Science Etcetera, Marsday 20080610

June 10th, 2008

As predicted by climate change scientists, the increase in CO₂, a plant fertilizer, has led to an increase in Earth’s biomass in some places over the past two decades.

June 2000 Primary Productivity

June 2005 Primary Productivity

I was glad to see a /.er’s question Are Academic Journals Obsolete? Met with a resounding NO!!!

A two-year old mud volcano in Java that has displaced 30k people is the result of gas exploration drilling.

The world’s oldest woman, at 115 years of age, donated her body to science, which has found a normal brain, free of Alzheimer’s and Atherosclerosis, which performed better than 60 to 75 year olds when alive.

The sun should be producing sunspots leading up to a peak in 2012, but instead is mysteriously quiet.

Virgin Galactic is rolling out models of its commercial spaceship the mega-mothership.

If all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what IBM’s Petaflop Roadrunner Supercomputer can in one day.

Steampunk sine-wave calculator.

Putting a GPS inside the new iPhone will be a huge boon to Citizen Science.

Cat-sized, mammal-like reptiles called Thrinxadons lived in burrows in Antarctica 400 million years ago, which were flooded, leaving casts of their dens.

Thrinaxodon

Gah! The Martian soil is clumpier than expected, making it difficult to get samples into the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer Thingamagig.

When we get to the Moon, we’ll be able to build new telescopes out of its dust. Now somebody build a business model off this.

It’s not just America: India’s sacred cows are starving to death from eating too many plastic bags, and India’s plastics lobby has prevented the country from doing anything about it.

Peter Barnes free Creative Commons licensed e-book Capitalism 3.0 seeks to show us the way to reclaiming the commons.

Astronomers have had a eureka moment concerning where to search for radio signals from extraterrestrials, stars along the plane of Earth’s orbit, where alien civilizations are most likely to be aware of us from observing Earth pass in front of the Sun.

I’m lookin’ over a 21-Leaf Clover!

15,000 years ago, icebergs left scars in the sea bed off the South Carolina coast.

Explosive Chemical Reaction: Potassium metal and Bromine:

3 comments to “Science Etcetera, Marsday 20080610”

Q: Does not an increase in biomass help stave off the food crisis? Wouldn’t global warming increase the amount of usable farmland? :)
by ClintJCL June 10th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I would think that it would so long as you have the water to sustain it. I think it would also depend on the crop?

-BMF
by BMF June 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Not too concerned that the Sun has low sunspot numbers. There have been a few spots recently, interestingly their polarity is from the last cycle not the new. This is not too unusual either. Look at this, you can see that there have been some long dips before.
In fact a new sunspot is emerging now. Check out spaceweather.com to see what is happening on the sun on a daily basis.
by Kav June 10th, 2008 at 5:44 pm