We Speak For Earth
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Scientists Flood NASA With 400 Ideas to Explore Red Planet
Scientists have responded in a big way to NASA’s call to help reformulate its Mars robotic exploration strategy, submitting about 400 ideas and Red Planet mission concepts to the space agency.
NASA’s Mars program suffered deep cuts in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, which was released in February. In response, NASA pulled out of the European-led ExoMars mission, which aims to launch an orbiter and a rover to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
The agency also undertook a broad rethink of its Mars strategy, to figure out how best to explore the Red Planet with reduced funding. NASA asked the scientific community for ideas and was expecting to get about 200 proposals at its recent Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration Workshop in Houston, officials said.
Instead, twice that many submissions poured in from individuals and teams that included professional researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, NASA centers, federal laboratories, industry and international partner organizations.
Science Query for the Presidential Candidates
I wonder when will the public start demanding scientific literacy among their governing officials, including presidential candidates. We were not a country founded on religious beliefs yet it floods our country’s interest for some odd reason. Would it be too much to ask these people have at least a basic, well-rounded sense of the scientific method, much like we require the same level of expertise from our doctors, scientists, teachers, etc.?.
Here’s a nice article via SciAm that reiterates a similar concern:
3 Science Questions to Ask U.S. Presidential Candidates
“As you may already be aware from my previous posts, The Guardian U.S. and NYU’s Studio 20 journalism lab have teamed up to push a project called The Citizens’ Agenda into the media discourse surrounding the U.S. presidential 2012 election. The idea: find out what you–the citizens–want the candidates to be discussing over the next four months – usually meaning questions of substance about policy rather than horserace and gotcha questions so pervasive in mainstream media.”
Explore the Map of Life!
MappingLife.org is live, and incredibly informative. It has collected biodiversity survey data for tens of thousands of terrestrial and aquatic species around Earth. And it’s all there for you to search and draw maps with.
The data comes from field observations as well as other sources, like museum specimens. You can toggle several different types of observations for each species that you choose, and overlay them on customized Google-based maps.
The map above is one I made just now, showing the known habitats of a few bluefin tuna species (genus Thunnus, because they are critically threatened), African elephants (Loxodonta africana, also fighting with humans to retain their habitat) and sea otters (Enhydra lutris, because I love otters). Here’s a tutorial video.
It’s a tool that’s as much educational as it is fun, and a way for anyone to take part in biodiversity research. It’s all of our planet. They’re all of our species.
Go. Play. Learn. Conserve.
The Ecological Footprint of Nations
The ecological footprint is a measurement of the consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions of both individuals and countries. It is expressed by Global Footprint Network (GFN), an NGO, in terms of “global hectares”—the number of hectares of land and sea required to produce the quantities consumed and emitted. This is calculated from the average productivity of six overlapping sorts of area use: arable, forests, grazing land, built-up areas, carbon sequestration and fisheries.
The GFN reckons the world had enough productive land and sea to apportion 1.8 global hectares per person in 2008, the latest year for which data are available. If that is right, humans are horribly depleting the planet. The world’s biggest guzzlers are Qataris, who account for the equivalent of 11.7 global hectares per person. Americans account for 7.2 global hectares and western Europeans weigh in at between 8.3 (Denmark) and 4.1 (Portugal). The title of the world’s most modest consumers is shared between Afghans, Timorese and Palestinians, who each consume or emit just 0.5 global hectares.
Watch How Life Recovers from Devastation
If a portion of Earth underwent a major cataclysm, how long would it take for life to recover?
The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens is giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to witness a recovery from devastation, as the eruption leveled the surrounding forest, blasted away hundreds of meters of the mountain’s summit, and claimed 57 human lives.
Landsat satellites have tracked what has happened on the mountain, and how the forest was reclaimed — all on its own.
The Brain Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains
“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher, though estimates on a global scale are even harder to make because neurocysticercosis is most common in poor places that lack good public-health systems. “Minimally there are 5 million cases of epilepsy from neurocysticercosis,” Nash says.
Breathtaking View of Earth Taken by Russian Satellite
Think of it as an amped up version of the iconic “Blue Marble” image. A new photo of Earth from space highlights the striking beauty and intensely rich colors of our home planet.
The photo was taken by a Russian weather satellite, called Elektro-L No.1, which flies in a geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (35,700 kilometers) above the Earth’s equator.
The image was posted by James Drake on the Planet Earth website. Drake obtained the photo from the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Research Center for Earth Operative Monitoring, which manages the Elektro-L No. 1 spacecraft, after he expressed interest in animating and publishing them.
Tracking Ocean Sulfur Could Help Test Gaia Hypothesis
A few months ago I posted an article on the cwl blog explaining the Gaia theory, it’s essentially a theory that states there could be an underlying system of control covering the Earth, a system that acts to the survival of the planet. Here’s a nice accompanying article by Wired delving into a new research published which attempts to prove or disprove the Gaia theory:
Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.
The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.
If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.
Oduro and his colleagues tracked two compounds — dimethylsulfoniopropionate (or DMSP), which is produced by plant plankton and seaweed in the ocean, and dimethylsulphide, which has a distinctive cabbage-like smell, and is produced when marine microbes break down DMSP.
By examining the differences in the isotope ratios between the compounds over time, the researchers were able to trace unique combinations of an element’s radioactive isotopes, keeping track of them to determine the rate at which the microbes metabolize DMSP into dimethylsulfide, and therefore get clues as to how fast it’s transferred from the ocean into the atmosphere.
Three Plant Proteins Could Aid Bioeconomy
Knowing the function of three plant proteins could help scientists raise seed oil yield in crops, a potential windfall for the bioeconomy. The analysis of gene activity by researchers at Iowa State Univ. and determination of protein structures by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences independently identified three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The researchers used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as the model plant.
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Three-Plant-Proteins-Could-Aid-Bioeconomy-051512.aspx
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
