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Scientists use MAGNETS to help people retrieve ‘lost’ memories

Scientists use MAGNETS to help people retrieve ‘lost’ memories

Someone reads a phone number out to you, and you dial the number to ring it, but ten minutes later, would you still remember that number?

Understanding what kind of information the brain stores, and what it keeps handy for easy access is not fully understood, but a new study shines light on the concept.

The study says certain memories thought forgotten could be brought back to attention, using magnets.

The researchers were able to snap the information back into active attention with magnets.

This work could help treat people with schizophrenia or depression, by finding new ways to control people's thoughts.

'A lot of mental illness is associated with the inability to choose what to think about,' said lead author Brad Postle, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. '

'For example depression with rumination on negative thoughts; schizophrenia with hallucinations, which amount to attending to and thinking about 'noisy' signals in the brain that psychiatrically healthy people can ignore.

Full article from Dailymail

Breathtaking footage spotted there are virtually no cars on the roads

Breathtaking footage spotted there are virtually no cars on the roads

Footage captured from the International Space Station has revealed a rare glimpse at North Korea’s capital city, Pyongyang.

The video, taken by the Iris camera on May 30, provides a rare look at life behind the city walls, with sparse traffic and even pedestrians visible in the clips.

According to engineers from UrtheCast, people can be seen walking within the grounds of the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, the massive tomb that houses the bodies of deceased leaders.

‘Yes, there are places on the planet where even drones and helicopters can’t be flown to capture video of the Earth below,’ Theras Wood, content and communications at UrtheCast, shared in a blog post.

‘Our space-based video captures the globe between ±52º north and south — an area of the planet in which ~95% of the human population lives.

'We're revealing a perspective of Earth from space that was previously reserved for a small few,' said Scott Larso, UrtheCast co-founder.

Ranging in length from 34 to 47 seconds, and covering areas of up to 1.19 x 0.67 miles (1.92 x 1.08 km), the footage is, as of yet, unparalleled.

Wade Larson, UrtheCast co-founder, said: 'We are realising UrtheCast's mission to bring something really quite unique to the Earth Observation industry.

Full article from Dailymail

Saturn's rings shows Cassini's daring descent into the planet's icy halo

Saturn's rings shows Cassini's daring descent into the planet's icy halo

Late last night, Nasa's Cassini spacecraft started a series of 20 orbits high above and below Saturn's poles. Plunging just past the outer edge of the main rings, the orbits will mark the last phase of Cassini's mission.

While it passes through Saturn's famous rings, Cassini will collect samples of particles and gases and get the best view yet of the tiny, hard-to-spot moons found near the rings.

'We're about to see Saturn like never before,' Tweeted Nasa's JPL Education Office.

After this, Cassini will swoop down through the outer edge of rings every seven days.

Instruments on board the spacecraft will take direct samples of particles in the rings and molecules of gases found close by.

Full article from Dailymail

Death Valley's 'secret' fossil after being hidden for almost a century

Death Valley's 'secret' fossil after being hidden for almost a century

A remote canyon in Death Valley has been kept shielded from the public for the past 76 years, to preserve a huge cache of fossilised animal tracks. The collection of prints is one of the biggest, most diverse and well-preserved in the world. Now palaeontologists, who refer to the secret canyon as 'The Barnyard', have called for the US National Park Service to open up the area to the public.

The remote area in the Death Valley National Park, which straddles the border between California and Nevada, features fossils tracks left by ancient camels, horses, big cats, birds, tapirs and elephant-like mastodons. It has been kept off limits since 1940 and officials ask that its exact location is not divulged.

The oldest of the tracks are thought to date back as far as 5 million years.

Full article from Dailymail 

Explaination how 'mini sun' lead to unlimited energy

Explaination how 'mini sun' lead to unlimited energy

For centuries, humans have dreamed of harnessing the power of the sun to energize our lives here on Earth.

But we want to go beyond collecting solar energy, and one day generate our own from a mini-sun.

If we're able to solve an extremely complex set of scientific and engineering problems, fusion energy promises a green, safe, unlimited source of energy.

From just one kilogram of deuterium extracted from water per day could come enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes.

As fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, we know that realistically, the first commercial fusion power plant is still at least 25 years away.

Full article from Dailymail

'micro-satellites' to spy on hurricanes

'micro-satellites' to spy on hurricanes

A new constellation of eight "micro-satellites" — each about the size of a full-grown swan — that should improve hurricane forecasts is scheduled to launch into orbit in mid-December.

The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, is NASA's first small satellite constellation devoted to Earth science and also the first that's focused specifically on the tropics, according to Christine Bonniksen, NASA program executive for the mission.

Using GPS technology, the satellites will be able to peer through rain and clouds to determine the wind speed just above the surface of the ocean by measuring the "ocean roughness," said Chris Ruf, a University of Michigan professor and the principal investigator for the mission. Previously, this weather data had only been available from hurricane hunter airplanes sent out to analyze the storms.

The satellites will also be used to study other weather and oceanic patterns besides hurricanes. They will measure waves and currents in the tropics and create "a great scientific data set," Maue said.

The satellites were designed and built by scientists and engineers at the University of Michigan and the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. They are set to launch from Cape Canaveral aboard a Pegasus XL rocket on Dec. 12.

Full article from USAToday

Scientist predict that We might have 1,000 years left on Earth

Scientist predict that We might have 1,000 years left on Earth

Science celebrity Stephen Hawking says the only way humankind can escape mass extinction is to find another planet.

“We must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” he said. “I don’t think we will survive another 1000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”

He said it’s inevitable that a disaster, possibly of our making, will strike the planet.

"By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race,” he said during the BBC lecture.

Full article from USAToday

roundest object ever spotted in universe

roundest object ever spotted in universe

A distant star some 5,000 light-years from Earth has attained a newfound status as the roundest natural object ever discovered in the universe.While still not a perfect sphere, Kepler 11145123 is only about 4 miles bigger at the equator than at the poles, according to a new study. That is astonishingly small compared to the star’s average diameter of 2 million miles

Stars and planets are not perfect spheres. Instead, they tend to flatten out in the middle when they rotate due to centrifugal force. The sun is six miles bigger at the equator than at the poles, while the Earth is 13 miles bigger at the equator.

Astronomers used instruments aboard the Kepler space observatory to conduct the research. The technique used to measure the size of the star is relatively new and allowed astronomers to determine its size with unprecedented precision.

Full article From USA Today

hot years soon will be normal

hot years soon will be normal

Scorching hot years like 2015 and 2016 will soon be the new normal, a study says.

2015 — the Earth’s warmest year on record — could be just another average year in as soon as 10 years if carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate.
What's even more sobering is that no matter what action we take, the global annual average temperature of 2015 will be the norm by 2040, the study said.

However, while the planet as a whole is locked in to this level of warming, the study said it's still possible for certain regions to prevent record-breaking warmth from becoming the standard. But it will take "immediate and strong action on carbon emissions" for this to happen, the study said.

"Based on a specific starting point, we determined a new normal occurred when at least half of the years following a record year were cooler and half warmer. Only then can a new normal state be declared," Lewis said.

Full article from USA Today

Giant snowballs on Russia beach

Giant snowballs on Russia beach

"It's as if someone spilled them," local resident Ekaterina Chernykh told the Siberian Times. "They are all of different sizes, from tennis balls to volleyballs."

Others were as big as three feet in diameter.

They're made of slush and "frazil" ice, which occurs when loose, needle-shaped ice crystals collect in the water, according to the Weather Underground.

As waves roll the ice crystals over and over again in the water, their spherical forms take shape.

Full article from USA Today

Science And Brexit

Science And Brexit

The scientific community is one of the main beneficiaries of the UK's membership of the EU, and stands to lose out in a post-Brexit world.

Britain receives £850m in research funds from the EU each year. Full membership of one of the main EU funding programmes requires free movement of labour. British universities employ 30,000 scientists with EU citizenship.

Lord Willetts suggested that if researchers try their best to seize the new opportunities Brexit presents, two things might happen. First, they might be pleasantly surprised and get to be involved in some really good, well-funded science. Second, according to the wily Lord Willetts, they would receive a more sympathetic hearing from government for the concessions they are seeking over Brexit.

Such a boost in funding would be transformative, according to Naomi Weir of Case.

"It would boost confidence for inward investment, drive growth in the economy, see the creation of high-quality jobs and increase our capacity to tackle national and global challenges in health, energy and the environment," she said.

Full Article From BBC

Why Pluto Is Not A Planet

Why Pluto Is Not A Planet

Nasa’s New Horizons mission was launched at the start of 2006, Pluto was a planet, but it's not any more.

Pluto is only 1,430 miles (2,302km) in diameter and that makes it smaller than our Moon. Pluto is 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion km) from the Sun – that’s 40 times the distance the Earth is from it. Consequently, it was the last 'planet' discovered. It took until 1930, because it was so small and too far away to be seen without the aid of a powerful telescope.

Because Pluto does not have enough ‘gravitational influence’ to clear its neighbouring orbit it was decided it did not make the cut.

Instead it was rebranded as a ‘dwarf planet’.

Full Article From BBC

SUPER FOOD

SUPER FOOD

Google ‘diet’ and you’ll get nearly half-a-billion results in less time than it takes to swallow. There are diets that tell you to count calories and diets that tell you to focus on food groups. There are diets that tell you to avoid carbs and diets that tell you to carbo-load. There are diets that tell you to eat a handful of blueberries, or a handful of walnuts, or that you should load all your foods with lemon juice, cinnamon or turmeric. Eggs, potatoes and full-fat dairy are out, then they’re back in.

“The super foods fad is yet another sign of the never-ending search for a magic bullet to solve problems,” she says. “Such thinking, which ignores the multi-factorial nature of diet-related health problems, is probably the greatest myth.”

“Then it achieves a health halo and it sells, and you see this with heavily sweetened breakfast cereals,” Stanton says. “I get concerned when people find that something’s good then they stick it in their Coco Pops.” Stanton points out that she is yet to find an Australian deficient in the sort of nutrients that go into fortified cereals.

Despite Stanton's objection to painting those so-called 'superfoods' as a nutritional panacea, she supports efforts to find new, environmentally sustainable sources of food as part of a balanced diet. Marine ecologist Pia Winberg from Venus Shell Systems offered one option at the BBC Future World-Changing Ideas Summit, when she presented a convincing argument that seaweed could become a major component of food in the future.

Full Article From BBC

Will farming be fully automated in the future

Will farming be fully automated in the future

The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues to rise at its current pace.

But the effects of climate change could see crop yields falling by more than a quarter.

So autonomous tractors, ground-based sensors, flying drones and enclosed hydroponic farms could all help farmers produce more food, more sustainably at lower cost.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs is far more bullish, predicting a $240bn market over the next five years. Manufacturers including John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO are all fighting to corner the market in driverless tractors.

The Hands Free Hectare project will use flying drones and automated tractors in the coming year to grow and harvest a cereal crop.

The latest generation of this trundling four-wheeled robot can make a cut every five seconds. It has six cameras - some with infrared sensors - and two arms, and is controlled by a tablet computer inside.

The machine learns as it goes and can trim the grass around each vine. An onboard solar-powered battery gives 10-12 hours of charge, so with a change of battery, it can work day and night.

Back outside, drones are monitoring crop growth rates, spotting disease, and even spraying crops with pesticides and herbicides

From 1950 to 2010, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), agricultural labourers as a percentage of the workforce declined from 81% to 48.2% in developing countries, and from 35% to 4.2% in developed ones.

Full Article From BBC

What If We Live In Matrix Movie World

What If We Live In Matrix Movie World

Several physicists, cosmologists and technologists are now happy to entertain the idea that we are all living inside a gigantic computer simulation, experiencing a Matrix-style virtual world that we mistakenly think is real.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford in the UK has broken down this scenario into three possibilities. As he puts it, either:

1. Intelligent civilisations never get to the stage where they can make such simulations, perhaps because they wipe themselves out first; or
2. They get to that point, but then choose for some reason not to conduct such simulations; or
3. We are overwhelmingly likely to be in such a simulation.

One possible answer invokes the "multiverse". Maybe there is a plethora of universes, all created in Big Bang-type events and all with different laws of physics. By chance, some of them would be fine-tuned for life – and if we were not in such a hospitable universe, we would not ask the fine-tuning question because we would not exist.

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

In the early 1700s, the philosopher George Berkeley argued that the world is merely an illusion. Dismissing the idea, the ebullient English writer Samuel Johnson exclaimed "I refute it thus" – and kicked a stone.

Full Article From BBC

Sceientist Warn Us About Danger From Space

Sceientist Warn Us About  Danger From Space

Tokuhiro Nimura is a researcher at the Japan Spaceguard Association, which was formed to monitor near-Earth objects that might strike the planet. In March 2016, Nimura and his coworkers suggested that the extinctions, global cooling and iridium layer might have been caused by the Solar System passing through a molecular cloud: one of the great clouds of gas and dust in space from which stars form. As dust accumulated in the atmosphere, it would have formed a haze that reflected sunlight and cooled the planet.

The basic idea goes back to a 1975 suggestion by British astronomer William McCrea. He thought that if Earth passed through an interstellar "dust lane" it could cause an ice age. At the time, astronomers Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees pointed out that such dust might instead affect the way particles streaming from the Sun impinge on the Earth’s atmosphere and expose the planet to high doses of radiation, causing extinctions as well as climate changes.

The event 66 million years ago is just one of several known "mass extinctions", in which many species worldwide seem to have died out suddenly.

The biggest was at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago, when no less than 96% of all life on Earth seems to have died out. All life today is descended from the surviving 4%, so it is easy to see that evolutionary history would have been very different if this extinction had not happened. When species die off, those that survive get opportunities to expand and diversify that they would not otherwise have had.

Our galaxy is shaped a bit like a plate. As it rotates, the Sun rises and falls in the galactic plane, rather like a merry-go-round horse. These shifts in position could change the amount of cosmic rays that stream through the Solar System and hit Earth.

Cosmic-ray collisions could also change the chemistry of the atmosphere. They might produce electrically-charged particles that affect cloud formation and thus climate, or they could destroy the ozone layer that protects the Earth from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

Stars explode as supernovae all the time; when they do, they can temporarily outshine their entire host galaxies. Many are seen every year in other galaxies, but the most recent one known to have happened in our own galaxy became visible about 140 years ago. Another in our galaxy that appeared in 1572 was so bright, it was visible to the naked eye and was seen by the astronomer Tycho Brahe.

But he adds that, while it is far from clear that our galaxy really has a disk of dark matter, "we know so little about the distribution and make-up of dark matter within the galactic disk and halo that the premise is certainly viable within our present uncertainty."

At this point that might be a rather too-familiar refrain: "interesting idea but it's all speculation". Should we believe any of these notions?


Full Article From BBC

What’s the Longest Humans Can Live?

What’s the Longest Humans Can Live?


“It all tells a very compelling story that there’s some sort of limit,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has made a similar argument for over 25 years.

James W. Vaupel, the director of the Max-Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging, has long rejected the suggestion that humans are approaching a life span limit. He called the new study a travesty.

“It is disheartening how many times the same mistake can be made in science and published in respectable journals,” he said.

A child born in the United States in 1900 had an average life expectancy just short of 50 years. An American child born today can expect to live on average to age 79. Japan’s average life expectancy at birth has risen the most of any country so far, to 83 years.

But when Dr. Vijg and his students looked closely at the data on survival and mortality, they saw something different.

The scientists charted how many people of varying ages were alive in a given year. Then they compared the figures from year to year, in order to calculate how fast the population grew at each age.

The fastest-growing portion of society has been old people, Dr. Vijg found. In France in the 1920s, for example, the fastest-growing group of women was the 85-year-olds.

As average life expectancy lengthened, this peak shifted as well. By the 1990s, the fastest-growing group of Frenchwomen was the 102-year-olds. If that trend had continued, the fastest-growing group today might well be the 110-year-olds.

Full article from NYTimes

 

Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain

Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain

The Arctic Ocean may seem remote and forbidding, but to birds, whales and other animals, it’s a top-notch dining destination.

“It’s a great place to get food in the summertime, so animals are flying or swimming thousands of miles to get there,” said Kevin R. Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University.

But the menu is changing. Confirming earlier research, scientists reported Wednesday that global warming is altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale.

Since the mid-2000s, researchers like Dr. Arrigo have been trying to assess the effects of retreating ice on the Arctic ecosystem.

The sun returns to the Arctic each spring and melts some of the ice that formed in winter. Algae in the open water quickly spring to life and start growing.

These algae are the base of the food chain in the Arctic Ocean, grazed by krill and other invertebrates that in turn support bigger fish, mammals and birds.

Dr. Arrigo and his colleagues visited the Arctic in research ships to examine algae in the water and to determine how it affected the water’s color. They then reviewed satellite images of the Arctic Ocean, relying on the color of the water to estimate how much algae was growing — what scientists call the ocean’s productivity.

The sea’s productivity was rapidly increasing, Dr. Arrigo found. Last year he and his colleagues published their latest update, estimating that the productivity of the Arctic rose 30 percent between 1998 and 2012

Full Articles From NYTimes.

 

Real Whale in the Hudson River

Real Whale in the Hudson River

For two years in a row, Dr. Dubroff said on Tuesday, she has spotted a whale swimming outside her living room window. Last year, she didn’t quite believe the sighting was real. But she saw a whale again on Saturday — and in the same spot again on Sunday — and news reports confirmed her hunch: The Hudson River has a resident humpback.

“It was general excitement and shock,” Dr. Dubroff, 39, said, “and how thrilling that a whale can be in the Hudson, based on what we see float by sometimes.”

Chuck Bowman, the president of the Riverhead Foundation, was among those who had helped to monitor the stranded whale while awaiting guidance from NOAA.

“The good thing was 30 years ago you’d see maybe one whale off of Long Island a season,” Mr. Bowman said. “Now you see them all the time due to conservation efforts.”

But, he added, “You get a bigger population and you get a greater chance of things like this happening.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Once again, science has confirmed the suspicions of dog owners that their beloved pets know more than they are letting on. In this case, it has to do with memory, a favorite subject of researchers who study the mental abilities of other animals.

No one doubts that dogs can be trained to remember commands and names of objects. They also remember people and places. But Claudia Fugazza and her colleagues at the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest set out to see whether dogs share a more complex kind of memory.

Jonathon D. Crystal of Indiana University, who studies episodic-like memory in rats and wrote a commentary on the work that will appear in the print edition of Current Biology, said he thought the conclusions were strong, although it was very difficult to ensure that a memory was truly incidental in a training situation. He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.

What does this mean for the dog owner? Dogs probably remember what their owners do even when training isn’t going on. And, she said, “It tells us that the dog’s memory is more similar to ours than we expected.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate

Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate

Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many feet above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?

Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground.

Full article from NYTimes

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A.T.M. MACHINE Is Full of Microbes

Whenever you withdraw money from an automated teller machine, the A.T.M. deposits microbes onto you.

That shouldn’t be surprising because germs and bacteria are everywhere: on doorknobs, subway seats, staircases, your cat, your dog, your face. You can’t avoid them, especially when you’re punching in your pin.

Researchers in New York City swabbed the keypads of 66 A.T.M.s at banks, bodegas and other places across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. They found that A.T.M.s are mostly covered in microbes from human skin, similar to the ones found in bathrooms, on pillowcases and on televisions.

“New Yorkers love their food, it’s not that surprising,” said Jane Carlton, an urban microbiology ecologist from New York University and an author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal mSphere. She added that the microbes they found were pretty consistent across boroughs and stressed that the majority of the microbes they found were harmless. Gross, perhaps, but mostly harmless.

Full article from NYTimes

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Mystery Behind the Deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’

Mystery Behind the Deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’

It was January. The place was Boston. And when 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst from a gigantic holding tank in the city’s North End, 21 people were killed and about 150 more were left injured. The wave of syrup — some reports said it was up to 40 feet tall — rushed through the waterfront, destroying buildings, overturning vehicles and pushing a firehouse off its foundation.

For nearly 100 years, no one really knew why the spill was so deadly.

“The historical record says that the initial wave of molasses moved at 35 miles per hour,” Ms. Sharp said, “which sounds outrageously fast.”

“At the time people thought there must have been an explosion in the tank, initially, to cause the molasses to move that fast,” she added. But after the team ran the experiments, she said, it discovered that the molasses could, indeed, move at that speed.

“It’s an interesting result,” Ms. Sharp said, “and it’s something that wasn’t possible back then. Nobody had worked out those actual equations until decades after the accident.”

If the tank had burst in warmer weather, it would have “flowed farther, but also thinner,” Mr. Rubinstein said.

In the winter, however, after the initial burst — which lasted between 30 seconds and a few minutes, Ms. Sharp said — the cooler temperature of the outside air raised the viscosity of the molasses, essentially trapping people who had not been able to escape the wave.

About half the people who were killed “died basically because they were stuck,” Mr. Rubinstein said.

Mr. Rubinstein and Ms. Sharp said they would like to eventually build an entire course around the disaster. Students could apply what they learn in other classes to understanding not just why the molasses behaved the way it did, but also what other forces shaped the events of that day in 1919.

Full article from NYTimes

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Space’s Trash Collector

Space’s Trash Collector

Only inside do visitors see signs that its founder, Mitsunobu Okada, aspires to be more than an ordinary garbageman. Schoolroom pictures of the planets decorate the door to the meeting room. Satellite mock-ups occupy a corner. Mr. Okada greets guests in a dark blue T-shirt emblazoned with his company’s slogan: Space Sweepers.

Mr. Okada is an entrepreneur with a vision of creating the first trash collection company dedicated to cleaning up some of humanity’s hardest-to-reach rubbish: the spent rocket stages, inert satellites and other debris that have been collecting above Earth since Sputnik ushered in the space age. He launched Astroscale three years ago in the belief that national space agencies were dragging their feet in facing the problem, which could be tackled more quickly by a small private company motivated by profit.

“Let’s face it, waste management isn’t sexy enough for a space agency to convince taxpayers to allocate money,” said Mr. Okada, 43, who put Astroscale’s headquarters in start-up-friendly Singapore but is building its spacecraft in his native Japan, where he found more engineers. “My breakthrough is figuring out how to make this into a business.”

“In the U.S., aerospace engineers are more interested in working on missions to Mars, not waste management,” Mr. Okada said. “Japan doesn’t have so many interesting space missions, so engineers were excited by my idea.”

He also said that Astroscale would start by contracting with companies that will operate big satellite networks to remove their own malfunctioning satellites. He said that if a company has a thousand satellites, several are bound to fail. Astroscale will remove these, allowing the company to fill the gap in its network by replacing the failed unit with a functioning satellite.

“Our first targets won’t be random debris, but our clients’ own satellites,” he said. “We can build up to removing debris as we perfect our technology.”

He said this approach would also get around a hurdle in international law to the removal of space debris — the required permission of the owner. Under a 1967 treaty, man-made objects in space belong to the countries that launched them, and cannot be touched without approval.

Mr. Okada said finding ways around these various barriers was more than a business proposition; it would also be the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

“I see a business opportunity in solving a problem that nobody knows how to solve,” Mr. Okada said. “But my enthusiasm is because I am going back to my teenage passion: space.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change

Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change

Alaska — In the dream, a storm came and Betsy Bekoalok watched the river rise on one side of the village and the ocean on the other, the water swallowing up the brightly colored houses, the fishing boats and the four-wheelers, the school and the clinic.

She dived into the floodwaters, frantically searching for her son. Bodies drifted past her in the half-darkness. When she finally found the boy, he, too, was lifeless.

“I picked him up and brought him back from the ocean’s bottom,” Ms. Bekoalok remembered.

Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village of 250 or so people is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate.

With its proximity to the Arctic, Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the state is heading for the warmest year on record. The government has identified at least 31 Alaskan towns and cities at imminent risk of destruction, with Shaktoolik ranking among the top four. Some villages, climate change experts predict, will be uninhabitable by 2050, their residents joining a flow of climate refugees around the globe, in Bolivia, China, Niger and other countries.

At least two villages farther up the western coast, Shishmaref and Kivalina, have voted to relocate when and if they can find a suitable site and the money to do so. A third, Newtok, in the soggy Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta farther south, has taken the first steps toward a move.

In Shaktoolik, as in other villages around the state, residents say winter is arriving later than before and rushing prematurely into spring, a shift scientists tie to climate change. With rising ocean temperatures, the offshore ice and slush that normally buffer the village from storm surges and powerful ocean waves are decreasing. Last winter, for the first time elders here can remember, there was no offshore ice at all.

The state of Alaska — which in the past provided some funds to Newtok, allowing the Y’upik community to begin its move across the river to safety — is in a fiscal crisis, its economic health tied to oil revenues. And a federal lawsuit filed by one village against oil and coal companies, seeking relocation money as compensation for their air pollution, went nowhere.

Full article from NYTimes

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there will be eartquake hit california and it was HUGE

there will be eartquake hit california and it was HUGE

For years, scientists believed the mighty San Andreas—the 800-mile-long fault running the length of California where the Pacific and North American plates meet—could only rupture in isolated sections.

But a recent study by federal, state and academic researchers showed that much of the fault could unzip all at once, unleashing a rare, singular catastrophe. Now, insurers have used that research to come up with a new analysis of the damage that could be caused by statewide break of the San Andreas.

Researchers say a statewide quake above 8.0 would likely hit the Golden State once at least every 2,500 years. “We are talking about very rare earthquakes here,” said Maiclaire Bolton, a seismologist and senior product manager for CoreLogic.


Full article from foxnews

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