President Obama has some unfinished business to attend to, and taking care of it will require help and support from corporate leaders across the country. When he ran for president in 2008, Obama made three big promises: end the Iraq War, extend health care coverage to all Americans, and take federal action to reduce the…
US military satellite data exposes complexity of climate change and impact of changing wind patterns on polar regions
Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a new report. The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other…
Manmade increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects that are larger than expected
Scientists have succeeded in “cloaking” an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves. Many “invisibility cloak” efforts have been demonstrated, but all have reflected some of the incident light, making the illusion incomplete. A Nature Materials study has now shown how to pull off the trick flawlessly. However, the…
A mother’s willingness to sacrifice her own health and safety for the sake of her children is a common narrative across cultures — and by no means unique to humans alone. Female polar bears starve, dolphin mothers stop sleeping and some spider moms give themselves as lunch for their crawly babies’ first meal. Now an…
Former vice president Al Gore posted on his webpage that scientific studies of clouds and atmospheric pressure suggests that, “more likely than not, our planet will experience cataclysmic warming by the end of the century.” That would take mankind to the year 2100 before all hell breaks loose. Gore, who taught the world about the…
Climate change, population growth and competing demands for land and resources are putting great pressure on the world’s food systems. Smallholder farmers in the developing world, who produce much of the food for the poorest people, are threatened by devastating droughts and floods, food price spikes, and persistent poverty. Scientific advances have greatly alleviated hunger…
From Massimo Pigliucci’s Rationally Speaking blog: Here is an interesting statistic: if we multiply the (approximate) number of computers currently present on planet Earth by the (approximate) number of transistors contained in those computers we get 10^18, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the number of synapses in a typical human brain. Which…
When a killer seaweed touches a kind of spiky coral, the coral pushes a chemical panic button that brings small resident fish to the rescue. Unchecked, seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef, as the community dwindles in “a descent into slime,” says marine ecologist Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta….