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Better Earth

New map shows the world hidden beneath your feet

Craig Sailor
The News Tribune
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 20:45 UTC
Mount Saint Helens
© Sailor, Craig - Tacoma Department of Natural Resources
Mount Saint Helens can be seen in this screen grab from the Washington State Department of Natural Resources’ Lidar map. The 1980 eruption blew out the northern side, top, of the volcano, while the southern side shows volcanic flows from ancient eruptions.
Puget Sound is grooved like an old record. That's one of the Earth's secrets that can be found on a new interactive map produced by the state.

Using Lidar technology, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources has mapped a good third of the state revealing the smallest of details hidden beneath trees, buildings and other obstructions.

The grooves, carved by ancient glaciers, can be seen from Whidbey Island to south of Olympia. Tacoma is etched with a series of subtle pattern of north-south lines. The grooves become most prominent around Lake Tapps.

Toggling between "Bare Earth" and "Top Surface" is the best way to view the map.
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Books

Groundbreaking examples of learning from nature to advance technology

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution
Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00 UTC
Biological mimicry
There's no doubt humans are resourceful — just look at the world we've created. However, as much as there may be to celebrate regarding just how far we've come, it's also incredibly important to hone in on the massive sustainability problems that have resulted from our innovations. Biomimicry seeks to change that, however.

An alternative approach to innovation, biomimicry's goal is to create sustainable solutions to human challenges by echoing nature's patterns and strategies. The approach involves creating products, processes, and polices that are well-adapted to life on earth for generations to come.

Hard to envision what this would look like? Check out these four incredible tech innovations that have been inspired by biomimicry:

Comment: It makes so much sense to work with and learn from nature rather than seeking to exploit our natural resources because of the greed of psychopaths in power. We can see in these examples, human creativity and innovation at work and how technology, instead of being used to oppress people and advance warfare, can be used for the betterment of humanity.

For more on some of the designs, in particular the Dewpoint water collector, see this video.


And this is what Wanda Lewis, the designer of the leaf-inspired bridge, had to say about her ambitious project:
A new generation of indestructible bridges could be possible, thanks to research from the University of Warwick.

Emeritus Professor Wanda Lewis in the School of Engineering has taken a design process called 'form-finding', inspired by the natural world, to another level.

Form-finding enables the design of rigid structures that follow a strong natural form - structures that are sustained by a force of pure compression or tension, with no bending stresses, which are the main points of weakness in other structures.

This could, for the first time, lead to the design of bridges and buildings that can take any combination of permanent loading without generating complex stresses.

Such structures will have enhanced safety, and long durability, without the need for repair or restructuring.

For 25 years Professor Lewis has been studying forms and shapes in nature: the outlines of a tree or a leaf, the curve of a shell, the way a film of soap can suspend itself between chosen boundaries. In all of these natural objects, Professor Lewis observed that they develop simple stress patterns, which help them to withstand forces applied to them (such as wind hitting a tree) with ease.

Professor Lewis has been developing mathematical models that implement nature's design principles and produce simple stress patterns in structures. The principles behind her mathematical models are illustrated using physical form-finding experiments involving pieces of fabric or chains, for example.

A piece of fabric is suspended, and allowed to relax into its natural, gravitational, minimum energy shape; then that shape is frozen into a rigid object and inverted. She finds the coordinates of this shape through computation by simulating the gravitational forces applied to the structure. This produces a shape (a natural form) that can withstand the load with ease.

Professor Lewis argues that "nature's design principles cannot be matched by conventional engineering design."

While classical architectural designs are appealing to the eye, they aren't necessarily structurally sound: "aesthetics is an important aspect of any design, and we have been programmed to view some shapes, such as circular arches or spherical domes as aesthetic. We often build them regardless of the fact that they generate complex stresses, and are, therefore, structurally inefficient," says Professor Lewis.


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Brain

Brain protein may unlock key to multiple sclerosis treatment - study


RT
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:03 UTC
ms cells
© Neil Hall / Reuters
Scientists have made significant progress in finding the cause of multiple sclerosis (MS), discovering the presence of a protein in brain tissue that may help lead to a treatment for the disease that affects 2.5 million people worldwide.

Researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK and the University of Alberta in Canada found large quantities of the protein Rab32 in brain tissue samples taken from people who had MS but was almost entirely absent in those without the condition.
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Info

How Little Ice Age displaced the tropical rain belt

Peter Rüegg
Phys.org
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 08:03 UTC
Tropical rain belt
© Wikipedia / Mats Halldin
The annual see-saw of the tropical rain belt.
The tropical rain belt, also known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), is in a state of constant migration. It continuously changes position in response to the seasons and follows the sun's zenith, with a slight delay. This in turn determines the wet and dry periods in the tropics and subtropics over the course of the year. The tropical rain belt therefore effectively controls the climate in most of the tropical and subtropical regions, such as the monsoon season in Southeast Asia and Central America.

An international team of researchers led by Franziska Lechleitner from the Geological Institute at ETH Zurich has proven for the first time that the migration of the tropical rain belt is quite sensitive to even small changes in global temperatures. The team's findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports, where they present the most comprehensive reconstruction of rainfall patterns within the Intertropical Convergence Zone for the past 2000 years.

Lower temperatures worldwide

In the past, scientists have only studied the migration of the tropical rain belt over very long timespans, such as glacial and interglacial cycles over tens of thousands of years, with correspondingly sizeable temperature differences of several degrees. "So far, however, scientists have not investigated the past two millennia on a global scale, when temperature changes have been far less pronounced," explains the climate geologist.

The ETH researcher and her colleagues have now managed to demonstrate how the tropical weather system shifted a good way south between 1450 and 1850, a period known as the Little Ice Age. "This migration is linked to the lower global temperatures during this time," explains Lechleitner.

The latest climate reconstructions show that the average temperatures during this period were around 0.4 degrees Celsius lower than before and after the Little Ice Age. The migration of the tropical rain belt also caused substantial changes in the tropical and subtropical climate during this time, affecting the areas of drought and heavy rainfall.
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Brain

Research finds psychedelic drugs create a different consciousness in the brain

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Wed, 19 Apr 2017 21:16 UTC
brain activity
© Beckley/Imperial Research Foundation
Measuring neuron activity has revealed that psychedelic drugs really do alter the state of the brain, creating a different kind of consciousness.

"We see an increase in the diversity of signals from the brain," says Anil Seth, at the University of Sussex, UK. "The brain is more complex in its activity."

Seth and his team discovered this by re-analysing data previously collected by researchers at Imperial College London. Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues had monitored brain activity in 19 volunteers who had taken ketamine, 15 who had had LSD, and 14 who were under the influence of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms. Carhart-Harris's team used sets of sensors attached to the skull to measure the magnetic fields produced by these volunteers' neurons, and compared these to when each person took a placebo.

"We took the activity data, cleaned it up then chopped it into 2-second chunks," says Seth, whose team worked with Carhart-Harris on the re-analysis. "For each chunk, we could calculate a measure of diversity."
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Info

What we know so far about the Larry Page-backed 'flying car' coming later this year

Alex Heath
Business Insider
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 20:18 UTC
The Kitty Hawk Flyer
© Kitty Hawk
The Kitty Hawk Flyer.
The mysterious flying-car startup funded by Google cofounder Larry Page, Kitty Hawk, finally took the wraps off its first vehicle on Monday.

The Kitty Hawk Flyer looks a mix between a flying jet-ski and, as John Markoff of The New York Times put it, "something Luke Skywalker would have built out of spare parts." It's designed to be flown over water and will be available for sale by the end of this year.

Kitty Hawk says that its flyer can be operated without a pilot's license as long as you fly it in "uncongested areas." The startup hasn't said how much the flyer will cost, but it's offering an early $2,000 discount for people who are willing to pay $100 now to get on the waitlist.
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Bulb

Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics

Erin Connelly
Heritage Daily
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 16:48 UTC
medieval medical book text
For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the "Dark Ages," which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to inform the search for new antibiotics.

The evolution of antibiotic-resistant microbes means that it is always necessary to find new drugs to battle microbes that are no longer treatable with current antibiotics. But progress in finding new antibiotics is slow. The drug discovery pipeline is currently stalled. An estimated 700,000 people around the world die annually from drug-resistant infections. If the situation does not change, it is estimated that such infections will kill 10 million people per year by 2050. I am part of the Ancientbiotics team, a group of medievalists, microbiologists, medicinal chemists, parasitologists, pharmacists and data scientists from multiple universities and countries. We believe that answers to the antibiotic crisis could be found in medical history. With the aid of modern technologies, we hope to unravel how premodern physicians treated infection and whether their cures really worked.

To that end, we are compiling a database of medieval medical recipes. By revealing patterns in medieval medical practice, our database could inform future laboratory research into the materials used to treat infection in the past. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to create a medieval medicines database in this manner and for this purpose.
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Robot

UK government to invest millions in 'truly groundbreaking' self-driving car tech


Sputnik
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 16:32 UTC
Oxbotica driverless car
© Oxbotica
Driverless cars are about to get a huge financial boost in the UK, as a group of technology companies, researchers and authorities such as Transport for London (TFL) have landed millions in funding from the government to get self-driving vehicles on Britain's roads.

Oxbotica, a UK tech company which spun off the Oxford Robotics Institute, will lead an ambitious 30-month program to get fully autonomous vehicles traveling between London and Oxford.

The UK public got their first extended trial of the driverless shuttlebus in March. As part of "Project Gateway", around 100 people traveled in a prototype shuttle on a route in Greenwich, London.
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Monkey Wrench

The puppet masters of academia promoting GMOs and pesticides

Jonathan Latham, PhD
independentsciencenews.org
Tue, 08 Sep 2015 21:34 UTC
The Puppetmasters of Academia
"Reading the emails make(s) me want to throw up" tweeted the Food Babe after reading a lengthy series of them posted online by the NY Times on Sept 5th. The emails in question result from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and are posted in the side bars of a front-page article by Times reporter Eric Lipton (Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show). The article is highly disturbing, but, as the Food Babe implied, the Times buried the real story. The real scoop was not the perfidy and deceit of a handful of individual professors. Buried in the emails is proof positive of active collusion between the agribusiness and chemical industries, numerous and often prominent academics, PR companies, and key administrators of land grant universities for the purpose of promoting GMOs and pesticides. In particular, nowhere does the Times note that one of the chief colluders was none other than the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

All this is omitted entirely, or buried in hard-to-notice side bars, which are anyway unavailable to print readers. So, here is the article Eric Lipton should have written.
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Rose

Naked mole-rats 'turn into plants' when deprived of oxygen

University of Illinois at Chicago
Science Daily
Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00 UTC
Naked mole-rats
© Thomas Park/UIC
Naked Mole-Rats - they're plants, well, sort of.
Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do. Understanding how the animals do this could lead to treatments for patients suffering crises of oxygen deprivation, as in heart attacks and strokes.

"This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the naked mole-rat -- a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn't feel many types of pain," says Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led an international team of researchers from UIC, the Max Delbrück Institute in Berlin and the University of Pretoria in South Africa on the study.

In humans, laboratory mice, and all other known mammals, when brain cells are starved of oxygen they run out of energy and begin to die. But naked mole-rats have a backup: their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants -- or so scientists thought.

In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole-rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream. The fructose, the scientists found, was transported into brain cells by molecular fructose pumps that in all other mammals are found only on cells of the intestine. "The naked mole-rat has simply rearranged some basic building-blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low oxygen conditions," said Park, who has studied the strange species for 18 years.
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