Science & TechnologyS


Apple Green

Environment: A greener way to die

Jeff Schechtman
Who What Why
Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
green burial
© landarchs.com
Are We Doing Our Worst Environmental Damage From the Grave?

Back in the early '60's Jessica Mitford wrote a shocking book — The American Way of Death — that exposed how the funeral industry took advantage of the aggrieved with expensive and unnecessary burial practices. Now we are learning that this $15 billion-a-year business is also unsustainable — and highly destructive to the environment.
Consider this: the millions of gallons of toxic embalming fluid used to pretty up and "preserve" corpses eventually find their way into the ground, contaminating soil and water resources. And the iron, lead, copper, zinc, and cobalt used in caskets and vaults also contaminate the soil. Even cremation isn't nearly as clean as you might think. Crematories release by-products from embalming fluid, dental fillings, surgical devices, etc.
Eco-cemetery
© inhabitat.comEco cemetery offers natural burials.
Enter the "Green Burial" movement that advocates burying a body, without embalming, in a biodegradable container that allows direct immersion into the earth — and the body returns to the land and to the cycle of life.

Suzanne Kelly, PhD — author of Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, September 2015) — has been a chief advocate for this practice. Kelly's work, which she discusses in this podcast with Jeff Schechtman, is beginning to have an impact. She says that today families are starting to push back on non-sustainable practices.

"Death is understood to be a path to environmental protection," says Kelly. "The Green burial offers us the possibility of restoring our lost relationship to the land."


Comment: When ya gotta go...go green! "Dust to dust"...what kind matters!

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Jupiter

Data from surveyor Rover Spirit indicates acid 'fog" eroding Martian rocks


RT
Sun, 08 Nov 2015 14:43 UTC
Mars
© Greg Shirah / ReutersThe planet Mars showing showing Terra Meridiani is seen in an undated NASA image.
Scientists believe they have figured out why rocks on Mars are eroding. They say an acidic fog created by volcanic eruptions on the red planet is the probable culprit.

Planetary scientist Shoshanna Cole came up with the theory after studying a 100-acre area on Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills of the Gusev Crater on Mars using data gathered by a number of instruments on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

She found that acidic vapors released by eruptions may have been responsible for eating away rocks on the Watchtower Class outcrops on the Cumberland Ridge and Husband Hill summit.

"The special thing about Watchtower Class is that it's very widespread and we see it in different locations. As far as we can tell, it is part of the ground there," which means that these rocks record environments that existed on Mars billions of years ago, Cole said in a press release submitted by the Geological Society of America.
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Sun

Climatologists create atlas showing a millennium of droughts and downpours


Sputnik
Sat, 07 Nov 2015 23:59 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia commonsQueen Mary's Psalter shows men harvesting in 14th century Europe.
The new Old World Drought Atlas of droughts and wet weather in the Old World gives climate scientists greater perspective on current weather phenomenon.

Climate scientists have produced an atlas reconstructing weather conditions over the last millennium, in an effort to understand more about current changes to the weather.

They hope their Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) will allow for a greater understanding of climate forecasts.

"Climate model projections suggest widespread drying in the Mediterranean Basin and wetting in Fennoscandia in the coming decades largely as a consequence of greenhouse gas forcing of climate," write the scientists in their paper, published in Science Advances on Friday.
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Beaker

New medical diagnostic test: Scientists use sound waves to levitate cells


Science Beta
Sat, 07 Nov 2015 19:20 UTC
acoustic levitation machine
Utah Valley University physicists are literally applying rocket science to the field of medical diagnostics. With a few key changes, the researchers used a noninvasive ultrasonic technique originally developed to detect microscopic flaws in solid fuel rockets, such as space shuttle boosters, to successfully detect cell stiffness changes associated with certain cancers and other diseases.

The method combines a low-frequency ultrasonic wave to levitate the cells and confine them to a single layer within a fluid and a high-frequency ultrasonic wave to measure the cell's stiffness.
"An acoustic wave is a pressure wave so it travels as a wave of high and low pressure. By trapping a sound wave between a transducer — such as a speaker — and a reflective surface, we can create a 'standing wave' in the space between," explained research assistant Brian Patchett. "This standing wave has stationary layers of high and low pressure, a.k.a. 'anti-nodes,' and areas, 'the nodes' where the pressure remains the same."
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Bulb

Speaking in tongues: the many benefits of bilingualism


The Conversation
Wed, 04 Nov 2015 16:44 UTC
Image
© Cambridge University Photo Library, Author providedBilingualism unlocks the way words work.
We live in a world of great linguistic diversity. More than half of the world's population grows up with more than one language. There are, on the other hand, language communities that are monolingual, typically some parts of the English-speaking world.

In this case, bilingualism or multilingualism can be seen as an extraordinary situation - a source of admiration and worry at the same time. But there are communities where bilingualism or multilingualism are the norm - for example in regions of Africa. A Cameroonian, for example, could speak Limbum and Sari, both indigenous languages, plus Ewondo, a lingua franca, plus English or French, the official languages, plus Camfranglais, a further lingua franca used between anglophone and francophone Cameroonians.

Comment:

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Bulb

'Charge density wave': A new dimension to high-temperature superconductivity discovered


Phys.org
Thu, 05 Nov 2015 14:03 UTC
high-temperature superconducto
© SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryIn this artistic rendering, a magnetic pulse (right) and X-ray laser light (left) converge on a high-temperature superconductor to study the behavior of its electrons.
A team led by scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory combined powerful magnetic pulses with some of the brightest X-rays on the planet to discover a surprising 3-D arrangement of a material's electrons that appears closely linked to a mysterious phenomenon known as high-temperature superconductivity.

This unexpected twist marks an important milestone in the 30-year journey to better understand how materials known as high-temperature superconductors conduct electricity with no resistance at temperatures hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit above those of conventional metal superconductors but still hundreds of degrees below freezing. The study was published today in Science.

The study also resolves an apparent mismatch in data from previous experiments and charts a new course for fully mapping the behaviors of electrons in these exotic materials under different conditions. Researchers have an ultimate goal to aid the design and development of new superconductors that work at warmer temperatures.
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Magnify

Complex skeletons evolved earlier than realized, fossils suggest


ScienceDaily
Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
Image
© J. SibbickThis is an image of Namacalathus hermanastes.
The first animals to have complex skeletons existed about 550 million years ago, fossils of a tiny marine creature unearthed in Namibia suggest.

The find is the first to suggest the earliest complex animals on Earth -- which may be related to many of today's animal species -- lived millions of years earlier than was previously known.

Until now, the oldest evidence of complex animals -- which succeeded more primitive creatures that often resembled sponges or coral -- came from the Cambrian Period, which began around 541 million years ago. Scientists had long suspected that complex animals had existed before then but, until now, they had no proof.

Genetic family tree data suggested that complex animals -- known as bilaterians -- evolved prior to the Cambrian Period. The finding suggests that bilaterians may have lived as early as 550 million years ago, during the late Ediacaran Period.
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Galaxy

NASA's EM Drive thruster goes against traditional physics, seems to actually work


Sputnik
Sat, 07 Nov 2015 00:39 UTC
orbiting earth in space
© Flickr/ NASA Johnson
For years, NASA has been working on an engine capable of providing tons of thrust without consuming fuel. It now looks like that pursuit is bearing fruit: the second-generation EmDrive upgrade gives necessary "anomalous thrust signals" while its main characteristics have been solidly improved, Paul March, a researcher participating in the project, wrote on the online NASA Space Flight forum.

A peer-reviewed article on the successes of the EmDrive project is yet to be published, but the online "leak" clearly indicates humanity may be a step closer to a brand-new range of speeds.
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Cloud Precipitation

Magic mushrooms? Scientist find that fungi can make it rain

Josh Mur
The Anti Media
Thu, 05 Nov 2015 19:50 UTC
mushrooms
It can be thoroughly refreshing to step out of the busy "A to B" lifestyle and simply admire the world around us. Nature operates like a complex map of biodiversity and natural laws — so complex, in fact, that after thousands of years mankind is still struggling to understand how it all works. But this great mystery and the insatiable human desire for understanding makes new findings in the natural world all the more joyous.

Mushrooms are often associated with two things: psychedelic experiences and pizza toppings. However, Plos One published a study last week implying that mushrooms may have a direct link to rainfall.
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Shoe

Study from Boston University finds brain has internal 'odometer' and 'stopwatch'


RT
Fri, 06 Nov 2015 16:25 UTC
brain neurons
© Nature/ReutersA Princeton University and National Institutes of Health study suggests that our response to stressful situations originates from structural changes in our brain that allows us to adapt to turmoil. Adult rats with disruptions in their social hierarchy produced far fewer new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for certain types of memory and stress regulation. They also reacted to the disruption by favoring the company of familiar rats. Their behavior manifested six weeks after social disruption, during which time brain-cell growth, or neurogenesis, had decreased by 50 percent. The photo shows adult hippocampal neurons that are less than two weeks old.
The brain has its own 'odometer' and 'stopwatch' neurons, a new research by Boston University scientists says. These findings could help battle mental and cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

The study involves rats running on treadmill, and focuses on specific neurons called grid cells which support navigation in time and space, even without visual landmarks and the optic flow.

Until now, there was no direct evidence demonstrating that the grid cells help the brain determine the distance and time passed.


To prove the contrary, researchers put rats on treadmills and recorded the activity of grid cells, keeping either distance or duration of running unchanged, and only varying the speed.

As a result, 92% of grid cells in rats emitted signals at specific moments: for instance, one cell would fire 8 seconds into the run, not taking into account speed or distance covered, and another cell would emit a signal every 400 cm, not depending on speed or duration of the run.

50 percent of the cells were affected by distance, another half by time, and around 40 percent by both factors.
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