Without honeybees, there would be no – Häagen-Dazs ice cream?
It’s true, the Oakland-Calif.-based sweets maker says. Honeybees help create ingredients that go into nearly 40 percent of Häagen-Dazs flavors. Continue reading ›
Also tagged Story 
Actress Hayden Panettiere, who plays cheerleader Claire Bennet on NBC’s hit series Heroes, will lead a rally against a resumption of commercial whaling at 1 p.m. this Sunday, January 27, in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle.
“Whales face increasing threats from climate change, ship strikes, entanglement in nets, and chemical and noise pollution, yet Japan, Norway and Iceland continue to kill them in increasing numbers,” Panettiere said. “I am looking forward to talking with officials who actually make and carry out our policies, as well as fellow young people who will be voting in the upcoming election — I want our voice to be heard.” Continue reading ›
Also tagged Campaign 2008, cheerleader, hayden panettiere, usa
Research has revealed the time of year a person is born can influence his or her personality, health and even whether they are male or female. But rather than being written in the stars, studies are showing that it is the season of birth that predisposes individuals to different traits.
In the northern hemisphere, women born in May will display more impulsive behaviour while those whose birthday falls in November will be more reflective. Men born in the spring will show greater persistence than those born in winter.
Other research has shown that people born in the autumn will tend to be physically active and excel in football while those born in the spring will be more cerebral and may be better suited to chess.
Those born between September and December are more prone to panic attacks while there is growing evidence that schizophrenia is higher among those born in the late winter and early spring.
“It is exactly what you would expect if it were temperature related,” said Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, who has examined the link between luck and the season of birth. “Many of the effects reverse in the two hemispheres.”
Professor John Eagle, a psychiatrist at Aberdeen University who has studied the relationships between season of birth and mental health, added: “The two main culprits are diet and the seasonal fluctuations in nutrition, and the increase in infections during the winter.”
Astrologers have seized on the findings as evidence that the stars influence personality. But scientists insist there are biological reasons behind the effects. –
Telegraph UK
Once styled as Earth’s twin, Venus was transformed from a haven for water to a fiery hell by an unstoppable greenhouse effect, according to an investigation by the first space probe to visit our closest neighbour in more than a decade.
Like peas in a cosmic pod, the second and third rocks from the Sun came into being 4.5 billion years ago with nearly the same radius, mass, density and chemical composition.
But only one, Earth, developed an atmosphere conducive to life. The other, named with unwitting irony after the Roman goddess of love, is an inferno of carbon dioxide (CO2), its surface hot enough to melt steel.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express, orbiting its prey since April 2006, seeks to explain this astonishing divergence.
Preliminary data from the probe reveal a Venus that is more Earth-like than once thought — but not in ways that are reassuring.
At first blush, the two worlds, 42 million kilometres (26 million miles) apart at their closest points, could hardly be more different.
Earth’s temperature range has remained largely stable and its atmosphere has maintained a balance of gases — and this, with the precious water covering two-thirds of its surface, has allowed riotous biodiversity to flourish.
Venus’ atmosphere, though, overwhelmingly comprises suffocating CO2 and a permanent blanket of clouds laced with sulphuric acid. Oxygen is nowhere to be found, nor is any water except in atmospheric traces.
But this was not always so, says Hakan Svedhem, an ESA scientist and lead author of one of eight studies published on Wednesday in the British journal Nature.
Venus, he believes, may have been partially covered with water before it became doomed by global warming.
“Probably because Venus was closer to the Sun, the atmosphere was a little bit warmer and you got more water very high up,” he told AFP.
As water vapour is a greenhouse gas, this further trapped solar heat, causing the planet to heat up even more. So more surface water evaporated, and eventually dissipated into space.
It was a “positive feedback” — a vicious circle of self-reinforcing warming which eventually caused the planet to become bone dry.
Even today, Earth and Venus have roughly the same amount of CO2. But whereas most of Earth’s store remains locked up in the soil, rocks and oceans, on Venus the extreme heat pushed the gas into the air.
“You wound up with what we call a runaway greenhouse effect,” Svedhem told AFP in an interview. “(It) reminds us of pressing problems caused by similar physics on Earth.”
Venus Express, the first dedicated mission since the US Magellan Orbiter mapped the planet’s surface in the early 1990s, is equipped with an arsenal of sensors to peer through the dense clouds across the entire light spectrum.
One surprise already turned up by the 600-kilo (1,320-pound) probe is a 30-40 C (55-70 F) variation between daytime and nighttime temperatures at an altitude of 60 kilometres (40 miles).
At this height, violent winds three times stronger than hurricanes on Earth should even out differences, or so it had been thought.
There are many questions yet to be answered during the mission, which is scheduled to last through 2013.
One is whether there is lightning on Venus. Given the kind of clouds covering the planet, there simply should not be any, Andrew Ingersoll, a professor at Caltech University in Pasadena, California, said in a commentary, also published in Nature.
But Venus Express has detected “whistlers,” low-frequency electromagnetic waves that last a fraction of a second and are normally a sure sign of electrical discharges.
Another enigma: sometime within the last 700 to 900 million years, the planet seems to have lost its skin, its topography resculpted by some giant force.
“Venus has quite recently completely changed its surface,” said Svedhem. “Some event completely changed everything — this is a strange process we do not completely understand.” – AFP
It is about the size and weight of a theatre programme and when it was published in Valencia, Spain, at the weekend, the first eagerly grabbed copies were held together by a hastily punched staple. Yet these 23 pages are crucial for the future of the world.
This is the key document on climate change, and from now on you can forget any others you may have read or seen or heard about.
This is the one that matters. It is the tightly distilled, peer-reviewed research of several thousand scientists, fully endorsed, without qualification, by all the world’s major governments. Its official name is a mouthful: The Policymakers’ Summary of the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment.
So let’s just call it The Synthesis.
It is so important because it provides one concise, easily-readable but comprehensive text of facts, figures and diagrams – in short all the information you need to understand and act on the threat of global warming, be you a politician, a businessman, an activist or a citizen (or for that matter, a doubter).
The Synthesis has been distilled from more than 3,000 pages of research published in the three separate parts of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, or AR4, during the course of 2007 – on the science of climate change, on its potential impacts, and the possible remedies.
These individual sections – published in Paris in February, in Brussels in April and in Bangkok in May – spelled out comprehensively that the Earth could warm by an average of up to 6C during the course of the coming century, and that this would be catastrophic in its impact for human society, most of all the poor in developing countries; but they also offered hope that the problem was solvable, if the governments took rapid and decisive action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing the warming.
The IPCC, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year (along with Al Gore) for its efforts to raise awareness of climate change, was set up by the UN in 1988 and published its first assessment, sounding the initial warning about rising temperatures, in 1990; it issued subsequent reports in 1995 and 2001. But this year’s fourth assessment has an importance all its own.
For it is the one where scientists now feel confident enough to declare that the warming world is a phenomenon beyond all doubt, and that the likelihood of this being caused by the human actions of putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – and not say, by increased solar activity, as some have argued – is greater than 90 per cent.
For all but the most perverse of sceptics, it ends the basic argument. And it also urgently warns that the risks are greater, and possibly closer in time, than was appreciated even six years ago, when the third assessment was published.
It is chapter and verse, it is Holy Writ: you may not agree with it, but this (backed up by the full reports) is what the world scientific community thinks. Its opening words are magisterial – almost Biblical – in tone. “Warming of the climate system,” it pronounces, “is unequivocal” . It goes on to spell out that the atmosphere is rapidly warming, snow and ice are melting across the world, and the global sea level is rising at an increasing rate; yet the problem is solvable if governments act decisively.
It is of immediate importance: for the 10,000 ministers, diplomats, officials and civil servants from every country in the world who are assembling in Bali, Indonesia, in two weeks’ time to try to sketch out a new international climate treaty to follow the bruised and battered Kyoto protocol.
The Bali conference was put back by a month so that the participants could be in possession of The Synthesis for the talks, and the document will provide the essential background information against which all delegates will work. “We expect to see their personal copies return from Bali, battered and worn from frequent use, with paragraphs underlined and notes in the margin,” said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace.
Because all governments adopted The Synthesis by consensus (after a week’s negotiations in Valencia), it means they cannot disavow the underlying science and its conclusions (although it does not commit them to specific courses of action).
In Bali, delegates will attempt to set a path forward to a replacement treaty for Kyoto, which runs out in its present form in 2012. The original protocol called on industrialised countries such as the US and Britain to cut their carbon dioxide emissions, without imposing a similar task on developing nations such as China and India – which was one of the reasons President George Bush withdrew.
But no new treaty will work unless it brings together both the US and China – now jointly the world’s greatest CO2 producers – along with the rest of the international community in a unified attempt to bring emissions under control.
The Synthesis shows in its 23 short pages – just 5,000 words – exactly why that is necessary. It shows it to governments and it shows it to all of us. It will be one of history’s most important documents, and because of the phenomenon of the internet you can read it in a matter of moments and judge for yourself.
Download – The IPCC Synthesis (.pdf)
Latest statistics and shocks still in store
* 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in instrumental records of global surface temperatures (since 1850)
* Global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an average rate of 1.8mm per year – but since 1993 at an average rate of 3.1mm
* Temperature changes will depend on how much CO2 is emitted, but different scenarios see the increase by 2100 ranging from 0.3C to 6.4C
* Up to 30 per cent of the world’s species are at increased risk of extinction after a 2C temperature rise
* Between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa could suffer water shortages by 2020; in Asia, heavily-populated “mega-deltas” are at greatly increased risk of flooding; tropical forest in eastern Amazonia will turn to savannah by mid-century - Independent.co.uk
Also tagged
In a full-page New York Times ad on Oct. 10, a group of grassroots Democrats, called DraftGore.com, published an open letter to Gore pleading with him to enter the race.
“You say you have fallen out of love with politics, and you have every reason to feel that way,” the letter read. “But we know you have not fallen out of love with your country. And your country needs you now — as do your party and the planet you are fighting so hard to save.”
Across the country, local draft-Gore groups have sprung up, preparing for signature drives to put Gore on the ballot in Democratic primaries, even as the clock on registration deadlines ticks down.
Some Gore backers hope that Gore might change his mind and enter the race after Oct. 12, the scheduled date for announcing the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he is a nominee because of his work on global warming.
The urgency that these rank-and-file Democrats feel about a Gore candidacy derives, in part, from the inadequacies of the current crop of presidential hopefuls who are seen as lacking the foresight, the experience or the gravitas that Gore offers.
Front-runner Hillary Clinton may have reinvented herself as an Iraq War critic for the Democratic primaries, but she was a staunch supporter of the war from 2002 to 2005, even aligning herself with Sen. John McCain’s advocacy for a military escalation.
In a Dec. 8, 2003, article, New York Times columnist William Safire dubbed Sen. Clinton “a congenital hawk” whose mantra on Iraq was “failure is not an option.”
It was not until George W. Bush’s approval ratings went into freefall in late 2005 — and Sen. Clinton was eyeing the Democratic presidential nomination — that she began repositioning herself as a war opponent.
By contrast, Gore was one of the few politicians of national stature who vocally opposed a preemptive war against Iraq amid the war fever of the time. In a speech in San Francisco on Sept. 23, 2002, he described the dangers of the Bush Doctrine’s muscular unilateralism and the harm that could result from charging into Iraq.
Read more at
Alternet.org
