Time // Current

A History of Time Travel in Film

Here is a fantastic little chart we came across today which gives us a run down of the... more

remanns
added this
6 days ago
|
6 comments

Timelines Swirl Move and Penpoint popular film and TV's Times....yeah

Here’s a visualisation of time travel plots in various films and TV programs. I had... more

J_Jammer
added this
3 months ago
|
4 comments

Twilight New Moon Mania

Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and the other stars of 'New Moon' are all over... more

Conor_Knighton
added this
9 days ago
|
1 comment

Does time change speed?

Do you ever get the feeling that time is just dragging on? You might be working in the... more

karthikmns
added this
9 days ago
|
0 comments

Dirt Powered Bamboo Soil Clock

Here’s an alarm clock you might not want to smash with a mallet each and every... more

whitespacecarpet
added this
10 days ago
|
0 comments

Will Work For……….A Bloody Chance!

The Blog Writer States: "The recession is so bad the AARP is calling thinking I'm... more

jrn
added this
16 days ago
|
0 comments

Shakira - World Dominator?

Her non-lying hips made it onto the cover of 'Rolling Stone,' and that means they made... more

Conor_Knighton
added this
23 days ago
|
1 comment

Time banks thrive in the midst of the recession

What is time? A storm in which we are all lost, but this is a great idea!

franksalot
added this
25 days ago
|
2 comments

Cosmic Time

Throughout history, one thing has never changed - time. It is something we rely on to... more

ras_menelik
added this
26 days ago
|
2 comments

Switch: If You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!

“Switch” is a 4-minute short animated film by the young French filmmakers... more

disembedded
added this
29 days ago
|
1 comment

The Babes of 'Battlestar Galactica'

Tricia Helfer and Grace Park made it onto the cover of 'Maxim,' and that means they... more

Conor_Knighton
added this
1 month ago
|
12 comments

Jennifer Stone Has a Secret

The secrets of teen stars made it onto the cover of 'Tiger Beat,' which means they're... more

Conor_Knighton
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Conspiracy watch: were the Dark Ages faked?

"Phantom time," Charlemagne, and a 300-year memory hole. THE CONSPIRACY THEORY: No... more

pjacobs51
added this
1 month ago
|
113 comments

10 worst ways to spend your time in a game

From level grinding to being stuck playing bass in guitar hero co-op, these are the 10... more

Genghis_Sean
added this
1 month ago
|
1 comment

Does time slow down in a crisis?

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” OR... more

franksalot
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Continued at link . . .WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene... more