ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 617

December 10, 2015

“Santa’s Sleigh” Will Be Visible On Christmas Eve

Space





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musicman/Shutterstock



If you look up at the the sky on Christmas eve in the United Kingdom, you’ll be able to see a magical passing light high up among the stars.


Santa’s sleigh? Hmm, not quite – it will actually be a lucky glimpse of the International Space Station (ISS) as it passes over the U.K.

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Published on December 10, 2015 08:54

A New Autism Risk Factor: Moms with Polycystic Ovaries

Mom's ovaries could hold clues to some autism cases, new research suggests—and this time it's not because of genetic vulnerabilities carried in her eggs. A new, large-scale study out of Sweden suggests that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)—an endocrine disorder that affects 5 to 10 percent of women of childbearing age—have an increased risk of giving birth to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).


The Karolinska Institute's Renee Gardner, along with colleagues from Sweden and the U.S., tapped into a Swedish national population health database to look at potential ties between PCOS and ASD. As they reported online December 8 in Molecular Psychiatry, the team looked at 23,748 individuals with ASD and nearly 209,000 unaffected individuals, all born in Sweden between 1984 and 2007.


Although identifying information about the individuals was removed, the researchers had access to information about their relationships to others in the database as well as documented diagnoses and use of health care services. The group found that ASD was 59 percent more prevalent in children born to women with PCOS—a relationship that was independent of PCOS complications such as increased neonatal distress or C-section delivery.


This risk level is roughly comparable with that of having a father over age 50 (estimated to be 66 percent) but lower than it is in those with certain rare genetic syndromes or mutations. The authors of the analysis believe PCOS increases ASD risk in offspring to a greater extent than maternal infection, one of many factors previously implicated in autism.


The apparent PCOS link may seem odd at first glance. But it fits with a theory for autism development that centers on androgens—male sex hormones. Many researchers suspect conditions that boost androgen levels or otherwise upset hormone balance during pregnancy may alter fetal brain formation in ways that contribute to social deficits, delayed language development and other autism-associated symptoms later in life. The theory is supported by several lines of evidence including epidemiological, genetic and mouse model data as well as direct measurements of male hormones and hormonal precursors in amniotic fluid from children with autism and Asperger syndrome.


All women naturally produce some male sex hormones, typically at low levels. Along with ovarian cysts, women with PCOS are prone to increased androgen levels, which can contribute to symptoms such as acne, excess hair growth, weight gain and, in some cases, problems becoming pregnant. For women who do conceive, both PCOS and obesity have been implicated in a bump in androgen levels during pregnancy.


In that framework, results from the Swedish study suggest that "maternal testosterone, which can cross the placenta, is one source of the elevated prenatal steroids to which children who later develop autism are exposed," Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the University of Cambridge Autism Research Center, noted via e-mail.


A longtime proponent of the fetal androgen theory, Baron-Cohen has been involved with numerous studies related to the hypothesis, including yet-to-be-published work by a former graduate student in his lab, who saw similar ties between PCOS and ASD using population data from the U.K.'s National Health Service. In addition, a 2007 study in Hormones and Behavior, co-authored by Baron-Cohen, also found an overrepresentation of PCOS among mothers with autistic children, Although the finding did not reach statistic significance.


The new study from Sweden, however, offers robust evidence that maternal PCOS increases autism risk. Hakon Hakonarson of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who studies ASD genomics and was not involved in the work, agrees that the reported association is convincing, given the size of the study and high quality of the data from the Swedish population resource. He adds that the findings fit with a role for altered fetal hormone exposure in a subset of ASD cases.


But Hakonarson is quick to point out the full gamut of ASD cases likely involves many different genetic and environmental contributors, because the absolute ASD risk in children of PCOS sufferers remains small. With ASD rates hovering around 1 to 2 percent in the general population, he explains, even an almost 60 percent increase in ASD rates in children born to PCOS-affected moms translates into just a fraction of a percent higher chance of the disease overall. Experts say additional contributors are almost certainly present, because the vast majority of women with PCOS give birth to children who don't develop autism. "For any one woman with PCOS, this doesn't mean that her child is definitely going to get autism," Karolinska’s Gardner agrees. "It just means that the risk of this relatively rare disorder is somewhat increased." For her part, she hopes the study will raise awareness amongst women with PCOS without causing alarm or stress.


Investigators are hesitant to tout any clinical interventions at the moment, although Gardner says her group is interested in using population data to compare ASD prevalence in children born to women who have or haven't received pharmaceutical treatment for PCOS. And because the association described in the Swedish study appeared more pronounced in PCOS sufferers who carried excess weight during pregnancy, she suggests women who have the condition may benefit from making an extra effort to maintain a healthy weight before and during pregnancy.


Finally, both Gardner and Baron-Cohen note that the PCOS and ASD link may help to identify ASD-prone children who might benefit from early interventions.

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Published on December 10, 2015 08:30

Underwater Hotel Receives Patent Approval

Environment





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The Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel is part of a wider project to restore the world's coral reefs. Caters News Agency



Tourists looking for a room with an ocean view will be thrilled to hear about the development of a new submarine hotel, which will lie 8.5 meters (28 feet) beneath the waves. Having recently received patent and trademark approval, the Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel is all set to be constructed in Key West, Florida, after which it will be shipped out on a barge to an as yet undecided location.

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Published on December 10, 2015 08:10

December 9, 2015

Quantum computer by Google and NASA is more than 100 million times faster than a regular computer chip

Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.


D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which works with quantum bits, or qubits — each of which can be zero or one or both — instead of more conventional bits. The superposition of these qubits enable machines to make great numbers of computations to simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes.


In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing — a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.


To continue reading the entire article, click the name of the source below.

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Published on December 09, 2015 15:15

What’s The Most Expensive Material In The World?

Technology





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Endohedral fullerenes could help to produce the most accurate atomic clocks ever, and are the most expensive material ever produced. AVN Photo Lab/Shutterstock



Forget diamond, gold and plutonium, because scientists at Oxford University have created a material with a price tag that dwarfs all of the finest substances money can buy. At a recent auction, 200 micrograms of the material fetched £22,000 ($33,000), which works out at around $4.2 billion per ounce.

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Published on December 09, 2015 12:31

Tracking Dr. Traas, Part 2

Anti-evolutionEvolution denialHistory

The title of the present post really ought to be “Tracking Dr. Fraas”—or perhaps “Fracking Dr. Fraas” for the alliteration?—for, as I explained in part 1, it turns out that “the famous paleontologist Dr. Traas,” who reportedly claimed, “The idea that mankind is descended from any Simian species whatever, is certainly the most foolish ever put forth by man writing on the history of man. It should be handed down to posterity as a new edition of the Memorial on Human Follies. No proof of this baroque theory can be given from discovered fossils,” is in fact the famous paleontologist Dr. Fraas. T. T. Martin’s Hell and the High Schools (1923), William A. Williams’s The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved (1925), and William Bell Riley’s Inspiration or Evolution (1926) all get the surname wrong, probably as a result of a mistake in Luther Townsend’s “Scientific Opinion Opposed to Evolution” (1917), while Theodore Graebner’s Evolution: An Investigation and a Criticism (1921) gets it right. Still, who is Dr. Fraas? The easiest way to answer is to look at Dieu et Science (1910), by Elie de Cyon (1843–1912), which introduced the quotation to the American creationist scene via a column in the Literary Digest in 1911.



In Dieu et Science, de Cyon quotes the following: “L’idée que le genre humain descend d’une espéce simienne quelconque est certainement la plus folle qui fut émise par un homme sur l’histoire des hommes. Elle mérite de passer à la postérité dans une nouvelle édition du Mémorial de bêtise humaines. Jamais aucune prevue de cette idée baroque ne pourra être donnée à l’aide des découvertes fossiles”—which is accurately translated in the Literary Digest column—and in a footnote attributes it to “Fraas” who “devoted his long life to the study of fossil animals,” and cites Karl Ernst von Baer’s “Über Darwins Lehre” (1876) as the source. In von Baer’s article in turn appears a reference to “die Ansicht eines gewiegten Paläontologen, des Herrn Fraas, anzuführen: ‘Daß aus einer dieser Affenspecialitäten das Menschengeschlecht hervorgegangen sein soll, ist der wahnwitzigste Gedanke, den Menschen je über die Geschichte der Menschheit dachten, würdig einst verewigt zu werden in einer neuen Auflage der Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheiten. Von irgend einer Begründung dieser barocken Idee durch Thatsachen, etwa durch Belege aus Erfunden u.s.w, ist ohnehin gar keine Rede.’”



Besides characterizing the passage as the insight of a shrewd paleontologist, Herr Fraas, von Baer isn’t particularly helpful, providing no first name and no reference for the passage. But having the German version in hand was helpful, because I was then able to find, in Franz Heinrich Reusch’s Bibel und Natur (1876), a version of the quotation, with two further sentences: “Lassen wir darum beruhigt den Gorilla in den tropischen Sümpfen von Gabon-Gina, dem einzigen Orte des Planeten, wo man ihn trifft. Den Beweis seiner Blutsverwandtschaft mit diesen Ungethüm bleibt vor der Hand der Mensch sich noch schuldig.” In the 1886 English translation: “We may therefore calmly leave the gorilla in the tropical swamps of Lower Guinea, the only place on this planet where he is found. The proof of man’s relationship to this monster has still to be discovered.” (I was disappointed to find that my off-the-cuff translation, on which Fraas was recommending that we reassure the gorilla that the proof of its relationship to the monstrous humans is yet to be discovered, was wrong: it would have been funny.) Plus Reusch even provides a first name for Herr Fraas, Oscar, and a source for the quotation, Vor der Sündfluth! 



Oscar Fraas (above; 1824–1897) studied theology at the University of Tübingen and served as a pastor for four years in southern Germany. But he was also keenly interested in the natural sciences, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Würzburg in 1851, becoming the curator of the department of mineralogy and paleontology at the Royal Württemberg museum of natural history in Stuttgart in 1854. According to the obituary in the Geological Magazine, he “not only made the Stuttgart collection one of the finest in Europe, and enriched it with Swabian fossil batrachians, reptiles, and mammals, many of which are absolutely unique; he also published popular writings to interest the people in his work, and carried on a long series of researches, of which the result appear in more than sixty papers and memoirs.” Among those popular writings was Vor der Sündfluth! (1866)—Before the Deluge!—which, according to M. J. S. Rudwick’s Scenes from Deep Time (1995), was a German equivalent of the hugely popular La Terre Avant le Déluge (1863)—Earth Before the Deluge—by Louis Figuier (1819–1894): “it was the success of Figuier’s book in France that prompted Fraas to write a similar work.” More to come in part 3.

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Published on December 09, 2015 10:00

Ceres Is Cloudy, with a Chance of Cryovolcanoes

Even a dwarf planet can harbor big surprises.


Ever since it was discovered floating between Mars and Jupiter in 1801, Ceres has perplexed astronomers and defied easy categorization. Telescopic studies over the years showed it was roughly the size of Texas, with up to a third of its weight in water—too small to be a true planet, too wet and icy to be an asteroid and too big and rocky to be a comet. Astronomers chalked up Ceres’ oddities to its being a relic from an early, formative epoch of our solar system, when planets coalesced from many Ceres-like objects caroming around the Sun. For lack of any better ideas, they also chose to include Ceres in the “dwarf planet” category they created for Pluto in 2006.


Now, new results from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since March, hint that Ceres may have much more in common with its diminutive dwarf-planet cousin than once thought. Dawn co-investigator Maria Cristina De Sanctis of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, Italy and colleagues report their detection of abundant ammonia-rich minerals on Ceres’ surface, suggesting that it was born closer to the vicinity of Pluto even though it now orbits in the asteroid belt. Separately, a team led by Andreas Nathues of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, has found what appears to be cloud-like hazes of water vapor emanating from one of the mysterious bright spots that dot Ceres’ asphalt-dark surface.


In keeping with all the rest of Ceres’ oddball uncertainties, the findings hold major albeit nebulous implications for our understanding of the dwarf planet and its relationship to the other large objects in our solar system. Both studies are published in Nature. (Scientific American is a part of Nature Publishing Group)


An import from the outer solar system?

Astronomers have been telescopically studying Ceres for decades, using spectrometers to measure how certain wavelengths of light are reflected or absorbed by substances upon the surface. In all that time, they have failed to pin down exactly what the world’s surface is made of, in large part because the key wavelengths of light they need for definitive detections are in the infrared, a region of the spectrum mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.


Armed with data from Dawn’s Visible-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, De Sanctis and colleagues examined a broad range of spectra for the entire surface of Ceres, including the crucial infrared wavelengths. The best match for the spectra proved to be something De Sanctis and her team hadn’t even been looking for—clay-like minerals called ammoniated phyllosilicates.


An abundance of ammonia on a relatively rocky world like Ceres is surprising, De Sanctis says, because the volatile compound of nitrogen and hydrogen cannot long persist in the relatively warm and sunny regions of the inner solar system where Ceres now resides. Consequently, ammonia is more commonly associated with comets. Explaining an ammonia-rich Ceres may require pushing the dwarf planet’s birthplace much farther out from the Sun, or instead importing showers of ammonia-rich pebbles from the outer solar system to help form Ceres where it now resides. Fortunately, one mechanism can do either of these things. “Ceres or ammonia-rich material from the outer solar system could have been implanted in the asteroid belt as a result of orbital perturbations exerted by the giant planets” early in the solar system’s history, De Sanctis says.


Based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence, many theorists now believe that in our solar system’s infancy its giant planets shifted over hundreds of millions of kilometers, propelled by gravitational interactions between the planets and orbiting disks of debris. Those wanderings are thought to have seeded our own world with another delicate volatile, some of the water that fills Earth’s oceans, and could in theory have flung Ceres or, more probably, ammonia-rich building material sunward from the outer dark. Ceres’ ammonia-rich surface, De Sanctis says, could be yet another piece of evidence confirming our solar system’s wild, disturbed youth.


“If borne out it would be potentially a very interesting result that would constrain Ceres’ history,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland. “But I’m not fully convinced about the interpretation of ammoniated phyllosilicates.” Claims of ammonia on Ceres date back to ground-based observations from the 1990s, and may yet evaporate under closer, more rigorous scrutiny of all the available spectra, Rivkin says. Instead, he has suggested the dwarf planet might be covered not with comet-like minerals, but with magnesium- and iron-rich carbonates thought to be more typical of a mixture of water and rock like Ceres. And even if the ammonia is real, Rivkin notes that it could have come from closer to home, perhaps from the nitrogen-rich amino acids prevalent in certain types of meteorites.


Bright spots in the search for life

There is less controversy over what De Sanctis and her colleagues did not see in their study of Ceres’ entire surface: water. Even though density measurements suggest that Ceres is roughly one-third water by weight, water ice should rapidly sublimate away into space on the dwarf planet’s airless, sun-soaked surface, so its absence at first would seem to be no surprise. But Ceres apparently does have water percolating at or near its surface, albeit in small, isolated patches too small to show up in the broadband global spectra. Last year the Herschel Space Observatory detected wisps of water vapor around the dwarf planet, and since its arrival at Ceres Dawn has imaged oodles of highly reflective bright spots on the Cerean surface that may be sites of exposed water ice.


Impacts exposing subsurface ice deposits and generating hydrothermal activity are one possible explanation for the bright spots and Herschel’s water vapor; “cryovolcanoes” that erupt molten water rather than rock are another. Both scenarios offer hopes that beneath Ceres' airless, barren surface there may be regions warm, wet and accessible enough to investigate for signs of past or even present extraterrestrial life.


In a second, complementary study using data from Dawn’s Framing Camera, Dawn co-investigator Andreas Nathues and colleagues sought answers to the mystery by examining images and spectra of more than a hundred of the bright spots. They found that most of the spots occur in impact craters, and range in brightness from that of concrete to that of ocean ice. The spots seem to be mixtures of salt-rich water ice. The brighter spots, they argue, must be fresher ice from more recent impacts. In the same study, Nathues and his co-workers looked for plumes of water vapor produced by erupting cryovolcanoes, but found none.


“Ongoing cryovolcanism at present seems to be unlikely, because of missing plumes of water and a missing mechanism for creating such powerful activity,” Nathues says. That is, Ceres seems too inert to readily produce water-vapor-belching volcanoes.


But the dwarf planet is not entirely inactive. Of all the spots investigated, the strangest by far was found in a 90-kilometer-wide, 4-kilometer-deep crater called Occator. A 10-kilometer-wide pit in the crater’s center holds a spot several times brighter than all the others on Ceres. While looking for plumes over Occator in the Dawn data, Nathues and his coworkers instead glimpsed something very surprising, a sort of daily weather cycle: A thin cloud or haze filled the crater in the mornings and the afternoons, then dissipated at sunset. The haze, they argue, must be sun-lofted dust and water vapor, suggesting that somehow fresh, exposed ice lurks in Occator’s depths, despite the Occator's baking by sunlight over millions of years.


According to another Dawn co-investigator, Mark Sykes, the director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, these sorts of unexpected, counterintuitive findings suggest there’s much more to learn about the bright spots. Cryovolcanism, perhaps generated by impacts, could still play a role in their formation. “Nothing is a slam dunk; what exactly is going on is still up in the air,” Sykes says. Within weeks, Dawn will enter a low-altitude mapping orbit around Ceres, quadrupling the resolution of its best images of the surface. “When the data’s spatial resolution increases by a factor of four, the one thing I have complete confidence in is surprises… God knows there will be many more questions to scratch our heads about!”


“The mystery of the bright spots continues,” says Dawn’s deputy principal investigator Carol Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is becoming clear is that the surface of Ceres shows evidence of activity, but the exact processes that are occurring are still not worked out.”


Dawn’s primary mission is slated to end next summer, but researchers are already planning observations of Ceres that could come afterward. Guided by Dawn’s detailed surface mapping, Rivkin says, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could target Occator and other bright spots for further detailed studies after it launches in 2018. But what he and other researchers really want is to visit Ceres again. “Ultimately, of course, I’d hope to see a lander or even a rover put down in Occator,” Rivkin says. “That probably couldn’t happen before the mid-late 2020s… Hopefully Ceres will continue to share its secrets until then.”

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Published on December 09, 2015 10:00

Six Tools That Are Revolutionizing Archaeology By Helping Us Find Sites Without Digging

Technology





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Delphi, Greece. Luarvick/wikimedia, CC BY-SA



In the past decade there has been a quiet revolution in archaeology, virtually allowing archaeologists to see through the ground without digging. Advances in geophysics, soil chemistry and remote sensing are speeding up the discovery of ancient sites and helping archaeologists understand them on a global scale.


Below is our list of the top six of these techniques. While each is valuable on its own, the future will lie in combining them – possibly one day creating a GPS-linked virtual reality that will take the observer below the ground.

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Published on December 09, 2015 09:52

Blocking the Sun Is No Plan B for Global Warming

LE BOURGET, PARIS—More than 300 watts per square meter of sunshine hits the top of Earth's atmosphere each year. A third is reflected and the sky, sea and land absorb the rest. Much of that warmth tries to escape back to space but only a little over half makes it each year. That proportion is declining as concentrations of gases in the atmosphere, notably carbon dioxide, edges ever upward. The result: global warming.


To a tinkerer's mind there is an obvious solution: block some of that sunlight from coming in. That's the solution known as geoengineering—the large-scale manipulation of the planet’s environment, in this case the sky. As negotiators at the climate talks underway here spar over what to do about adding more CO2 to the air, geoengineering becomes more and more attractive to those with this tinkerer's bent—a group dubbed the "geoclique" by journalist Eli Kintisch in his 2010 book Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe. These scientists, engineers and businessmen want to at least study options for blocking sunlight, which they say can be relatively inexpensive when compared with the bill for transforming the trillion-dollar global energy system that largely burns fossil fuels.


Geoengineering is also part of the appeal of big physics, once reserved for hydrogen bombs and subatomic particles. Figuring out how droplets of sulfuric acid sprayed into the stratosphere might offset rising CO2 offers physicists a chance to have a literal global impact. As journalist Oliver Morton details in his new book "The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World," the geoclique is calling the approach "solar-radiation management," to fend off critics who call the sulfur idea far-fetched, or dangerous.


The lexical sleight of hand hasn’t attracted the favor of climate negotiators, although a nation or even an average Internet billionaire could pay for a program to swathe the world in a sulfuric veil, using specially modified jet planes plying the stratosphere. A more speculative and longer-term alternative would be a fleet of self-propelled ships that could seed low-lying clouds across the world's oceans, expanding cloud cover and reflecting more sunlight.


As Morton points out, the massive ships busily moving containers of goods or tanks of fossil fuels across the oceans already form similar tracks, easily visible in satellite images. But 171 countries are working to clean the pollution from those vessels, under the auspices of the International Maritime Organization. Cleaning the emissions may exacerbate global warming, however; fewer polluting particles means less of the cooling, cloudy ship tracks.




Credit: IPCC


The incredibly slow progress in combating climate change worldwide—the Paris talks are the 21st attempt to reach international agreements in the past 25 years—raises the appeal of the seemingly quick fix of seeding the sky. I remember attending a panel on geoengineering with Morton back in the heady days before the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference negotiations in Copenhagen. As Morton and his fellow panelists pointed out, with little hope to cut pollution, artificial volcanoes or a fleet of aircraft spewing out sulfur might prove not just enticing but necessary. "We aren't going back to the climate we had before," said Jane Long, a geologist and engineer formerly at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Copenhagen in 2009. "We are going to be managing the environment—not just the climate but hydrology, soils. We have to learn how to do that."


In short: you break it, you bought it. Industrial civilization owns the climate now, with CO2 concentrations reaching 400 parts per million. There are only two questions, as Morton puts it, borrowing from physicist Robert Socolow of Princeton University. "Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?" And "do you think that reducing an industrial economy's carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?" If you answer yes to both, blocking sunlight might prove an important tool, or even the only one available in the near term.


As Kintisch puts it in his book, however, solar radiation management at this point is "not applied engineering" but "applied conceit." The National Research Council in Washington, D.C., agreed with that view in its 2015 analysis of geoengineering, given that engineering implies a precision in expected outcome—a level of understanding that is unwarranted in this case, thus far. And geoengineering could have unintended consequences worse than climate change itself or end up exacerbating the underlying problem of too much CO2 by mistakenly taking the pressure off to reduce fossil fuel burning.


There is also a fundamental question that remains unanswered: Because any action to fix the climate will affect the whole planet, who will have the authority to unleash actual geoengineering programs?


The production of global warming pollution and the ability to afford technology to do something about it are unevenly distributed worldwide. Global negotiations over the shared sky represent the hard work of earning the ability to deliberately affect the planetary environment. It is the hard work of growing up as a world-changing species, of forging a "we" that could contemplate such a decision. So as the Research Council argues, we should study up on climate interventions but focus the majority of efforts on thinning the blanket of CO2.


That could mean enhancing natural ways for removing the greenhouse gas—more trees, more plankton, more plants and soil. Or inventing new machines to clean the air. "Technofixes are dangerous," says marine biologist and founder of Mission Blue, Sylvia Earle, as a bid to protect the oceans, including the ability to draw down CO2. "It's better to save the systems that are naturally there."


The secret to combating climate change is not some lever to tilt Earth's energy balance but rather to be flexible, to build a system of replaceable parts with as many mutually reinforcing connections as possible to fend off a single, catastrophic failure—in a word, resilience, like that of life itself on this planet and how biology and geology conspire to create the air. "What if instead of garbage patches in the oceans we had tree patches," asked glaciologist Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland at an event on oceans here. "Bio-mimicry is the key rather than a space age technofix."


In the case of the best planet we will ever have, it is more important to be wise than clever. Solar-radiation management sometimes feels like a last gasp from big physics. There is no getting around the need to cut CO2, whether sunlight gets blocked or not, as even the most ardent geoengineers agree. There is plenty in that grand challenge for those with a tinkerer's bent.

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Published on December 09, 2015 09:40

Five Surprising Findings About Death And Dying

Health and Medicine





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Just thinking about death triggers odd behaviour, shows research. Jesse Krauß/wikimedia



In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes, as Benjamin Franklin famously wrote. Few of us find taxes exciting, but death – even just thinking about it – affects us profoundly in many different ways. This is why researchers across so many different fields study it from their perspectives.


Here are five research findings – biochemical, medical, genetic, sociological and psychological – that you may not be aware of.


1. Decomposing human flesh smells (sickly) sweet

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Published on December 09, 2015 09:35

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