////////////A PERSON THAT JUST WANTS TO LEARN Lots of people will read and stuff their brains full of information. This is learning and not a project. They pick up a book and get a tingle in their brain because they are happy. That is a chemical reaction. Sort of like bungee jumping but less intense. An endorphin rush. I think of people that like too much stimulation on a regular basis as endorphin junkies. This learning is not proactive. It is the desire to feel a feeling. To want to be happy or get the rush of the endorphins in the mind.
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//////////////////Something in the Way She Moves?
By Constance HoldenScienceNOW Daily News5 October 2007In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers--women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men--earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.
Women, unlike many mammals, don't come into heat or estrus, a state of obvious fertility that attracts potential mates. Common wisdom has it that estrus was lost as humans evolved. The notion is that women evolved "concealed ovulation" along with around-the-month sexual receptivity the better to manipulate males by keeping them in the dark, says Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. But now Miller and colleagues have found evidence that a woman’s state of fertility may not be so secret after all.
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Hip size 'gives cancer risk clue'
Hip size is linked to levels of the hormone oestrogenWomen whose mothers have big hips may be more likely to develop breast cancer, research suggests.
A study led by the University of Southampton found breast cancer rates were more than three times higher among women whose mothers had wide hips.
Rates were more than seven times higher if those mothers had already given birth to one or more children.
The American Journal of Human Biology study suggests high levels of the sex hormone oestrogen are to blame.
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Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was a qualified doctor
/////////////////Plants chatter amongst themselves to spread information, a lot like humans and other animals, new research suggests.
A unique internal network apparently allows greens to warn each other against predators and potential enemies.
Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form a set of connections to share information with each other through channels known as runners—horizontal stems that physically bond the plants like tubes or cables along the soil surface and underground. Though connected to vertical stems, runners eventually form new buds at the tips and ultimately form a network of plants.
“Network-like plants do not usually produce vertical stems but their stems lie flat on the ground and can hence be used as network infrastructure,” said researcher Josef Stuefer from the Radboud University in the Netherlands.
///////////////////Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste). Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current.
////////////////////hose-draggern.a nickname for a firefighter
RANADA
///////////////THINKING ALLOWED
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Caligynephobia
Fear of beautiful women.
Gynephobia or Gynophobia
Fear of women.
Venustraphobia
Fear of beautiful women.
//////////////////////Most minimum wage earners are young.
Most minimum wage earners work in food service.
Most minimum wage earners have never attended college
IN WEST
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Gold rings create first true invisibility cloak
16:56 02 October 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Colin Barras
Enlarge image
The cloak's concentric gold rings can steer light waves travelling along a surface around an object and straight on again as if it was not there (Image: Smolyaninov/University of Maryland)The world's first true invisibility cloak – a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum – has been created by physicists in the US. But don't expect it to compete with stage magic tricks. So far it only works in two dimensions and on a tiny scale.
The new cloak, which is just 10 micrometres in diameter, guides rays of light around an object inside and releases them on the other side. The light waves appear to have moved in a straight line, so the cloak – and any object inside – appear invisible.
//////////////////THE NAKED APE
////////////////////ARTALAD=LEX MESS x/70
/////////////////THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PLANET EARTH
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers WeeklyAccording to the authors-who argued in their previous book, Rare Earth, that the complex life found on earth is probably unique in the vast expanses of the universe-our planet has a pretty bleak future ahead of it, one that is a mirror image of its past. Ward and Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, claim that human civilization has flowered during an 11,000-year warm interlude in a recurring cycle of ice ages. In their view, "global warming," while possibly harmful in the short term, may help postpone the return of the ice. But not too many thousand years from now, skyscraper-high glaciers will again grind across North America as far south as New York City, and civilization will be driven toward the equator to survive, if not into space. Further into the future, the authors argue, the complex give and take between carbon trapped in rocks, water and oxygen in the sea, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere-the latter playing the most important role in climatic change-will eventually turn earth into a barren sibling of Mars. While the authors don't make an airtight case for their claims about how our planet's climate and geology will begin to rewind, they do deftly bring together findings from many disparate areas of science in a book that science buffs will find hard to put down. 15 b&w illus. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalThe science of astrobiology attempts to answer some of the big questions that have long engaged the imagination of the human race. In this fascinating follow-up to Rare Earth, geologist/zoologist Ward and astronomer Brownlee, both of the University of Washington, draw an analogy between the planet's development and the human cycles of birth, growth, maturity, and death. They explain the Earth's natural aging process over eons by looking at changes in land formations, oceans, climates, plant and animal life, and the stars. Although the authors are adamant that human recklessness is hastening Earth's demise, it is just as apparent that this ultimate fate is inevitable. Given that the time frame is millions, if not billions, of years, it is difficult for the reader to feel a real impending sense of doom. Still, the authors effectively communicate their knowledge and sense of wonder while making the scientific evidence clear to readers of even limited science backgrounds. Thought-provoking and philosophical questions throughout ensure that this work never reads like a textbook. Readers interested in the environment and "the big picture" will enjoy. Recommended for public libraries of all sizes.Denise Hamilton, Franklin Pierce Coll. Lib., Rindge, NH Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
/////////////////Plants and animals evolved very different receptor sets since their split more than a billion years ago
////////////////NOSTALGIA=BRITISH COUNCIL LIBRARY IN MIRABAI ROAD,DGPR,WITH DAD
CLOSED DUE TO CUTS BY THTCHER
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The Life and Death of Planet EarthHow the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
A Times BookScience6 1/8 X 9 1/4; 288 pages15 b7w illustrations0-8050-6781-7/hardcover$26.00US/$38.95CANJanuary 2003
Read an excerpt
A landmark work of science that illuminates the second half of the life of our planet.
Imagine our planet far into the future, Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" reduced to a reddish-brown husk, a mere shell of its former self. It seems like the stuff of science fiction novels, but it is really of science today. We are at a unique moment in our history -- Earth's midlife -- a point at which science has given us the capability to examine the birth of our planet as well as the forces that will bring about its eventual death. Scientists are finally beginning to understand the cycles that make Earth work and to write, for the first time, a biography of our planet. This revolution in thinking, which finds its voice in this book, is as dramatic, in its own way, as the discovery of Earth revolving around the sun.
Two brilliant scientists -- Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, a paleontologist and an astronomer respectively -- are helping to bring this groundbreaking work to a popular audience. Vanguards of a new field called astrobiology -- the science of how planets and organisms live and die -- Ward and Brownlee combine the discoveries of astronomers, Earth scientists, and those in other specific disciplines. Astronomers are well-poised to study the ends of other worlds, while paleontologists can tell us about "worlds" that have already ended on our planet, such as the death of dinosaurs and other signposts in the rock and fossil record.
Ward and Brownlee present a comprehensive portrait of Earth's ultimate fate, allowing us to understand and appreciate how our planet sustains itself, and offer a glimpse at our place in the cosmic order. As they depict the process of planetary evolution, they peer deep into the future destiny of Earth, showing us that we are living near or shortly after Earth's biological peak. Eventually, the process of planetary evolution will reverse itself; life as we know it will subside until only the simplest forms remain. In time they, too, will disappear. The oceans will evaporate, the atmosphere will degrade, and as the sun slowly expands, Earth will eventually meet a fiery end.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is crucial to understand Earth's tumultuous history and probable future. Combining groundbreaking research with lucid, eloquent writing, this landmark book offers fresh and realistic insight into the true nature of our world and how we should best steward our planet for the long-term benefit of our species.
"This is the first real biography of the Earth -- not only a brilliant portrait of the emergence and evolution of life on this planet but a vivid and frightening look at Earth's remote future. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee combine storytelling power with extreme scientific care, and their narrative is as transfixing as any H.G. Well's fantasies, but more enthralling, for Ward and Brownlee have real power to prognosticate. This is a book that makes one shiver, but also inspires one to wonder how humanity (if we survive in the short term) will fare in the more distant future."--Oliver Sacks
"I have written three biographies and read many others, but who would have thought of a biography of planet Earth and its lifeforms? Ward and Brownlee have introduced the emerging science of astrobiology as a field that is important, exciting, and fun. The different scenarios for the end of life on Earth are provocative; while we cannot prevent some possibilities, the good news is that we can prevent others."--David H. Levy, discoverer of Twenty-One Comets, Including Shoemaker-Levy 9
"This is beautifully written, provocative book, exploring the long-term future of planet Earth in ways that have never been probed before."--David Morrison, NASA Ames Research Center
Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee are the coauthors of the acclaimed and bestselling Rare Earth. Don Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and has been involved in many space experiments; currently he is leading NASA's Stardust mission to collect samples of a comet and return them to Earth. Peter Ward is a professor of geological science and zoology at the University of Washington and the author of nine other books, including Future Evolution, In Search of Nautilus, The Call of Distant Mammoths, and The End of Evolution, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
////////////////////////For the first time, scientists have provided concrete evidence that endosome-mediated signaling occurs in plants, not just in animals, according to a new report in Genes and Development. "The fact that both [plants and animals] share some similarities in the endosomal signaling system means that this system is either much older than we could have ever assumed, or that plants have independently evolved the same solution to the same problem, a scenario that I favor," study author Niko Geldner of The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, told The Scientist.
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'The end of the world' has already begun, UW scientists say
Click on image for high-resolution version
An illustration from "The Life and Death of Planet Earth" shows the authors' view of the Earth's clock of life. (Image credit: Donald Brownlee/Peter Ward)
In its 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from its hot, violent birth to the celebrated watery blue planet that stands out in pictures from space. But in a new book, two noted University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun.
By their reckoning, Earth's "day in the sun" has reached 4:30 a.m., corresponding to its 4.5 billion-year age. By 5 a.m., the 1 billion-year reign of animals and plants will come to an end. At 8 a.m. the oceans will vaporize. At noon – after 12 billion years – the ever-expanding sun, transformed into a red giant, will engulf the planet, melting away any evidence it ever existed and sending molecules and atoms that once were Earth floating off into space.
"The disappearance of our planet is still 7.5 billion years away, but people really should consider the fate of our world and have a realistic understanding of where we are going," said UW astrophysicist Donald Brownlee. "We live in a fabulous place at a fabulous time. It's a healthy thing for people to realize what a treasure this is in space and time, and fully appreciate and protect their environment as much as possible."
In "The Life and Death of Planet Earth," Brownlee and UW paleontologist Peter Ward use current scientific understanding of planets and stars, as well as the parameters of life, to provide a glimpse of the second half of life on Earth and what comes after.
The book, a sort of biography of our planet, is being published today by Times Books, a division of Henry Holt and Co. It is a sequel to Ward and Brownlee's best-selling and much-discussed book "Rare Earth," in which they put forth the hypothesis that simple life is relatively common in the universe but complex, Earth-like life is exceedingly rare.
"The Life and Death of Planet Earth" explains how the myriad life on Earth today was preceded by a long period of microbial dominance, and the authors contend that complex life eventually will disappear and be succeeded again by a period of only microbial life. They say that higher life will be removed much as it came into being, ecosystem by ecosystem. Aspects of the planet's past, such as numbingly cold ice ages, will be relived in the period of devolution.
"If we do begin to slide into the next glacial cycle, there probably are grand, planetary-scale engineering projects that might stop or lessen the effects," Ward said.
"The big unknowns are whether we can afford to do such projects and would we really know what to do. If the planet was cooling, we could, in principle, begin painting the surface black to collect more heat. Could we afford it? And what would be the many possible ramifications of a planet suddenly covered in black paint? Any planetary remediation project would always run the risk of making things worse."
Eventually, though, scorching heat will drive land creatures to the sea for respite. Those that can adapt will survive for a time, but eventually the oceans will warm too much for the complex life forms to continue.
"The last life may look much like the first life – a single-celled bacterium, survivor and descendant of all that came before," the authors write. Finally, even the surviving microbes "will be seared out of existence."
The prospects of humans surviving by moving to some other habitable planet or moon aren't good, Brownlee and Ward contend, because even if such a place were found, getting there would be a huge obstacle. Various probes sent into space could survive Earth's demise, and just a few grams of material could arguably carry a DNA sample from every human, they say, but it's not likely the human species itself will survive. Long before the planet's final end, life will become quite challenging, and finally impossible, for humans.
As the sun gets hotter and grows in size, it will envelop Mercury and Venus. It is possible it will stop just short of Earth, the authors say, but the conditions still would make this a most-inhospitable planet. More likely, though, the sun will consume Earth as well, severing all the chemical bonds between molecules and sending its individual atoms out into space, perhaps eventually to form new planets. That would leave Mars as the nearest planet to the sun, and on Mars the fading sun's glow would be like that of Earth's moon.
That end is still some 7.5 billion years distant, but by then Earth will have faced a variety of "ends" along the way, the authors say. The last dinosaur perished long ago. Still to come are the last elephant, the last tree, the last flower, the last glacier, the last snowflake, the last ocean, the last life.
"The Life and Death of Planet Earth" is like its predecessor, "Rare Earth," in that the authors collected and distilled some of the latest scientific ideas about the Earth's place in the universe, Brownlee said. He hopes the new book, like "Rare Earth," will spark widespread discussion, and give people a fundamental and realistic view of the past and future of their planet.
"It's a healthy thing to think of the place of Earth among the other planets, and its place in the sun. The sun gave life and ultimately it will bring death."
//////////////////Prologue
Fire? or Ice?
Come with us to the future of Earth, a world that echoes our prehistoric past.
Imagine our planet some tens of thousands of years into the future, a stretch of history far longer than the time it has taken our species to develop from hunter-gatherers to industrial civilization. From the vantage point of a derelict and forgotten satellite orbiting far out in space, the reflection of our marbled home is as disquieting as it is dazzling: a reflective, expanding white. The ice of the Poles is creeping steadily equatorward as glaciers advance, and the snows of winter are persisting far longer into the increasingly brief summers. The Alps, the Himalayas, and the northern Rockies are capped year-round with growing tongues of ice. Even at Mount Kilimanjaro and the Mountains of the Moon in central Africa, the glaciers are growing. The sea level that briefly rose at the height of civilization is now dropping, exposing new coastal plains, linking islands, and creating land bridges. Harbors have become meadows. The English Channel and the Bering Strait have become corridors. All the maps have changed.
At night the planet no longer glistens with a galaxy of city lights that once stretched from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean. Instead, the Arctic has been abandoned and the Southern Ocean is largely frozen over. The lights that glitter are in a narrower band hugging the equator and midlatitudes. Many are now campfires.
It is as if time has not gone forward, but backward. Eerily, the planet is beginning to resemble again the Ice Age world that our primitive ancestors endured.
The age of fossil fuels is long over, the planet's reservoir of oil and gas and coal expended in a gluttonous feast of energy consumption that briefly dumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The resulting global warming caused agricultural havoc and erratic climate swings that lasted for several disastrous centuries, but that's but a blink in planetary time. Slowly, the natural processes that seek to balance our planet reabsorbed the carbon out of the atmosphere. The cruelly hot weather dissipated, and for a while our species rejoiced at a return to "normality." But now the climate has dipped toward a more ominous norm. Earth is returning to the conditions that have dominated it for the last 3 million years: a regime of ice. The human civilization that arose in a brief interglacial period is now struggling for survival in a colder and much drier world. The diverse and extensive rain forests of the tropics are being replaced by savanna. The midlatitude grasslands that once helped feed the world, such as the American Great Plains, are becoming dust bowls. Katabatic winds that can reach 200 kilometers per hour howl off the advancing ice sheet and make permanent habitation near its fringe almost impossible. The glaciers are a blue-white wall, gritty on top and at their base, which are grinding forests, towns, and highways into oblivion. Eventually the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the towers of London will be bulldozed by snouts of ice half a kilometer high. Earth has become a planet where humans struggle to feed themselves. Changing climate has made a mockery out of seasons, and the farm crops that predictable seasons allow. Our descendants are starving.
Shiver, and go on.
Come with us to an even grimmer future. The reign of ice will come again, but will not last forever. Fire will succeed it, in the form of an increasingly hot sun.
This time we travel not just thousands of years forward, but hundreds of millions of years: a time more distant from the present era than the ancient seas and primordial swamps that preceded the dinosaurs. The succession of Ice Ages that held the Earth in thrall for millions of years is long forgotten. From space, our planet no longer looks white, or green, or even blue. Its continents are a desolate reddish-brown and its atmosphere thick with windblown dust. Descend in your imagination to an alien world.
Picture that we are standing on a seashore, at the edge of a vast, white-capped ocean. The water, at least, is familiar. As it has been since nearly the dawn of time on Earth, the sea is filled with life. Fleet schools of fish arrow through the sunlit surface waters. Below, on the rippled sand of the sea bottom, persist crabs and anemones, flounders and starfish, corals and barnacles. What is different is that the ocean - once a cradle for the life that crawled onto land - has become a sanctuary. Animals, hammered by a relentless sun, are retreating into the water.
The ocean shore that was once life's beachhead has become its Dunkirk, and the species that cannot readapt to the water are doomed to extinction. The sandy strand we are standing on has become an oven where a hard cadre of animals struggles to exist between the two worlds of warm water and far warmer air. During high tide a few species of hardy crustaceans and mollusks scurry and hunt, feeding and breeding. But during low tide all visible life comes to a stop, the animals hunkered down under parasol-like shells or wedged within the damp crevices of overhanging rocks, trying to survive the murderous rays of the sun.
Look up. The sky is grayish-yellow, huge winds carrying storms of sand at galelike velocities. The continents have become deserts of scoured rock and marching dunes. Although imperceptible to the eye, the Sun is slightly brighter and the Moon - slowly spiraling away - appears slightly smaller and dimmer. The hottest temperature on record in our own times is the 136 degrees Fahrenheit measured at Le Aziza, Libya, on September 13, 1922. In this future world it reaches that temperature every day, and not just in the Sahara but on midlatitude shores that were once cold and forested.
The humidity is 90 percent, the air sticky, oxygen thin. We gasp for breath as if on a high mountain.
What life is left? There is no driftwood on this beach, because there are no longer any trees on Earth. Or bushes. Or even grass. The tallest green things left are mosses, found among the more common lichens and fungi that cling to a precarious existence. Even soil is a thing of the past, for when the dying roots of the planet's flora unclenched their grasp on the topsoil, it flew with the wind, leaving behind rock, dust bowl, and dune. The land has become a vast expanse of sand and rock. The rivers are chocolate Colorados carrying eroded land to sea.
Some animals persist in this new hell. If we get down on our knees we can see that centipedes and spiders still prowl for insect prey. Ants march in search of wrack worth scavenging. Amphibious lizards watch for food. All of these species conduct their business with alacrity, however, scurrying frantically to finish before the punishing sun reaches its awful noon. Then they too must hide.
There are no more birds. Nor mammals, nor amphibians. There is no song and no shade. To try to escape the heat, we too wade into the water, but the surf is uncomfortably hot. We'd have to develop gills and dive deeper to find temperatures that are more comfortable. Yet even the sea will turn out to be only temporary sanctuary for the animals that persist there. The vast oceans themselves are evaporating, their water molecules slowly lost to space. Even they, like all things, will eventually come to an end. The long history of the sea will have left only glistening plains of salt.
/////////////////////When Eden Comes to Titan
Donald Brownlee, co-author of "Rare Earth," "The Life and Death of Planet Earth", and Professor of Astronomy of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Peter Ward, co-author of "Rare Earth," "The Life and Death of Planet Earth", and Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington in SeattlePaleontologist Peter D. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, recently published their insights into the future of the planet. The excerpted sections from their new book "The Life and Death of Planet Earth", poetically portrays a very fragile future - one profoundly grounded by what we now know so far about the distant past. The predictable rhythm of this terrestrial lifecycle comes in stages: glaciers, supercontinents, loss of plants, then animals, and boiling oceans towards what might look like present day Venus. The final stage of life on Earth features the last gasp of a Sun fusing its very heavy elements and forming a much expanded Red Giant star. Excerpted from The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
For millenia travelers have left graffiti to note their passage. Lewis and Clark and Daniel Boone carved their names on trees. The pharaohs left the Pyramids. Paleolithic man left magnificent charcoal drawings in Pyrenees caves. Mountaineers leave notes at the top of the peaks they conquer. World War II GI's left "Kilroy was here" scrawls, and the Apollo astronauts left plaques and flags on the Moon. What can we leave behind on an Earth that is going to be vaporized, its atoms hurled into space? ...When the Lunar Prospector mission crash-landed on the Moon in 1999, it carried with it the ashes of planetary scientist Gene Shoemaker. He became the first-known organism to have permanently escaped the surly bonds of Earth. He is quite literally the man on the Moon.Each of us humans is one of some 6 billion humans currently alive, one of the numerous humans that have existed on Earth since the formation of our species during the Pleistocene epoch. In an analogous fashion, our planet Earth is one of an even greater population, one planet among the billions in the galaxy and untold billions and billions in the Universe....
In a universe brimming with stars, it is difficult to imagine that life exists nowhere else. "The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our Earth." Thus the Italian philosopher-scientist Giordano Bruno articulated a vision for astrobiology (De L'infinito Universo e Mondi, 1584). Credit:NASA/STScI/ESAMany astrobiologists have concluded that the formation of microbial life on a planet within a habitable zone might be releatively easy--that, given the conditions of a liquid water-covered surface, many or most planets might yield life of some sort. If so, then millions of to hundreds of millions of planets in the galaxy have potential for advanced life. However, getting from microbial life to advanced life requires time and a stability of conditions. Only under such circumstances of long-term planetary stability where large-scale temperature fluctuations do not take place can the jump to the more fragile forms of complex life take place... Perhaps complex life can occur on any planet where life evolves (or upon which it arrives) that also bears freestanding liquid water or some equivalent solvent. One of the Earth's most basic life-supporting attributes is its location, its seemingly ideal distance from the Sun. In any planetary system, there are regions--distances from the central star--where the Earth could survive with a surface environment similar to its present state. That is the habitable zone, the region in a planetary system where habitable Earth clones might exist...Our closest neighbors in space provide sobering examples of what happens to planets inside of, or outside of, the habitable zone. Interior to the habitable zone, a planet gets too hot. Venus is an example where this has happened. The surface of Venus is nearly hot enough to glow. If it ever had an ocean, it has evaporated and been totally lost to space.Outside of the habitable zone, temperatures are too low. Mars is outside the habitable zone, and is frozen to depths of many kilometers below its surface.Life is a very complex and delicate chemical balancing act, easily destroyed by too much heat or cold--and too many gamma rays, X rays, and other types of ionizing radiation....Important attributes of our planet are its size, its radioactive heat, and the presence of a large metal core. All appear necessary to produce animal life: the metal core produces a magnetic field that protects the surface of the planet from radiation from space, while the radioactive material maintains the engine of plate tectonics, also, in our view, necessary for maintaining animal life on the planet.
The gas giants in our solar system. From left: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter.Credit: NASA [Consider: ] It is the year 7 billion A.D. the Sun has gone into its red giant phase. The Earth has been consumed by the outer envelope of the 100-million-mile diameter sun. Mars is a dried and lifeless body with a surface temperature sufficient to melt its crustal rocks. Jupiter is a roiling heated mass rapidly losing gas and material to space. The ice cover of Jupiter's moon Europa has long since melted away, followed by the disappearance of its oceans to space. Farther away, Saturn has lost its icy rings. But one world of this vast solar system has benefited from the gigantic red orb that is the Sun. It is Saturn's largest moon, aptly named Titan.Long before, in the time of humanity, a science fiction named Arthur C. Clarke penned a series of tales about the moon of Jupiter named Europa. In these stories, alien beings somehow truned Jupiter into a small but blazing star, and in doing so warmed Europa--and brought about the creation of life. A wonderful, though physically impossible, fable. Now in these late days of the solar system, the huge red Sun was doing the same to Titan, changing it from frozen to thawed, and in doing so liberating the stuff of life. But Titan was always a very different world than Europa. Like Europa, Titan always had oceans, frozen, to be sure, but oceans nevertheless. But where Europan oceans were water, those of Titan were of a vastly different substance--ethane. Titan had always been covered with a rich but cold stew of organic materials And with the coming of heat, for the first time Eden came to Titan. Like a baby born to an impossibly old woman, life came to this far outpost, the last life ever to be evolved in the solar system.The red giant phase was short-lived--only several hundred million years, in fact. But it was enough. For a short time, for the last time, life blossomed in the solar system. After death, once more came the resurrection of life in masses of tiny bacteria like bodies on a moon once far from a habitable planet called Earth, a place that, in its late age, evolved a species with enough intelligence to predict the future, and be able to prophesize how the world would end....
///////////////////////This is a vivid description of the second half of the life of our planet. Combining their knowledge of evolution with their understanding of the life cycle of stars and solar systems, the authors predict that the process will essentially reverse itself until only the simplest forms remain on Earth
////////////////////If you like The Life and Death of Planet Earth, you might also enjoy the Science Shelf reviews of other books about life in the Universe, which includes additional links to additional related reviews.Killjoys! First Geologist Peter D. Ward and Astronomer Donald Brownlee demolish E. T.'s home in their bestselling Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, and now they they're going after our world, too. In the compelling The Life and Death of Planet Earth, they describe a planet in late middle age on a trajectory toward a lifeless end. As the subtitle announces, this book recounts How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World. The death of our world will be neither pretty nor swift. Our planet will suffer the decline of one life-sustaining system after another. Just as a person loses faculties through the ravages of living, so will Earth lose its ecosystems in a predictable step-by-step sequence. "[H]istory," write the two University of Washington professors, "will begin to run backward as Earth's environment eventually slips toward the simple ecology of hundreds of millions of years ago. This decline, we assert, ... has already started. Biologically, Earth has already peaked -- perhaps as long as 300 million years ago." The time scales of geology are far longer than those of human history, and scientific prediction becomes increasingly difficult the further ahead the prognosticator looks. Yet Ward and Brownlee's detailed vision of the future is well-conceived and plausible, and their description leaves room for other scenarios of Earth's inevitable decline and demise. Civilization has arisen in a brief interglacial period between ice ages. Global warming, though a genuine concern in the short run of the next few centuries, will be a brief interlude. When we exhaust our reserves of fossil fuel, the decline of atmospheric carbon dioxide will resume. Ocean ice and glaciers will creep toward the equator from the poles. Eventually, the Earth and Sun will conspire to melt the ice, setting the stage for planetary death by fire. A quarter of a billion years from now, thanks to continental drift, a supercontinent will form, larger than the ancient Gondwanaland whose appearance a quarter of a billion years ago produced stagnation of ocean currents and may have led to Earth's greatest mass extinction. Meanwhile, the aging Sun will gradually increase its output. In another billion years, if an "Accidental Armageddon" has not sterilized the planet first, solar heat will lead to first the loss of plants, then animals, then Earth's oceans. The planetary corpse would be host for (at best) heat-loving bacteria in subterranean niches of a Venus-like wasteland. Several billion years after that, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core and begin burning helium, becoming a red giant that will either consume Earth or turn it into a cinder. The existence of humanity will be documented only by a few scattered spacecraft -- unless we can somehow engineer "The Great Escape." Though not ruling out that possibility, the authors close with more practical advice: "[T]his moment on this Earth truly is a precious gift to be savored and appreciated.... Another obvious lesson is that we tinker with our atmosphere and oceans at great risk."
//////////////////////The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How Science Can Predict the Ultimate Fate of Our World, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee (Portrait, £8.99)
"Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice". These lines from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" appear at the start of Ward and Brownlee's book which argues that both fates await us. The authors are a palaeontologist ("a glorified and well-educated grave robber") and an astronomer ("a catcher of comets"). They point out that the Earth is already middle aged and past its best years. We are fortunate to live in an interglacial period but "the gentle green cradle we regard as normal" is in fact only temporary. After global warming ("a blink in planetary time") has done its worst, the Earth will catch a very nasty cold. For the next ice age is coming: glaciers half a kilometre high will grind their way down to New York and into central Europe. After this, the authors whisk us away hundreds of millions of years into the future, to a time when the sun has become a red giant. Then the only life on Earth will be those from which it all evolved: bacteria. This fascinating but bleak work of scientific eschatology is an important reminder of "how wondrous, fragile, and perilous our present world is". PD Smith
/////////////////////In a 101-patient Canadian study, Alzheimer's patients treated with antibiotics doxycycline and rifampin for three months had significantly less mental decline than those given dummy pills, said Dr. Mark Loeb, associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the study's lead author.
"The antibiotic regimen might allow a person suffering from Alzheimer's disease to remain home and avoid having to go to a nursing home or other institution, at least for a period of time," said Dr. Loeb.
/////////////////?STATINS CAN PREVENT ALZHEIMER
////////////////'The End of the World' Has Already Begun
LibrariesScience News
Keywordsdevolution Rare Earth end world Ward Brownlee
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DescriptionIn 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from a violent birth to the watery blue planet celebrated in pictures from space. Now in a news book, two University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving toward its final end.
In its 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from its hot, violent birth to the celebrated watery blue planet that stands out in pictures from space. But in a new book, two noted University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun.
By their reckoning, Earth's "day in the sun" has reached 4:30 a.m., corresponding to its 4.5 billion-year age. By 5 a.m., the 1 billion-year reign of animals and plants will come to an end. At 8 a.m. the oceans will vaporize. At noon -- after 12 billion years -- the ever-expanding sun, transformed into a red giant, will engulf the planet, melting away any evidence it ever existed and sending molecules and atoms that once were Earth floating off into space.
"The disappearance of our planet is still 7.5 billion years away, but people really should consider the fate of our world and have a realistic understanding of where we are going," said UW astrophysicist Donald Brownlee. "We live in a fabulous place at a fabulous time. It's a healthy thing for people to realize what a treasure this is in space and time, and fully appreciate and protect their environment as much as possible."
In "The Life and Death of Planet Earth," Brownlee and UW paleontologist Peter Ward use current scientific understanding of planets and stars, as well as the parameters of life, to provide a glimpse of the second half of life on Earth and what comes after.
The book, a sort of biography of our planet, is being published today by Times Books, a division of Henry Holt and Co. It is a sequel to Ward and Brownlee's best-selling and much-discussed book "Rare Earth," in which they put forth the hypothesis that simple life is relatively common in the universe but complex, Earth-like life is exceedingly rare.
"The Life and Death of Planet Earth" explains how the myriad life on Earth today was preceded by a long period of microbial dominance, and the authors contend that complex life eventually will disappear and be succeeded again by a period of only microbial life. They say that higher life will be removed much as it came into being, ecosystem by ecosystem. Aspects of the planet's past, such as numbingly cold ice ages, will be relived in the period of devolution.
"If we do begin to slide into the next glacial cycle, there probably are grand, planetary-scale engineering projects that might stop or lessen the effects," Ward said.
"The big unknowns are whether we can afford to do such projects and would we really know what to do. If the planet was cooling, we could, in principle, begin painting the surface black to collect more heat. Could we afford it? And what would be the many possible ramifications of a planet suddenly covered in black paint? Any planetary remediation project would always run the risk of making things worse."
Eventually, though, scorching heat will drive land creatures to the sea for respite. Those that can adapt will survive for a time, but eventually the oceans will warm too much for the complex life forms to continue.
"The last life may look much like the first life -- a single-celled bacterium, survivor and descendant of all that came before," the authors write. Finally, even the surviving microbes "will be seared out of existence."
The prospects of humans surviving by moving to some other habitable planet or moon aren't good, Brownlee and Ward contend, because even if such a place were found, getting there would be a huge obstacle. Various probes sent into space could survive Earth's demise, and just a few grams of material could arguably carry a DNA sample from every human, they say, but it's not likely the human species itself will survive. Long before the planet's final end, life will become quite challenging, and finally impossible, for humans.
As the sun gets hotter and grows in size, it will envelop Mercury and Venus. It is possible it will stop just short of Earth, the authors say, but the conditions still would make this a most-inhospitable planet. More likely, though, the sun will consume Earth as well, severing all the chemical bonds between molecules and sending its individual atoms out into space, perhaps eventually to form new planets. That would leave Mars as the nearest planet to the sun, and on Mars the fading sun's glow would be like that of Earth's moon.
That end is still some 7.5 billion years distant, but by then Earth will have faced a variety of "ends" along the way, the authors say. The last dinosaur perished long ago. Still to come are the last elephant, the last tree, the last flower, the last glacier, the last snowflake, the last ocean, the last life.
"The Life and Death of Planet Earth" is like its predecessor, "Rare Earth," in that the authors collected and distilled some of the latest scientific ideas about the Earth's place in the universe, Brownlee said. He hopes the new book, like "Rare Earth," will spark widespread discussion, and give people a fundamental and realistic view of the past and future of their planet.
"It's a healthy thing to think of the place of Earth among the other planets, and its place in the sun. The sun gave life and ultimately it will bring death."
//////////////////////ALZHEIMER-LIVING FADING DTH=LONG SLOW GOODBYE
BIGGEAST RISK FACTOR IS AGE
AGE.>80 YRS
/////////////////POFTO=PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT
Why do we do science? Beyond altruistic and self-aggrandizing motivations, many of our best scientists work long hours seeking the electric thrill that comes only from learning something that nobody knew before. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of previously unpublished or difficult-to-find short works by maverick physicist Richard Feynman, takes its title from his own answer. From TV interview transcripts to his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, we see his quick, sharp wit, his devotion to his work, and his unwillingness to bow to social pressure or convention. It's no wonder he was only grudgingly admired by the establishment during his lifetime--read his "Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry" to see him blowing off political considerations as impediments to finding the truth.
Feynman had a fantastic sense of humor, and his memoirs of his Manhattan Project days roil with fun despite his later misgivings about nuclear weapons. Though one or two pieces are a bit hard to follow for the nontechnical reader, for the most part the book is easygoing and engaging on a personal rather than a scientific level. Freeman Dyson's foreword and editor Jeffrey Robbins's introductions to each essay set the stage well and are respectful without being worshipful. Though Feynman has been gone now for many years, his work lives on in quantum physics, computer design, and nanotechnology; like any great scientist, he asked more questions than he answered, to give future generations the pleasure of finding things out. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers WeeklyA Nobel-winning physicist, inveterate prankster and gifted teacher, Feynman (1918-1988) charmed plenty of contemporary and future scientists with accounts of his misadventures in the bestselling Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and explained the fundamentals of physics in (among other books) Six Easy Pieces. Editor Jeffrey Robbins's assemblage of 13 essays, interviews and addresses (only one of them new to print) will satisfy admirers of those books and other fans of the brilliant and colorful scientist. Best known among the selections here is certainly Feynman's "Minority Report to the Challenger Inquiry," in which the physicist explained to an anxious nation why the Space Shuttle exploded. The title piece transcribes a wide-ranging, often-autobiographical interview Feynman gave in 1981; an earlier talk with Omni magazine has the author explaining his prize-winning work on quantum electrodynamics, then fixing the interviewer's tape recorder. Other pieces address the field of nanotechnology, "The Relation of Science and Religion" and Feynman's experience at Los Alamos, where he helped create the A-bomb (and, in his spare time, cracked safes). Much of the work here was originally meant for oral delivery, as speeches or lectures: Feynman's talky informality can seduce, but some of the pieces read more like unedited tape transcripts than like science writing. Most often, however, Feynman remains fun and informative. Here are yet more comments, anecdotes and overviews from a charismatic rulebreaker with his own, sometimes compelling, views about what science is and how it can be done. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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