publishedmedium:scientific american

James Hansen leaves NASA to become a full-time activist fighting climate chaos — War in Context
http://warincontext.org/2013/04/13/james-hansen-leaves-nasa-to-become-a-full-time-activist-fighting-clima

Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/04/12/why-jim-hansen-stopped-being-a-government-scientist-video:

Why did James Hansen retire on April 2 after 32 years as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? As he told the enterprising students of Columbia University’s Sustainability Media Lab who captured him in the following video, “I want to devote full time to trying to help the public understand the urgency of addressing climate change.”

It’s not exactly the “spend more time with my family” excuse often give by retiring government officials, but his family is nonetheless the reason for this change. He’s worried about preventing “climate chaos” and instead preserving the relatively stable climate of the past 10,000 years—when human civilization developed and flourished—for his five grandchildren.

That means full-time activism for the 72-year-old, and perhaps the risk of getting arrested at more coal-mine or tar-sand protests.

Melting Arctic ice will make way for more ships and more species invasions

http://www.nature.com/news/melting-arctic-ice-will-make-way-for-more-ships-and-more-species-invasions-1

Melting Arctic ice will make way for more ships and more species invasions

A new study shows immense increases in shipping are likely over the North Pole and Arctic Ocean in the coming years, alerting scientists who study invasive species.

07 March 2013

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.9375.1362666288!/image/1.12566.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_300/1.12566.jpg

The rare ships that have ventured through the harsh, icebound Arctic Ocean require reinforced hulls and ice-breaking bows that allow them to plow through dense ice as much as two meters deep, and face hazardous conditions in remote locations for long periods of time. Arctic sea ice now is melting so rapidly each summer due to global warming, however, that ships without ice-breaking hulls will be able to cross previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean by 2050. And light-weight ships equipped to cut through one meter of ice will be able to travel over the North Pole regularly in late summer, according to a new study published March 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Plus.

#arctique #climat

Invasive Ant Armies Clash on U.S. Soil — Marissa Fessenden, Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=invasive-ant-wars

One of the most aggressive invasive ants in the world seems to have met its match in North Carolina—but if the arthropod challenger prevails, don’t expect it to play nice

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/invasive-ant-wars_1.jpg
Asian needle ant attacking a termite
Image: By Benoit Guenard

#écologie #it_has_begun

The Embedded Dangers of Untested Stem Cell Cosmetics | Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stem-cell-cosmetics&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20121219

@beautefatale des cellules souches injectées dans la peau du visage peuvent se transformer en os…

About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hills—a face-lift that made use of her own adult stem cells. (...)

Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman’s eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.

http://returntofleet.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/boneface-2011-11-perfuct.jpg

#chirurgie_esthétique #santé

How the World Found Out about Global Warming: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=timeline-how-the-world-found-out-ab

300 BC - Theophrastus, a student of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, documents that human activity can affect climate. He observes that drainage of marshes cools an area around Thessaly and that clearing of forests near Philippi warms the climate.

1896 - Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius becomes the first to quantify carbon dioxide’s role in keeping the planet warm. He later concluded that the burning of coal could cause a “noticeable increase” in carbon levels over centuries.

#histoire #climat

Obama and Romney Tackle 14 Top #Science Questions: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obama-romney-science-debate

#politique #recherche #etats-unis

Tenségrité (architecture) - Wikipédia
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tens%C3%A9grit%C3%A9_(architecture)

La tenségrité caractérise la faculté d’une structure à se stabiliser par le jeu des forces de tension et de compression qui s’y répartissent et s’y équilibrent. Les structures établies par la tenségrité sont donc stabilisées, non par la résistance de chacun de leurs constituants, mais par la répartition et l’équilibre des contraintes mécaniques dans la totalité de la structure.

Voir aussi : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity et http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Buckminster_Fuller

#architecture #design #biomécanique #arts_martiaux

Can #Facebook Show How to Reduce the Growing Energy Use of the Internet? | Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=facebook-leadership-reduces-internet-growing-phys

There are now more than 500,000 #data_centers worldwide, hosting the bulk of the more than 32 million individual servers. Server farms, according to data center expert Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, now account for roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity use, or about 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. #Google's data centers, for example, dwarf Facebook’s, using two billion kilowatt-hours per year as the world searches for the latest article on server energy use.

That makes the #Internet a larger emitter of greenhouse gases—230 million metric tons—than all the countries of Scandinavia put together.

(...) small server rooms, or even closets, employed by smaller companies the world over, typically do not have computers with the most efficient cooling and use up to twice as much electricity per computation as the more effective computers

#environnement #électricité

Bill Gates invests in solar-powered toilet
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/08/201281601350190483.html

US billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates is investing in a solar-powered toilet for the developing world that will use little or no water.

The need for a new type of toilet is an important part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s push to improve health in the developing world, officials familiar with the project said.

Pour @fil

WHO meeting calls for mutant-flu research to be published ‘in full.’
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/who-meeting-calls-for-mutant-flu-research-to-be-published-in-full.html

A two-day meeting of 22 experts convened in Geneva by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded that two controversial flu studies should be published in full. The research — in which ferret-transmissible strains of avian H5N1 flu virus were created — will be published after a delay of probably a few months, which the experts argue is needed to explain better the public-health benefits of the research and allay public concerns over the safety of the work

papier du NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/health/details-of-bird-flu-research-will-be-released.html

une video du débat
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/video-debating-h5n1-and-dual-use-research.html

calculs des taux de fatalité
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=h5n1-bird-flu-case-fatality-calculations

#h5n1 #recherche #censure #santé #bioarmement

Wasting Away: Can a Gates Foundation-Funded Toilet-Design Initiative End a Foul Practice in the Developing World?: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gates-toilet-tech-challenge

Advocates for universal access to and use of basic personal sanitation hope their efforts will get a big boost in August, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation present several hygienic innovations developed through its Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.

la merde est un gros enjeu pour la fondation #bill_gates

“Of the Millennium Goals, sanitation is the one that’s most off track,” according to Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, (Metropolitan Books, 2008) which makes the case for universal toilets.

#santé #développement #toilettes

Le changement climatique tue

New Study Calculates Years of Life Lost to Extreme Temperature: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-calculates-years-life-lost-extreme-temperat

in one Australian city, researchers have calculated how many years of life were lost due to heat waves and cold snaps.

#santé #climat #recherche

Could the desert sun power the world? | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/sahara-solar-panels-green-electricity

dossier du Guardian sur #Desertec

Green electricity generated by Sahara solar panels is being hailed as a solution to the climate change crisis

#énergie #solaire #renouvelable

Why conservative white men are more likely to deny #climate change - The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/why-conservative-white-men-are-more-likely-to-deny-climate-change/article2192459

“confident” conservative white men at the top of the heap of people who think climate change is a #hoax (like that other scientific heresy – evolution).

#déni #propagande #science

Bye bye X-Men: bienvenue au recyclage neuronal.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/eps-gif/HeringIllusion_800.gif

“If there is something next, some imminently arriving transformative development for human capabilities, then the key will not be improved genes or cortical plug-ins. But what other way forward could humans possibly have? With genetic and cyborg enhancement off the table for many years, it would seem we are presently stuck as-is, sans upgrades.

This mystery mechanism of human transformation is neuronal recycling, coined by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, wherein the brain’s innate capabilities are harnessed for altogether novel functions.

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
(...)
Nevertheless, there is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened.
(...)
We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains.

Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.
”
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0

http://www.quora.com/What-is-Neuronal-Recycling

http://www.changizi.com
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2009/11/how-our-brains-learned-to-read.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_VaticanChapter.pdf

http://www.groupsrv.com/computers/about683192.html
http://www.unicog.org/main/pages.php?page=Stanislas_Dehaene

Illusion de Hering:
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_hering/index.html

#neurosciences #evolution #sciences

The Secret Language Code: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-language-code

As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts — blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.

How Do Tumors Grow?: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-tumors-grow

Although imatinib keeps Elliott—and some 22,000 other CML patients in the U.S.—alive and healthy, the drug’s inability to eradicate the cancer suggests that perhaps the standard model that most researchers use to visualize how tumors grow—and the treatments that have arisen from that model—is flawed. An alternative hypothesis has recently gained traction; if it proves to be more accurate, physicians may need to adjust their therapeutic approaches, targeting their treatments to destroy particular subsets of cells within the tumor.

#medecine #cancer

A Brief History of Plastic’s Conquest of the World : Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-brief-history-of-plastic-world-conquest
extrait d’un #livre sur l’histoire du plastique

Most of the new plastics discovered in the 1930s were monopolized by the military over the course of World War II. Eager to conserve precious rubber, for instance, in 1941 the U.S. Army put out an order that all combs issued to servicemen be made of plastic instead of hard rubber. So every member of the armed forces, from private to general, in white units and black, got a five-inch black plastic pocket comb in his “hygiene kit.” Of course, plastics were also pressed into far more significant service, used for mortar fuses, parachutes, aircraft components, antenna housing, bazooka barrels, enclosures for gun turrets, helmet liners, and countless other applications. Plastics were even essential to the building of the atomic bomb: Manhattan Project scientists relied on Teflon’s supreme resistance to corrosion to make containers for the volatile gases they used. Production of plastics leaped during the war, nearly quadrupling from 213 million pounds in 1939 to 818 million pounds in 1945.

Come V-J Day, however, all that production potential had to go somewhere, and plastics exploded into consumer markets. (Indeed, as early as 1943, DuPont had a whole division at work preparing prototypes of housewares that could be made of the plastics then commandeered for the war.)

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=1051973
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/assets/product/9780547152400.gif

Adolescent #Brains: Cause or Consequence? » Sociological Images
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/07/adolescent-brains-cause-or-consequence-2

By “the way our culture treats its teens,” Epstein is referring to the possibility that we infantilize and criminalize them. He includes a figure illustrating how we’ve increasingly targeted teens with laws:

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2011/02/123.jpg

#adolescence