Life // Current TV

My Stolen life

This site was created to inform people that there is a killer drug that makes people... more

CarlaMarino
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Scientists have (probably) made contact with Earth's most alien lake!

13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the otherworldly Lake Vostok. Home to some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, Vostok has remained isolated from the rest of the world for 20 million years, and completely inaccessible to mankind. Until now.

Yesterday, reports originating from Ria Novosti — a state-run, Russian news agency — began to circulate, indicating that the twenty-year mission to reach Vostok's ice-entombed waters had finally reached its goal. Other media outlets were quick to pick up the news as well, citing an unnamed scientific source, who claimed that, "Yesterday [February, 5], our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake."

Whether the team has finally drilled through to the Lake, however, remains to be seen. Is it likely? Yes. A spokesperson from the Russian Antarctic Expedition in St. Petersburg told New Scientist this morning that the drill did make contact with water last week, and that the water was automatically drawn up into the borehole, as planned.

But the team must now check the water levels in the borehole, and readings from their equipment's pressure sensors, to confirm that the water is, in fact, from Vostok — and not from a pocket of water in the layers of ice overlaying the lake. The fact that this confirmation process is ongoing probably explains why there is still no official announcement on the website of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (the government agency that heads up the country's polar science expeditions). Valery Lukin, director of the Russian Antarctic Program, told Nature this morning that the team's data could be processed by as early as tomorrow.

In any case, even if the lake has been breached, it will still be almost a year before Russia's scientists have an opportunity to address the question that everyone is so anxious to know the answer to: whether Vostok's pitch-black waters — which have been cut off from light for millions of years — harbor any weird new life forms. If they do, it would strengthen the prospect of discovering exoplanetary life in the subsurface waters of Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and any other cosmic bodies that harbor water, subglacial or otherwise.

And if they don't? Well, that would be disappointing (after all, who wouldn't want to discover a new species of subglacial extremophile?), but it would also be incredibly interesting. After all, everywhere on this planet that we've found water, we've found life; to not find it in the waters of Vostok — the third largest lake by volume on Earth — would be totally unprecedented.

http://io9.com/5882868/scientists-have-probably-made-contact-with-earths-most-alien-lake13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the... more

pjacobs51
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3 days ago
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How to Give Your Cell Phone Battery a Long, Happy Life

Improving your cell phones battery life, know what to do.... more

adamvanwildest
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7 days ago
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Diabetes and the vegan power of choice

Don't blame Paula Deen for type 2 diabetes; it comes from the food choices we... more

Glenn_Osrin
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11 days ago
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Where do my words come from?

We come from an infinite dimensional fractal.... more

11dim
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17 days ago
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Evolution Is the Greatest Show On Earth - And This Video Is Pretty Cool, Too

Gizmodo... . By Jesus Diaz Jan 22, 2012 12:30 PM . Evolution Is... more

EthicalVegan
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18 days ago
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40 to 50 Dolphins Found Stranded, At Least 20 Dead, Near Cape Cod Shore

CNN... . At least 20 dolphins found dead in Cape Cod area By Dominique... more

EthicalVegan
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24 days ago
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6 comments

NASA: Probabilty of Alien Life in the Milky Way Increasing Exponentially

Like the Age of Copernicus, the Kepler space telescope's survey of one small... more

pjacobs51
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28 days ago
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51 comments

Santorum to Mother of Cancer Survivor: People with Pre-Existing Conditions Should Pay Extra!!!

During a town hall in Keene, New Hampshire this morning, Rick Santorum told a mother... more

KB723
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1 month ago
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Prophetic Predictions for 2012

The great seer, Obscuranto Oracula, predicts major events for 2012.

Progresshiv
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1 month ago
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36 comments

USDA deregulates two more GM seeds for Monsanto

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced on Thursday its decision... more

JanforGore
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Africa: gangsters swap guns for greenhouses

With his long black plastic gumboots, overalls and cap, Alamin Ibrahim really looks the part of a farmer leaving his shamba (field) in the Kenyan countryside. Once a car-jacker, he has become a farmer, while the smallholding he works beside a railway line previously used as a tip for the slums of Kibera, Nairobi, produces organic vegetables. Or something very close.

Inside the greenhouse patched together with plastic sheeting, rows of onions and chilli peppers run alongside lines of tender-green spinach, just beginning to sprout. Pests devoured the most recent cabbage crop. This time the onions and chilli are supposed to keep them at bay.

As for the soil, it is still a bit too acidic. "There were quite a lot of car batteries in the tip, so of course there was spillage and the soil is still full of the stuff," Ibrahim explains. Organic farming in Kibera – with neither chemical fertilisers nor pesticides – is still in its early days.

Ten years ago Ibrahim realised he either had to leave his gang, the G Unit, or accept the likelihood of a premature death. "One day I sat down and looked at a photo taken a few years earlier with my mates. They were all dead, most of them shot down by the police," he says. So he had to find some way out. "Our main activity was car-jacking on Mbagathi Way [a major thoroughfare nearby]. In Kibera itself it was mainly petty thieving and hold-ups. If you'd come this way at the time, we'd have stripped you bare."

So a bunch of gang members who did not want to end up full of lead in a ditch decided to go straight, in so far as possible, and set up an organisation to survive in the slum. It evolved into the Youth Reform Self Help Group. They started collecting rubbish, selling plastic to "brokers" who bought recyclable waste.

Then they got hold of a 2,000-litre water tank and began selling water in jerrycans. Ibrahim says: "We did our own market research and noticed there were no latrines, no way of getting a wash, so we saved up and built proper facilities."

The wash-house seems a little like exploiting misery, but there is paper in the toilets, soap in the showers and "security" throughout, laid on by YRSHG members (which means you will not have all your gear stolen while under the shower) and the whole thing only costs five cents a time.

This was soon followed by a small operation renting plastic chairs, much in demand in Kibera. In the makeshift shacks there are never enough seats when people drop in or on special occasions. Another lucrative activity is selling wooden posts, to build the framework of new homes.

The idea of organic farming came later, in the wake of the violence sparked by the presidential election in December 2007. Kibera erupted and even the rails on the nearby track were torn up to paralyse traffic.

When calm was finally restored, the YRSHG decided to clean up the slum's perimeter and then branch out into organic food, in the hope that they could sell their produce to a specialist network. In fact the main buyers are ordinary local people, but the project is still going.

More at the linkWith his long black plastic gumboots, overalls and cap, Alamin Ibrahim really looks... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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NY Times gets blunt: Climate action requires a fundamental remaking of the sinews of modern life

John Broder had this remarkable sentence in his Sunday New York Times dispatch from Durban:

Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life.

This is uncharacteristically blunt for the Times. It reflects a worldview that is generally not reflected in their overall coverage, as I discussed in “The New York Times Abandons the Story of the Century and Joins the Energy and Climate Ignorati.”

Broder’s point is that the UN process is simply not up to the task of addressing the climate problem:

It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.

“There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics,” said Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC, the London-based global bank.

Unfortunately, most economics ministers are pretty clueless about the subject. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of the current process, which requires near-unanimous consent by nearly 200 countries.

What’s most blocking action, from my perspective, isn’t the process so much as the failure of the media and policymakers here and around the globe to realize that failing to address climate change will lead to an even bigger remaking of what’s left of modern life in a world of 10°F warming (see An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Inaction will create the almost impossible task of feeding 9+ billion in “the face of a rapidly worsening climate.” And avoiding mass starvation and general chaos will certainly require a fundamental remaking of the world. The NYT‘s science reporter Justin Gillis gets this, as you see in articles like “Food Supply Under Strain on a Warming Planet” and “Global Warming Hinders Crop Yields, Study Finds.”

We cannot escape fundamentally remaking the sinews of modern life over the coming decades — in a sustainable way if we act on climate and in a catastrophic way if we don’t. Now is the time for major media outlets like the New York Times to remake their coverage to inform the public of this far more clearly and unambiguously.

More at the linkJohn Broder had this remarkable sentence in his Sunday New York Times dispatch from... more