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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
if i look back, i am lost
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Cosmic Funnies
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Three Goblin Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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Jules of Nature
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Take off into your week like these baby green sea turtles in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument!
Located in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, this monument provides safe haven for little sea turtles just starting out their lives. More than 90 percent of all Hawaiian green sea turtles come from nests on East Island, an 11-acre island within Papahānaumokuākea.
(Photo: Koa Matsuoka)
Malicious code written into DNA infects the computer that reads it
In a mind-boggling world first, a team of biologists and security researchers have successfully infected a computer with a malicious program coded into a strand of DNA.
That is something a few years ago would have been a sci-fi plot line and only fiction. Weird!
love it!
The app can spot jaundice before it becomes noticeable.
Pancreatic cancer has a very low survival rate, with just nine percent of patients surviving past five years. A major contributor to this rate is the fact that once those with pancreatic cancer start to show symptoms, the disease is usually already quite advanced. But researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a simple and incredibly accurate way to test for the cancer that people can administer themselves.
Continue Reading.
Seven in 10 Americans believe global warming is happening, but less than half think it will harm them personally, a new Yale University study estimates.
New poll: Americans agree climate change is a serious threat to economy, but won’t affect them personally.
Interesting find.
Living near nature and birds linked to lower rates of depression and anxiety, study finds
According to a recent study published in the journal Bioscience, people who live in areas with more birds and green plants are less likely to experience depression, stress and anxiety.
Researchers at the University of Exeter, the British Trust for Ornithology and the University of Queensland distributed an online lifestyle survey to close to 300 people of different ethnicity, household incomes and ages.
They found that participants who experienced daily doses of nature — “vegetation cover” and “afternoon bird abundances,” in particular — showed higher rates of well-being. Read more (3/1/17 11:16 AM)
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Found: Hundreds of Minerals That Only Exist Because of Humans
There are more than 5,000 minerals in the world—naturally occurring chemical compounds that are stable at room temperature and have a unique chemical formula. But, as Scientific American reports, humans are rapidly adding to that number. In a new report in American Mineralogist, a team of scientists reports that they found 208 new minerals that would never have occurred without humans and thousands more mineral-like compounds that humans have created.
“There is nothing at all like this in the geology of the past 4.5 billion years on Earth,” one geologist told Scientific American.
The new minerals, SciAm reports, formed in conditions created only by humans—in man-made mines with unnatural humidity or in shipwrecks deep on the ocean floor.
Energizes water recycling - literally!
This new NSF-funded solar panel technology recycles water for many uses, including heat. Watch this transformational UC Berkeley engineering research in action: bit.ly/2kXy0Nz
This is February? 80°F in Denver, 99° in Oklahoma, 66° in Iceland, 116° in Australia | Category 6™
The strong, recurrent Pacific jet stream that’s been delivering massive amounts of rain to California has also been pushing mild Pacific air downslope off the Rockies and eastward, keeping the southern two-thirds of the U.S. absurdly warm for early February. From New Mexico to Virginia southward to the Gulf Coast, trees and shrubs are budding out en masse up to three weeks ahead of schedule (see Figure 1). In Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth recorded its last freezing temperature on January 8. With no freezes expected into at least the last week of the month, there’s a chance that the Jan. 8 reading of 20°F will be DFW’s last freeze of the winter. That would eclipse the earliest final freeze of the season (Feb. 5, 2000), in records extending back to 1899. The February warmth comes after a three-month span that was milder in Texas than any Nov/Dec/Jan period since the 1930s Dust Bowl, according to state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.
The warm, moist air prevailing along the South has been teaming up with occasional jet-stream intrusions to produce severe thunderstorms, including an unusually large number of tornadoes for the year thus far. This includes six confirmed tornadoes across southeast Louisiana on February 7, with an EF3 twister causing more than 30 injuries and damaging or destroying more than 600 homes in and near East New Orleans (see the detailed National Weather Service survey report on all six tornadoes). As of February 13, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center had tallied 163 U.S. tornadoes for the year thus far, not quite a record but far above average. On Tuesday morning, NOAA/SPC placed parts of the western and central Gulf Coast under a slight risk of severe weather, with a small enhanced-risk area along the central Texas coast near a large thunderstorm complex that had already produced several tornado reports west of Houston.
Trees are budding here in DC.
Happy Valentine’s Day 💗💜💗
Here’s round 2 of funny space themed Valentine’s Day cards to send to the people you love (or for yourself because you should love yourself too) 💞
Women in Science Profiles: Erica Smithwick
Erica is an ecologist and associate professor of geography whose work has taken her around the world, including to South Africa to research biodiversity and the role of forests in global climate change.
New numbers published on Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
How does the makeup of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise compare to the country’s population? Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (WMPD), a report from NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), answers that question, with in-depth data tables and expert analysis.
The 2017 report, released this week, shows the degree to which women, people with disabilities and minorities from three racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in science and engineering (S&E). Women have reached parity with men in educational attainment but not in S&E employment. Underrepresented minorities account for disproportionately smaller percentages in both S&E education and employment.
Why is this information important? Congress mandated the WMPD report two decades ago as part of the Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act, which addressed NSF’s mission to encourage and strengthen the participation of underrepresented groups in S&E. Accomplishing that mission requires up-to-date, accurate information about what the U.S. science and engineering workforce and educational system look like. As NSF Director France Córdova said, “This report is a valuable resource to the science and engineering policy community.”
Objectifier
Student Interactive Design project from Bjørn Karmann uses computer vision and neural networks to learn habits and gestures in living spaces to operate appliances, effectively programming your own room:
Objectifier empowers people to train objects in their daily environment to respond to their unique behaviors. It gives an experience of training an artificial intelligence; a shift from a passive consumer to an active, playful director of domestic technology. Interacting with Objectifier is much like training a dog - you teach it only what you want it to care about. Just like a dog, it sees and understands its environment.
With computer vision and a neural network, complex behaviours are associated with your command. For example, you might want to turn on your radio with your favorite dance move. Connect your radio to the Objectifier and use the training app to show it when the radio should turn on. In this way, people will be able to experience new interactive ways to control objects, building a creative relationship with technology without any programming knowledge.
More Here
Very impressive.
The sequel to “Inconvenient Truth” premiered at the Sundance on January 19, 2017, to good to excellent reviews and audience enthusiasm. This isn’t technically a “trailer,” but a snip from the movie. General release this summer (July 28).
Here’s a little bit about the movie from the review in Variety (and here’s the link).
The film opens with images of the Greenland ice sheets melting: tumultuous mountains of white caving in on themselves, and long stretches of scrubby brownish-green terrain where, as recently as the 1980s, there was only ice. Gore tours these areas, and updates other catastrophic patterns around the globe, which are like something out of a disaster movie or a rite of biblical reckoning: rainstorms that no longer resemble the storms of the past, because they enter an atmosphere so much more saturated that the violent downpours are nicknamed “rain bombs”; people in India with their shoes stuck to melting streets; and the ongoing surges of flooding in cities like Miami that are the byproduct of all that Arctic meltdown — the water, after all, has to go somewhere.
Talk about a revolution! The most hopeful note sounded by “An Inconvenient Sequel” relates to the newly competitive costs of wind and solar energy, which are rapidly nudging them center stage; that may prove a force too powerful for even a nihilistic fracking fetishist like Donald Trump to withstand. Nevertheless, Trump’s desire to trash global climate-change treaties, like the one signed in Paris (where even Vladimir Putin joined in!), is very much in the air, so “An Inconvenient Sequel” suddenly seems like a more subversive radical-underdog movie than it might have before.
Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does. When it plays in theaters this summer (Paramount has just given it a release date of July 28), “An Inconvenient Sequel” is likely to be another event, a part of the conversation, a movie that glories, once again, in the incisive power of its inconvenience. Ten years later, Al Gore is still bringing the news.
Women in Science Profiles: Carolina Pulido
Carolina is a quality engineer at Minitab, a statistical software company. She tries to find problems with the software before any users do, and she can do that in 5 different languages!
NASA need YOU to look at these photos from Mars
It’s cold here in central Pa. Need a cold-weather hobby?
NASA JPL needs you, citizen scientists, to check out these images of #Mars and identify sites with intersecting ridges. Learn how here: http://go.nasa.gov/2jy7fO4
Polar research, science & curiosity
NSF Polar Programs Division Director Kelly Falkner shares her stories about science and curiosity, research at the poles and more in this in depth interview on “Choose to be Curious”: bit.ly/2kxNr1t
Above: Falkner on the Ross Ice Shelf in January, 2014. In the far distance is Mt. Erebus and in the near distance are the “teenager equivalent” of Emperor penguins hanging out after molting. Falkner was escorting NSF senior leadership on an Antarctic site visit. Credit: Kelly Falkner, NSF
NSF Polar Programs: https://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=PLR
Below: This was taken during the same trip. Falkner is in Blood Falls in the Taylor Valley of the Dry Valleys, Antarctica. Credit: Kelly Falkner, NSF
E coli microbes have been modified to carry an expanded genetic code which researchers say will ultimately allow them to be programmed
Scientists in the US modified common E coli microbes to carry a beefed-up payload of genetic material which, they say, will ultimately allow them to program how the organisms operate and behave.
The work is aimed at making bugs that churn out new kinds of proteins which can be harvested and turned into drugs to treat a range of diseases. But the same technology could also lead to new kinds of materials, the researchers say.
In a report published on Monday, the scientists describe the modified microbes as a starting point for efforts to “create organisms with wholly unnatural attributes and traits not found elsewhere in nature.” The cells constitute a “stable form of semi-synthetic life” and “lay the foundation for achieving the central goal of synthetic biology: the creation of new life forms and functions,” they add.
