Read moreSuch is Matt Taylor’s devotion to the cause he proudly wears tattoos depicting key ESA projects: “I had a tattoo done of a previous mission I was working on so of course I had to have one done of Rosetta.”
Quotes
Read moreGötherström thinks there are a few possible explanations. One is that after humans left Africa, some flourished by becoming farmers and exploiting the fertile lands they found in the Near East. Others ventured further north, where they continued to rely on the wild animals they killed and the plants and berries they collected from the landscape. These groups were split into small populations that survived in isolation between the ice sheets.
The Swedish data shows some mixing between the two groups, suggesting that as the farmers later swept north they interbred with the hunter-gatherers they encountered and assimilated them into their cultures. The exchange seems to have been unidirectional: there is very little if any evidence that farmers were assimilated into the hunter-gatherers.
Read moreTo climb straight back to the surface, without stopping to rig ropes and phone wire, would take them four days. It took three days to get back from the moon…
Casteret and Chevalier helped turn caving into a heroic undertaking, and the search for the world’s deepest cave into an international competition—a precursor to the space race…
“In the past, I’d lose twenty-five pounds on one of these trips,” Stone told me. “We can burn as many calories as a Tour de France rider every day underground.” Ascending Chevé, he once said, was like climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan at night through a freezing waterfall. To fine-tune the team’s diet, he’d modelled it on Lance Armstrong’s program, aiming for a ratio of seventeen per cent protein, sixteen per cent fat, and sixty-seven per cent carbohydrates…
Over the years, caving gear has undergone a brutal Darwinian selection, lopping off redundant parts and vestigial limbs. Toothbrushes have lost their handles, forks a tine or two, packs their adjustable straps. Underwear is worn for weeks on end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic silver and copper threads. Simple items are often best: Nalgene bottles, waterproof and unbreakable, have replaced all manner of fancier containers; cavers even stuff their sleeping bags into them. Yet the biggest weight savings have come from more sophisticated gear. Stone has a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Texas and spent twenty-four years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His company has worked on numerous robotics projects for NASA, including autonomous submarines destined for Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. The rebreathers for the Chevé trip were of his own design. Their carbon-fibre tanks weighed a fourth of what conventional tanks weigh and lasted more than four times longer underwater; their software could precisely regulate the mix and flow of gases.
Stone’s newest obsession was a set of methanol fuel cells from a company called SFC Energy. Headlamps, phones, scuba computers, and hammer drills (used to drive rope anchors into the rock) all use lithium batteries that have to be recharged. On this trip the cavers would also be carrying GoPro video cameras for a documentary that would be shown on the Discovery Channel. In the past, Stone had tried installing a paddle wheel underground to generate electricity from the stream flow, with fairly feeble results. But a single bottle of methanol and four fuel cells—each about the size of a large toaster—could power the whole expedition…
“Welcome to Hell,” one of the cavers told me, when I joined him by the campfire that first night. “Where happiness goes to die,” another added. There was a pause, then someone launched into the colonel’s monologue from “Avatar”: “Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. . . . If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude.” It was a favorite conceit around camp: the cloud forest as hostile planet…
“Where did the water go a million years ago? That’s what you have to ask yourself,” Stone said. “As a cave diver, you have to think four-dimensionally.”
Everyone has the right to roam Finland’s forests and countryside freely, no matter who owns the land, thanks to a legal concept, unique to the Nordic countries, known as Everyman’s Right.
Everyman’s Right enables Finns and foreigners alike to explore Finland’s famous forests, fells and lakes – and also freely collect natural products like tasty wild berries and mushrooms, even where they grow in privately owned forests.
“The legal concept of Everyman’s Right has developed over many generations,” explains legal expert Anne Rautiainen from the Outdoors Association of Finland. “It’s not enshrined in any single law, though its scope is well defined in many pieces of legislation on different issues.
“The fundamental idea behind Everyman’s Right is to enable everyone to freely enjoy outdoor activities that have always been popular in Finland, like walking and skiing in the forest, boating, swimming, and picking mushrooms and berries.”
Free to explore Finland’s great outdoors – thisisFINLAND (via juhavantzelfde)
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#civilisation #commonwealth
Read moreSir John added: “There is a real problem of ignorance. There is a false assumption that what is good for mammals is good for everything else, or at least not harmful. People assume that vultures belong in the Serengeti with the lions, but they are common in Spain and France; a wild vulture has even been seen in Holland.
There was a Black Vulture spotted in Wales, but they think it escaped from somewhere. Vultures have always been disregarded because of the way they look, but actually they do a very, very good job.”
José Tavares, director of the Swiss-based Vulture Conservation Foundation, added: “Vultures fulfill an incredibly important role. They clean the countryside, they provide an ecological service that is free and unique. In a few depressed areas of Europe, they bring tourist income. If diclophenac becomes widespread in Europe, carcasses would have to be collected and incinerated at huge cost.“
If you’re going to be worried every time the universe doesn’t make sense, you’re going to be worried every moment of every day for the rest of your natural life.
A reading from one of the holiest of metafictional texts.
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(Book of) G’Kar // Babylon 5 // “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?”
(via fuckyeahb5)
“Say it with me: I WILL NOT GO BACK INTO THE CAVE.”
“Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.”
Say it with me: I WILL NOT GO BACK INTO THE CAVE.
Sustainability is zero sum bullshit. Hair shirt greens can eat my shorts. Either we build up and out, or we fall back and let the next species takeover in a million years.
May an asteroid wipe out any closed mind, human purist, Puritan Earth, false progress civilization. They won’t see it coming anyway. Ahem.
WHY I REALLY DIDN’T LIKE THIS – Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114
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Read moreUniversity of Canterbury ecologist Professor Jason Tylianakis says no study has explicitly tested whether exotic species fill the roles left by declining native species.
“A collaborative research project between scientists at the University of Canterbury and the University of Oviedo, Spain, has examined the role of exotic birds in dispersing the seeds of native New Zealand trees and shrubs.
“Many fruiting plants require birds to carry their seeds to new locations and drive the persistence and recovery of native forests.
“New Zealand fruit-feeding birds have historically suffered a strong decline but the country has also gained new fruit-eaters in the form of introduced European birds, such as blackbirds and song thrushes.’’
The Canterbury researchers studied the network of feeding interactions between different species of plants and birds in the North and South islands. They found that the intermediate body and beak size of exotic birds allowed them to feed on a great variety of different fruits.
This allowed the birds to disperse seeds of plant species that were not eaten by native birds at any given location and helped to stabilise seed dispersal across a whole range of plants.
Without introduced species, many native plants would not have their fruits eaten and their seeds would simply fall to the ground below the tree.
Another Canterbury biological sciences researcher, Dr Daniel Stouffer, says exotic species were less discriminating in their fruit consumption patterns.
“Native fruit-eaters have developed strong affinities for or against consumption of native fruit species making our native communities vulnerable to loss of key bird species. However, the exotic species are more than happy to make equal use of all the fruits available, thereby spreading their benefit more widely.’’
Professor Tylianakis says people often consider invasions by non-native species as always being harmful.
“However, many of our native species have already become extinct and sometimes we need new species to fill their role. Although they often do harm, we can’t always assume that non-native species are the bad guys in our constantly changing eco-systems,” Professor Tylianakis says.
Read moreGenerally speaking, there are three criteria that X projects share. All must address a problem that affects millions–or better yet, billions–of people. All must utilize a radical solution that has at least a component that resembles science fiction. And all must tap technologies that are now (or very nearly) obtainable.
according to Wilk, the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.
Leon Neyfakh quoting Daniel Levinson Wilk in How the elevator transformed America for The Boston Globe. (via blech)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 