorical effect. I will admit that. But it is, at the same time, a kind of expression of real danger. I think that being melancholy is an essential part of being a human being. I think to be a fully expressed human being you must be willing to delve into melancholy as much as into joy. If we try too hard to get rid of that melancholy it's almost like we're settling for a half-life."

Clip Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

Richard Robinson, www.robinsonphoto.com

Interview: Eric G. Wilson

Why the pursuit of happiness naturally includes melancholy

By Megan Gambino
Smithsonian.com, June 05, 2008

Eighty-four percent of Americans claim to be happy, a statistic that Wake Forest University English professor Eric G. Wilson finds "strange at best, troubling at worst." With a litany of self-help books, pills and plastic surgery to feed Americans' addiction to happiness, he says, "It's now easier than ever before to live a trouble-free life, to smooth out the rough edges, to hide the darkness." In his recent book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson—a non-recovering melancholic by choice—praises sorrow as the muse of many writers and songwriters, warning that to rid life of it is to rid life of a vital source of creativity.

You compare the loss of melancholy to other apocalyptic concerns: global warming, rising oceans and nuclear war. What about happiness is life threatening?

Roll over, Steve Ballmer

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:50:05 GMT

clipped by: communicatrix
clipper's remarks: Best summary yet of why Microsoft's model is f*cked.

Clip Source: www.cultureby.com

This much is clear. Microsoft helped create an industry that is creating a culture that is creating an economy in which Microsoft can sustain itself only with an installed base and bully boy bluster. In sum, Microsoft helped start a party to which it is no longer invited. Apple gets it. Google gets it. Firefox gets it. (Each of them in a different way, interestingly.) Microsoft, not so much. Microsoft, not at all. How can something as smart as a corporation sometimes act as dumb as a corporation?

Tags: microsoft, business, internet, software

Global Telescope has 10x's the Resolution of the Hubble

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:32:45 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico joined a project called Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI), which can make temporary radio telescopes that rival the size of the Earth, spanning North America, South America, Europe and Africa.

The e-VLBI's size gives it 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing the array to image objects - like the bright 'afterglow' formed when a high-speed jet of matter from a gamma-ray burst slams into its surroundings, that just look like points to individual radio telescopes, according to Chris Salter of Arecibo. Now, with the e-VLBI, the data is sent via fiber optic cables to produce real-time images of celestial objects. That allows astronomers to easily plan follow-up observations for rapidly changing phenomena, such as supernovae.

Tags: astronomy, is, out, of, th......................