Newsdesk Archive
If human fossil fuel consumption continues as projected the environmental effects will be felt for millennia, according to a new analysis that considers long-term feedback processes not usually included in climate projections. Taking those processes into account increases the estimated likelihood of eventual ice sheet disintegration and major sea level rise.
At first glance the small laboratory on Stanford University's campus in California looks very clinical. But after volunteers are given a virtual reality headset, the laboratory becomes a pasture which allows them to experience life as a cow destined for the slaughterhouse.Those taking part in the research can 'see' the pasture around them, and are directed to feeding troughs by laboratory workers. As they are given instructions on how to move their bodies and where to go, the volunteers see the cow avatar move correspondingly and begin to relate to it.
PARIS (Reuters)
In the early to mid-1900s, the islands of Hawaii were a far-away, exotic destination. People who managed to get there often kept mementos of that journey including kitschy menus from Hawaiian fine dining restaurants and hotels like like Trader Vic's and Prince Kuhio's.Now these old menus are serving a purpose beyond colorful relics from the past. , an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he's found a scientific purpose for the menus.
It seemed at first like a logical alliance for boldface names in the interconnected worlds of Hollywood and politics. Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Robert Redford, a staunch conservationist, joined animal rights groups in a federal lawsuit to block the revival of horse slaughter in the United States, proclaiming that they were
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has insisted the Government has the "courage" to see through the controversial badger cull.Owen Paterson, who joined the Prime Minister in a tour of the North Devon Show yesterday, refused to say when two pilot schemes in west Somerset and Gloucestershire would begin, claiming it was a matter for locals to decide.
"What we call 'green burial' is really what all of us simply called 'burial' 150 years ago, and is pretty much what Jews and Muslims practice in their burial traditions," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers' Alliance in the US."I always like to point out to people that it isn't a technological new way of doing things but more a return to old-fashioned simplicity.".
People have more empathy for battered puppies and full grown dogs than they do for some humans -- adults, but not children, finds new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association."Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering," said Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University.
Well-meaning city types who put hives up in their gardens could actually be harming bees, according to a new study.The Unviersity of Sussex research said that more honey bees in the city just mean less nectar and flowers are available to the wild bee population.The study, published by The Society of Biology, said people should be planting wild flowers instead.
It's not just humans that still feel the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still feeling the effects.Many ecosystems rely on big animals to supply them with nutrients, mostly from dung. "If you remove the big animals from an ecosystem, you pretty much stop nutrients moving," says Chris Doughty of the University of Oxford.
The long extinct
For most of us, "pterodactyls" are imagined as large, vicious and ugly gargoyles with lanky limbs, leathery wings and jaws lined with savage teeth, the sort of disreputable brutes we find in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, the Jurassic Park franchise
While NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers drive across the red planet's surface, a new probe is being prepared for launch to figure out why Mars lost its protective atmosphere.Scientists believe that Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, started off much more like Earth, with warm temperatures and water flowing across its surface. But something happened that turned Mars into a cold and dry desert.The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) is designed to provide some answers.
More than 100,000 people are eager to make themselves at home on another planet. They've applied for a one-way trip to Mars, hoping to be chosen to spend the rest of their lives on uncharted territory, according to an organization planning the manned missions.The Mars One project wants to colonize the red planet, beginning in 2022.
About 57 light years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a large new planet, colored a deep magenta. It
Large animals help move nutrients around the landscape in much the same way as arteries carry blood around our bodies, scientists have found.And when those large creatures become extinct, these crucial "circulatory systems" are damaged, causing long-term harm to the health of soils.
When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting from below, caused by a high heat flow from the mantle into the lithosphere. This influence is very variable spatially and has its origin in an exceptionally thin lithosphere. Consequently, there is an increased heat flow from the mantle and a complex interplay between this geothermal heating and the Greenland ice sheet. The international research initiative IceGeoHeat led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences establishes in the current online issue of Nature Geoscience that this effect cannot be neglected when modeling the ice sheet as part of a climate study.
The future of the world
If human fossil fuel consumption continues as projected the environmental effects will be felt for millennia, according to a new analysis that considers long-term feedback processes not usually included in climate projections. Taking those processes into account increases the estimated likelihood of eventual ice sheet disintegration and major sea level rise.
At first glance the small laboratory on Stanford University's campus in California looks very clinical. But after volunteers are given a virtual reality headset, the laboratory becomes a pasture which allows them to experience life as a cow destined for the slaughterhouse.Those taking part in the research can 'see' the pasture around them, and are directed to feeding troughs by laboratory workers. As they are given instructions on how to move their bodies and where to go, the volunteers see the cow avatar move correspondingly and begin to relate to it.
PARIS (Reuters)
In the early to mid-1900s, the islands of Hawaii were a far-away, exotic destination. People who managed to get there often kept mementos of that journey including kitschy menus from Hawaiian fine dining restaurants and hotels like like Trader Vic's and Prince Kuhio's.Now these old menus are serving a purpose beyond colorful relics from the past. , an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he's found a scientific purpose for the menus.
It seemed at first like a logical alliance for boldface names in the interconnected worlds of Hollywood and politics. Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Robert Redford, a staunch conservationist, joined animal rights groups in a federal lawsuit to block the revival of horse slaughter in the United States, proclaiming that they were
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has insisted the Government has the "courage" to see through the controversial badger cull.Owen Paterson, who joined the Prime Minister in a tour of the North Devon Show yesterday, refused to say when two pilot schemes in west Somerset and Gloucestershire would begin, claiming it was a matter for locals to decide.
"What we call 'green burial' is really what all of us simply called 'burial' 150 years ago, and is pretty much what Jews and Muslims practice in their burial traditions," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers' Alliance in the US."I always like to point out to people that it isn't a technological new way of doing things but more a return to old-fashioned simplicity.".
People have more empathy for battered puppies and full grown dogs than they do for some humans -- adults, but not children, finds new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association."Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering," said Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University.
Well-meaning city types who put hives up in their gardens could actually be harming bees, according to a new study.The Unviersity of Sussex research said that more honey bees in the city just mean less nectar and flowers are available to the wild bee population.The study, published by The Society of Biology, said people should be planting wild flowers instead.
It's not just humans that still feel the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still feeling the effects.Many ecosystems rely on big animals to supply them with nutrients, mostly from dung. "If you remove the big animals from an ecosystem, you pretty much stop nutrients moving," says Chris Doughty of the University of Oxford.
The long extinct
For most of us, "pterodactyls" are imagined as large, vicious and ugly gargoyles with lanky limbs, leathery wings and jaws lined with savage teeth, the sort of disreputable brutes we find in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, the Jurassic Park franchise
While NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers drive across the red planet's surface, a new probe is being prepared for launch to figure out why Mars lost its protective atmosphere.Scientists believe that Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, started off much more like Earth, with warm temperatures and water flowing across its surface. But something happened that turned Mars into a cold and dry desert.The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) is designed to provide some answers.
More than 100,000 people are eager to make themselves at home on another planet. They've applied for a one-way trip to Mars, hoping to be chosen to spend the rest of their lives on uncharted territory, according to an organization planning the manned missions.The Mars One project wants to colonize the red planet, beginning in 2022.
About 57 light years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a large new planet, colored a deep magenta. It
Large animals help move nutrients around the landscape in much the same way as arteries carry blood around our bodies, scientists have found.And when those large creatures become extinct, these crucial "circulatory systems" are damaged, causing long-term harm to the health of soils.
When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting from below, caused by a high heat flow from the mantle into the lithosphere. This influence is very variable spatially and has its origin in an exceptionally thin lithosphere. Consequently, there is an increased heat flow from the mantle and a complex interplay between this geothermal heating and the Greenland ice sheet. The international research initiative IceGeoHeat led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences establishes in the current online issue of Nature Geoscience that this effect cannot be neglected when modeling the ice sheet as part of a climate study.
The future of the world
If human fossil fuel consumption continues as projected the environmental effects will be felt for millennia, according to a new analysis that considers long-term feedback processes not usually included in climate projections. Taking those processes into account increases the estimated likelihood of eventual ice sheet disintegration and major sea level rise.
At first glance the small laboratory on Stanford University's campus in California looks very clinical. But after volunteers are given a virtual reality headset, the laboratory becomes a pasture which allows them to experience life as a cow destined for the slaughterhouse.Those taking part in the research can 'see' the pasture around them, and are directed to feeding troughs by laboratory workers. As they are given instructions on how to move their bodies and where to go, the volunteers see the cow avatar move correspondingly and begin to relate to it.
PARIS (Reuters)
In the early to mid-1900s, the islands of Hawaii were a far-away, exotic destination. People who managed to get there often kept mementos of that journey including kitschy menus from Hawaiian fine dining restaurants and hotels like like Trader Vic's and Prince Kuhio's.Now these old menus are serving a purpose beyond colorful relics from the past. , an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he's found a scientific purpose for the menus.
It seemed at first like a logical alliance for boldface names in the interconnected worlds of Hollywood and politics. Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Robert Redford, a staunch conservationist, joined animal rights groups in a federal lawsuit to block the revival of horse slaughter in the United States, proclaiming that they were
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has insisted the Government has the "courage" to see through the controversial badger cull.Owen Paterson, who joined the Prime Minister in a tour of the North Devon Show yesterday, refused to say when two pilot schemes in west Somerset and Gloucestershire would begin, claiming it was a matter for locals to decide.
"What we call 'green burial' is really what all of us simply called 'burial' 150 years ago, and is pretty much what Jews and Muslims practice in their burial traditions," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers' Alliance in the US."I always like to point out to people that it isn't a technological new way of doing things but more a return to old-fashioned simplicity.".
People have more empathy for battered puppies and full grown dogs than they do for some humans -- adults, but not children, finds new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association."Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering," said Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University.
Well-meaning city types who put hives up in their gardens could actually be harming bees, according to a new study.The Unviersity of Sussex research said that more honey bees in the city just mean less nectar and flowers are available to the wild bee population.The study, published by The Society of Biology, said people should be planting wild flowers instead.
It's not just humans that still feel the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still feeling the effects.Many ecosystems rely on big animals to supply them with nutrients, mostly from dung. "If you remove the big animals from an ecosystem, you pretty much stop nutrients moving," says Chris Doughty of the University of Oxford.
The long extinct
For most of us, "pterodactyls" are imagined as large, vicious and ugly gargoyles with lanky limbs, leathery wings and jaws lined with savage teeth, the sort of disreputable brutes we find in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, the Jurassic Park franchise
While NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers drive across the red planet's surface, a new probe is being prepared for launch to figure out why Mars lost its protective atmosphere.Scientists believe that Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, started off much more like Earth, with warm temperatures and water flowing across its surface. But something happened that turned Mars into a cold and dry desert.The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) is designed to provide some answers.
More than 100,000 people are eager to make themselves at home on another planet. They've applied for a one-way trip to Mars, hoping to be chosen to spend the rest of their lives on uncharted territory, according to an organization planning the manned missions.The Mars One project wants to colonize the red planet, beginning in 2022.
About 57 light years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a large new planet, colored a deep magenta. It
Large animals help move nutrients around the landscape in much the same way as arteries carry blood around our bodies, scientists have found.And when those large creatures become extinct, these crucial "circulatory systems" are damaged, causing long-term harm to the health of soils.
When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting from below, caused by a high heat flow from the mantle into the lithosphere. This influence is very variable spatially and has its origin in an exceptionally thin lithosphere. Consequently, there is an increased heat flow from the mantle and a complex interplay between this geothermal heating and the Greenland ice sheet. The international research initiative IceGeoHeat led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences establishes in the current online issue of Nature Geoscience that this effect cannot be neglected when modeling the ice sheet as part of a climate study.
If human fossil fuel consumption continues as projected the environmental effects will be felt for millennia, according to a new analysis that considers long-term feedback processes not usually included in climate projections. Taking those processes into account increases the estimated likelihood of eventual ice sheet disintegration and major sea level rise.
At first glance the small laboratory on Stanford University's campus in California looks very clinical. But after volunteers are given a virtual reality headset, the laboratory becomes a pasture which allows them to experience life as a cow destined for the slaughterhouse.Those taking part in the research can 'see' the pasture around them, and are directed to feeding troughs by laboratory workers. As they are given instructions on how to move their bodies and where to go, the volunteers see the cow avatar move correspondingly and begin to relate to it.
In the early to mid-1900s, the islands of Hawaii were a far-away, exotic destination. People who managed to get there often kept mementos of that journey including kitschy menus from Hawaiian fine dining restaurants and hotels like like Trader Vic's and Prince Kuhio's.Now these old menus are serving a purpose beyond colorful relics from the past. , an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he's found a scientific purpose for the menus.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has insisted the Government has the "courage" to see through the controversial badger cull.Owen Paterson, who joined the Prime Minister in a tour of the North Devon Show yesterday, refused to say when two pilot schemes in west Somerset and Gloucestershire would begin, claiming it was a matter for locals to decide.
"What we call 'green burial' is really what all of us simply called 'burial' 150 years ago, and is pretty much what Jews and Muslims practice in their burial traditions," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers' Alliance in the US."I always like to point out to people that it isn't a technological new way of doing things but more a return to old-fashioned simplicity.".
People have more empathy for battered puppies and full grown dogs than they do for some humans -- adults, but not children, finds new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association."Contrary to popular thinking, we are not necessarily more disturbed by animal rather than human suffering," said Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University.
Well-meaning city types who put hives up in their gardens could actually be harming bees, according to a new study.The Unviersity of Sussex research said that more honey bees in the city just mean less nectar and flowers are available to the wild bee population.The study, published by The Society of Biology, said people should be planting wild flowers instead.
It's not just humans that still feel the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still feeling the effects.Many ecosystems rely on big animals to supply them with nutrients, mostly from dung. "If you remove the big animals from an ecosystem, you pretty much stop nutrients moving," says Chris Doughty of the University of Oxford.
While NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers drive across the red planet's surface, a new probe is being prepared for launch to figure out why Mars lost its protective atmosphere.Scientists believe that Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, started off much more like Earth, with warm temperatures and water flowing across its surface. But something happened that turned Mars into a cold and dry desert.The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) is designed to provide some answers.
More than 100,000 people are eager to make themselves at home on another planet. They've applied for a one-way trip to Mars, hoping to be chosen to spend the rest of their lives on uncharted territory, according to an organization planning the manned missions.The Mars One project wants to colonize the red planet, beginning in 2022.
Ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions and carvings on pharaonic tombs chronicle hartebeest and oryx
The boreal forest seems to like the higher levels of carbon dioxide that result from fossil-fuel burning. All that carbon appears to be enabling growth rates not seen in human history for the northernmost forest, according to a new study."Boreal forests are more active than 50 years ago," says geochemist Heather Graven of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, lead author of the new analysis, published online August 8 in Science. She and her colleagues documented a dramatic uptick in the flow of carbon into and out of the forests, which cover most of Canada as well as large swathes of Russia and Scandinavia.
The key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look at how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle
Once, somewhere in what is now China, lived an animal with the fur and teeth
A type of brain cell known to help animals keep track of their location has been found for the first time in humans, according to a new study.Researchers discovered the neurons, called grid cells, because they were activated in the brains of study participants exploring a virtual environment. The cells function like an internal GPS system, and may also play a role in memory, the researchers said."Grid cells tell a person where they are in their environment," said study researcher Joshua Jacobs, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, adding that in animals the cells provide a kind of measuring stick for navigation.
A dog may be man's best friend, but dolphins can imitate human actions, and even how they solve problems.A recent study shows that when a dolphin has one of its senses blocked, it can use other senses to mimic a human's movements.
You may have heard the news that SeaWorld recently hired a big-league public relations firm to try and counter the bad publicity resulting from the movie exposé "Blackfish."SeaWorld's image troubles cannot be addressed in their entirety by throwing money at public relations. Even with the best spin-masters in the world, it's very hard to reverse the growing public perception that whales should not be contained in sterile swimming pools.
In winter 2010, Adrian Glover, a marine biologist from the Natural History Museum in London, got a call from a colleague with some good news. While piloting a remotely operated vehicle to study a hydrothermal vent 4,700 feet beneath the surface of the Antarctic
Excerpted from Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate, by Rose George.I leave a note for duty officers on the chart table of the container ship Kendal. It says,
Scientists have been trying to discover why millions of beehives have collapsed and died during the past six years. According to a new study, the reason for the phenomenon
The hole in the planet's ozone layer may be shifting wind patterns and cloud cover over Antarctica in a way that could be triggering slightly warmer global temperatures, a new study finds.Using computer models, researchers examined how the ozone hole may be altering winds in the jet stream over the Antarctic region, pushing clouds closer to the South Pole. These changes in cloud cover could affect how much of the sun's radiation is reflected by the clouds, leading to a slightly warmer planet, the scientists said.
The greenhouse at Metabolix
The private Dutch-based Mars One project is proposing to select a group of 40 would-be civilian astronauts this year, aiming to send four of them on a no-return journey to to the red planet in 2022.Experts have questioned both the financial and practical viability of the mission, but that hasn't stopped people signing up in droves, including 30,000 Americans, CNN reported.
New evidence was unveiled Thursday that Japan
Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them.So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why?If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don't have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.
Ladar Levison, 32, has spent ten years building encrypted email service Lavabit, attracting over 410,000 users. When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was revealed to be one of those users in July, Dallas-based Lavabit got a surge of new customers: $12,000 worth of paid subscribers, triple his usual monthly sign-up. On Thursday, though, Levison pulled the plug on his company, posting a cryptic message about a government investigation that would force him to
Two of Germany's biggest Internet service providers said Friday they will start encrypting customers' emails by default in response to user concerns about online snooping after reports that the U.S. National Security Agency monitors international electronic communications.The plan by Deutsche Telekom AG and United Internet AG is the digital equivalent of putting an envelope around a postcard. Currently most emails are sent across the web in plain view of anyone standing between the sender and the recipient.
A major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham, which enables all of the world
Ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions and carvings on pharaonic tombs chronicle hartebeest and oryx
The boreal forest seems to like the higher levels of carbon dioxide that result from fossil-fuel burning. All that carbon appears to be enabling growth rates not seen in human history for the northernmost forest, according to a new study."Boreal forests are more active than 50 years ago," says geochemist Heather Graven of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, lead author of the new analysis, published online August 8 in Science. She and her colleagues documented a dramatic uptick in the flow of carbon into and out of the forests, which cover most of Canada as well as large swathes of Russia and Scandinavia.
The key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look at how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle
Once, somewhere in what is now China, lived an animal with the fur and teeth
A type of brain cell known to help animals keep track of their location has been found for the first time in humans, according to a new study.Researchers discovered the neurons, called grid cells, because they were activated in the brains of study participants exploring a virtual environment. The cells function like an internal GPS system, and may also play a role in memory, the researchers said."Grid cells tell a person where they are in their environment," said study researcher Joshua Jacobs, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, adding that in animals the cells provide a kind of measuring stick for navigation.
A dog may be man's best friend, but dolphins can imitate human actions, and even how they solve problems.A recent study shows that when a dolphin has one of its senses blocked, it can use other senses to mimic a human's movements.
You may have heard the news that SeaWorld recently hired a big-league public relations firm to try and counter the bad publicity resulting from the movie exposé "Blackfish."SeaWorld's image troubles cannot be addressed in their entirety by throwing money at public relations. Even with the best spin-masters in the world, it's very hard to reverse the growing public perception that whales should not be contained in sterile swimming pools.
In winter 2010, Adrian Glover, a marine biologist from the Natural History Museum in London, got a call from a colleague with some good news. While piloting a remotely operated vehicle to study a hydrothermal vent 4,700 feet beneath the surface of the Antarctic
Excerpted from Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate, by Rose George.I leave a note for duty officers on the chart table of the container ship Kendal. It says,
Scientists have been trying to discover why millions of beehives have collapsed and died during the past six years. According to a new study, the reason for the phenomenon
The hole in the planet's ozone layer may be shifting wind patterns and cloud cover over Antarctica in a way that could be triggering slightly warmer global temperatures, a new study finds.Using computer models, researchers examined how the ozone hole may be altering winds in the jet stream over the Antarctic region, pushing clouds closer to the South Pole. These changes in cloud cover could affect how much of the sun's radiation is reflected by the clouds, leading to a slightly warmer planet, the scientists said.
The greenhouse at Metabolix
The private Dutch-based Mars One project is proposing to select a group of 40 would-be civilian astronauts this year, aiming to send four of them on a no-return journey to to the red planet in 2022.Experts have questioned both the financial and practical viability of the mission, but that hasn't stopped people signing up in droves, including 30,000 Americans, CNN reported.
New evidence was unveiled Thursday that Japan