This & That !!!: Rape Of The Indian Society

This & That !!!: Rape Of The Indian Society: We have stopped partying late nights. We have stopped wearing"skimpy" clothes. We have stopped asking our dads to help us when we are ...

Chapters From My Life: Santa, Bring Us Some Humanity This Christmas..

Chapters From My Life: Santa, Bring Us Some Humanity This Christmas..: It is time for spread of happiness and merriment all around the world. Santa is coming loaded with gifts for good behavior from child...

Maya Scholar Debunks World-Ending Myth

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Sandy Changed US Coast

The USGS has released a series of aerial photographs showing before-and-after images of Hurricane Sandy's impacts on the Atlantic Coast. Among the latest photo pairs to be published are images showing the extent of coastal change in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The photos, part of a USGS assessment of coastal change from as far south as the Outer Banks of North Carolina to as far north as Massachusetts, show that the storm caused dramatic changes to portions of shoreline extending hundreds of miles. Pre- and post-storm images of the New Jersey and New York shoreline in particular tell a story of a coastal landscape that was considerably altered by the historic storm.

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Climate-Related Migration

Recent reports, as well as extreme weather events such as Superstorm Sandy, suggest that climatechange, and particularly sea-level rise, may be occurring faster than earlier anticipated. This has increased public and policy discussions about climate change’s likely impacts on the movement of populations, both internally and worldwide. Research suggests that when climate-related migration does occur, much of it is short distance and within national borders, as opposed to international, according to new analysis conducted by Lori Hunter, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, for the Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Signs Online service

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions Delaying the Ice Age

Mankind's emissions of fossil carbon and the resulting increase in temperature could prove to be our salvation from the next ice age.

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Climate and Migration

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EU initiative to map cyber repression

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Does Healthy Living Add Years to Your LIfe?

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Researchers Emphasize the Need to Monitor Rivers for Triclosan

As an antibacterial and antifungal agent, Triclosan is used in everything from toothpaste, to soaps, socks and trash bags. While the US Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Union all regulate triclosan, the chemical is not monitored and often gets absorbed into sewage sludge after wastewater treatment.Researchers from Germany and Slovakia are claiming that triclosan is harmful to the ecology of rivers and are calling for further monitoring of the chemical. After monitoring the Elbe river basin, concentrations of the chemical at various test sites were found to exceed the predicted no-effect concentration for algal communities. From the 500 river basin-specific pollutants investigated, triclosan ranked sixth as one of the most particularly harmful substances in Europe. According to an article published in the journal Environmental Science Pollution Research, scientists want to emphasize the importance for routine monitoring programs at the European scale.

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Stream of Stars Slowly Being Ingested by the Milky Way

Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, researchers have discovered a band, or stream, of stars believed to be the remnant of an ancient star cluster slowly being ingested by the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy.

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Climate Change May Alter Amphibian Evolution

Most of the more than 6,000 species of frogs in the world lay their eggs in water. But many tropical frogs lay their eggs out of water. This behavior protects the eggs from aquatic predators, such as fish and tadpoles, but also increases their risk of drying out. Justin Touchon, post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, discovered that climate change in Panama may be altering frogs' course of evolution.

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Singing Sand Dunes

What does Elvis Presley have in common with a sand dune? No, it's not that people sometimes spot both in the vicinity of Las Vegas. Instead, some sand dunes, like The King, can sing. And new research looking for clues to how streams of sand can sing may explain why some dunes croon in more than one pitch at the same time.

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Giant Impact Scenario May Explain the Unusual Moons of Saturn

Among the oddities of the outer solar system are the middle-sized moons of Saturn, a half-dozen icy bodies dwarfed by Saturn's massive moon Titan. According to a new model for the origin of the Saturn system, these middle-sized moons were spawned during giant impacts in which several major satellites merged to form Titan.

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Neil Armstrong ,First Man to Walk On the Moon Dies

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, has died, following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. He was 82.

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Sustainability Through The Back Door

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Our Changing Forests: An 88-Year Time Lapse

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Human and Chimps Genetic Differences

Ninety-six percent of a chimpanzee's genome is the same as a human's. It's the other 4 percent, and the vast differences, that pique the interest of Georgia Tech's Soojin Yi. For instance, why do humans have a high risk of cancer, even though chimps rarely develop the disease?

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DNA Sequenced for Parrot's Ability to Parrot

Scientists say they have assembled more completely the string of genetic letters that could control how well parrots learn to imitate their owners and other sounds.

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European Parliament considers curbing food ads aimed at the young

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Nanotechnology Breakthrough Could Dramatically Improve Medical Tests

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A-Musing: The Unfairness Of Being Fair

A-Musing: The Unfairness Of Being Fair: courtesy : Google images I t’s a crime, not to be fair-skinned in our country. I mean God must have been vacationing in Goa for you...

NASA Sees Eastern Pacific's Second Tropical Storm During Formation

On May 21, NASA satellites were monitoring Tropical Depression 02E in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and 24 hours later it strengthened into the second tropical storm of the season. Tropical Storm Bud was captured by NOAA's GOES-13 satellite on May 22, and appears to be well-formed.

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Thunderstorms and the Upper Atmosphere

 Thunderstorms result from the rapid upward movement of warm, moist air. They can occur inside warm, moist air masses and at fronts. As the warm, moist air moves upward, it cools, condenses, and forms cumulonimbus clouds that can reach heights of over 20 kilometers. 

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and other organizations are targeting thunderstorms in Alabama, Colorado, and Oklahoma this spring to discover what happens when clouds suck air up from Earth’s surface many miles into the atmosphere.....

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How Humans Became Masters of the Earth

 Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts thinks that fluctuations in the environment in which our ancestors lived were responsible. Our ancestors responded by becoming more versatile through a suite of changes that included an ability to modify our environment. Potts' theory is known as the variability selection hypothesis.

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Ghost Ship Sinks Off Alaska Coast

 Japanese fishing vessel drifted unmanned at sea since the 2011 dreaded Fukushima earthquake and tsunami sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska after the U.S. Coast Guard fired at the so-called ghost ship on Thursday ,April 5,2012. It was considered a navigational hazard, as it was located in busy shipping lanes near the Dixon Entrance in Southeast Alaska. It isn't sure why the vessel is being called a "ghost ship," perhaps the term was coined  due to the fact it has been drifted at sea unmanned and without power.

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Carbon Dioxide and the End of Last Ice Age

The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren't sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt.

New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick it off. A change in the Earth's orbit likely started of the melt, setting off a chain of events, according to the researchers.

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Dwarf Galaxies Provide New Insights On Dark Matter

There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this "dark matter" really is. Many scientists think it's likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it.

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Earthly Mounds Shaped Like Animals

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Some Corals Like It Hot

 A team of international scientists working in the central Pacific has discovered that coral which has survived heat stress in the past is more likely to survive it in the future.The study, published March 30 in the journal PLoS ONE, paves the way towards an important road map on the impacts of ocean warming, and will help scientists identify the habitats and locations where coral reefs are more likely to adapt to climate change.

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Slumdog shacks worth £100,000: Soaring property prices in the Mumbai slum made famous by film

Shacks in the Mumbai shanty town made famous in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire are selling for more than £100,000 each as developers cash in on India's growing economy.

Nearly 500 families lived in the Bandra slum in tiny corrugated iron shacks back when Danny Boyle's rags-to-riches movie was filmed.

But now the number has dwindled to just 250 after many residents were bought out by property developers who offered them sums in the region of 8,000,000 rupees - about £102,000 - to move off the land.

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New Water Budget for Earth

Investigating the history of water on Earth is critical to understanding the planet's climate. One central question is whether Earth has always had the same amount of water on and surrounding it, the same so-called "water budget." Has Earth gained or lost water from comets and meteorites? Has water been lost into space? New research into Earth's primordial oceans conducted by researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University revisits Earth's historical water budget.

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Milky Way's Black Hole Davouring Asteroids

 The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be vaporizing and devouring asteroids, which could explain the frequent flares observed, according to astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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Surface of Mars an Unlikely Place for Life After 600-Million-Year Drought, Say Scientists

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team's analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.

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Revisiting the 'Pillars of Creation'

 In 1995, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took an iconic image of the Eagle nebula, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation," highlighting its finger-like pillars where new stars are thought to be forming. Now, the Herschel Space Observatory has a new, expansive view of the region captured in longer-wavelength infrared light.

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Ancient Popcorn Discovered in Peru

People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by Dolores Piperno, curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and emeritus staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

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Pink Core of Omega Nebula:Image Captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT)

 A new image of the Omega Nebula, captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), is one of the sharpest of this object ever taken from the ground. It shows the dusty, rose-coloured central parts of this famous stellar nursery and reveals extraordinary detail in the cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars.

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Debris of Pacific Ocean, Possibly Heading to US

ScienceDaily (Dec. 29, 2011) — Debris from the tsunami that devastated Japan in March could reach the United States as early as this winter, according to predictions by NOAA scientists. However, they warn there is still a large amount of uncertainty over exactly what is still floating, where it's located, where it will go, and when it will arrive. Responders now have a challenging, if not impossible situation on their hands: How do you deal with debris that could now impact U.S. shores, but is difficult to find.

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