Qaddafi Killed, Say Libyan Officials (Image: Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images)
It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you’re reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.
Proportion of Women in Senior Management - 2011
By Mark Brown, Wired UK
French engineer Georges Mougin has a big idea. He wants to go to Antarctica, tie a big rope around a six-million-ton iceberg, drag it back to Africa and melt it into fresh, drinkable water.
Some might call him crazy, but Mougin reckons the plan could work. Using 3D computer simulations and declassified satellite data, his “IceDream” team believes that towing a drifting mountain of fresh water to Africa is absolutely possible.
Various species of sea life found along the California coast (pictured).
Photographs by David Liittschwager, National Geographic
Even after centuries of effort, some 86 percent of Earth’s species have yet to be fully described, according to new study that predicts our planet is home to 8.7 million species.
That means scientists have cataloged less than 15 percent of species now alive—and current extinction rates mean many unknown organisms will wink out of existence before they can be recorded.
The study was driven by a simple question: “Are we within reach of finding all species, or are we way off?” said study co-author Boris Worm of Canada’s Dalhousie University.
“The answer is, we are way off.”
Two hundred and fifty years after Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus devised a formal system for classifying the diversity of nature, the catalog for some classes of living things—such as mammals and birds—is nearly complete, the study says. But the inventories for other classes are woefully sparse.
For instance, only 7 percent of the predicted number of fungi—which includes mushrooms and yeasts—has been described, and less than 10 percent of the life-forms in the world’s oceans has been identified.
What’s been discovered so far are “those things that are easy to find, that are conspicuous, that are relatively large,” Worm said.
“There is an age of discovery ahead of us when we could find out so much more of what lives with us on this planet.”
Counting Earth’s Millions
So far, some 1.2 million species are known to science. To calculate the percentage of unknown species, Worm and colleagues first had to answer one of the great questions of ecology: How many species live on the Earth?
Previous guesses ranged from three million all the way to a hundred million. (See “‘Encyclopedia of Life’ to Catalog All Species on Earth.”)
To gain a more precise answer, the authors examined the categories into which all species are grouped.
Scientists lump similar species together into a broader grouping called a genus, similar genera into a still broader category called a family, and so on, all the way up to a supercategory called a kingdom. (See photos of species classification inNational Geographic magazine.)
There are five kingdoms: animals, plants, fungi, chromists—including one-celled plants such as diatoms—and protozoa, or one-celled organisms.
Worm’s team estimated the total number of genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla—a designation above class—in each kingdom. That’s a relatively easy task, since the number of new examples in these categories has leveled off in recent decades.
By contrast, the number of newly discovered species continues to rise sharply.
Using complex statistics, Worm and colleagues used the number of genera, families, and so on to predict Earth’s number of unknown species, and their calculations gave them a number: 8.7 million.
An Issue of Statistics
Some experts called the research, published August 23 in the journal PLoS Biology, reasonable.
The new study “takes a hugely clever approach, and I think it’s going to turn out to be a pretty important study,” said Lucas Joppa, a conservation ecologist at Microsoft Research, the research branch of the software giant.
“If I asked you to count out 8.7 million pennies, that would take you a while, even if you had a whole lot of people doing it.”
But Dan Bebber, an ecologist at the environmental group Earthwatch Institute, said the study relies on improper statistical methods.
The study team used a method called linear regression to calculate the number of Earth’s species. But Bebber thinks this method is the wrong one for the data, and that the team should have used a technique known as ordinal regression.
As a result, the true number of species could be much higher or lower than 8.7 million, he said.
Nature’s Library Disappearing
Overall, formally categorizing a new organism is a lot more complicated than discovering one, study co-author Worm said. Scientists must compare their specimen to museum samples, analyze its DNA, and complete reams of paperwork.
“It’s a long process,” he said. Most scientists “will describe dozens of species in their lifetime, if they’re really lucky.”
Unfortunately, extinction rates have accelerated to ten to a hundred times their natural level, Worm added.
(See “Extinctions Overestimated by 160 Percent?”)
The information to be gained when new species are discovered “is nature’s library, and we’ve only begun to decipher the first ten books,” Worm said.
“We’re throwing out entire books without having a look at them.”
itsfullofstars: Caught in the act: Black hole rips apart a star
A black hole described as a “cosmic monster” lurking at the heart of a galaxy has been recorded as it tore apart a luckless star, astronomers report in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
On March 25, NASA’s Swift orbital telescope captured a surge of X-rays from deep space, disgorged by what was clearly an immensely powerful source.
Closer observation revealed a “supermassive” black hole with a mass a million times that of the Sun.
The X-ray flare was a “relativistic outflow,” or a jet of high-energy matter that flowed from the star as it was pulled apart by the black hole’s gravitational pull and hauled towards its maw.
The jet, called Swift J164449.3+573451, moved at 99.5 percent of the speed of light.
“Supermassive” black holes are commonly found at the centre of galaxies. The newly discovered black hole is about the size of its counterpart in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Even so, they are relative tiddlers, for some “supermassive” specimens have been measured at a mass of more than a billion Suns.
Hurricane Irene
High above the Earth from aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan snapped this image of Hurricane Irene as it passed over the Caribbean on Aug. 22, 2011.
The National Hurricane Center noted on Aug. 22 that Irene is expected to produce total rainfall accumulations of 5 to 10 inches across Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Southeastern Bahamas and The Turks and Caicos Islands. Isolated maximum amounts of rainfall may reach up to 20 inches.
(via NASA - Hurricane Irene)
cordisre: THIS WEEKEND:
Photograph by Siddhartha Saha
A celestial traffic jam may be on tap this week as two meteor showers combine forces to put on a brilliant sky show.
One of the best shooting star events of the year is the annual August Perseid meteor shower. However this year’s peak, on August 12, happens to coincide with a bright full moon—drastically cutting down the number of meteors visible to the naked eye.
Yet while the main event might be blocked out by the blinding moonlight, the opening act promises to be much better.
Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,
Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
As a young man, he was in a gang that regularly smashed up private property. We know that you were absent parents who left your child to be brought up by a school rather than taking responsibility for his behaviour yourselves. The fact that he became a delinquent with no sense of respect for the property of others can only reflect that fact that you are terrible, lazy human beings who failed even in teaching your children the difference between right and wrong. I can only assume that his contempt for the small business owners of Oxford is indicative of his wider values.
Even worse, your neglect led him to fall in with a bad crowd.
There’s Michael Gove, whose wet-lipped rage was palpable on Newsnight last night. This is the Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another of his houses in order to avail himself of £7,000 of the taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled (or £13,000, depending on which house you think was which).
Or Hazel Blears, who was interviewed in full bristling peahen mode for almost all of last night. She once forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. At the time she said it would take her reputation years to recover. Unfortunately not.
But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn’t show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies.
Unless you’re Gerald Kaufman, who broke parliamentary rules to get £8,000 worth of 40-inch, flat screen, Bang and Olufsen TV out of the taxpayer.
Or Ed Vaizey, who got £2,000 in antique furniture ‘delivered to the wrong address’. Which is fortunate, because had that been the address they were intended for, that would have been fraud.
Or Jeremy Hunt, who broke the rules to the tune of almost £20,000 on one property and £2,000 on another. But it’s all right, because he agreed to pay half of the money back. Not the full amount, it would be absurd to expect him to pay back the entire sum that he took and to which he was not entitled. No, we’ll settle for half. And, as in any other field, what might have been considered embezzlement of £22,000 is overlooked. We know, after all, that David Cameron likes to give people second chances.
Fortunately, we have the Met Police to look after us. We’ll ignore the fact that two of its senior officers have had to resign in the last six weeks amid suspicions of widespread corruption within the force.
We’ll ignore Andy Hayman, who went for champagne dinners with those he was meant to be investigating, and then joined the company on leaving the Met.
Of course, Mr and Mrs Cameron, your son is right. There are parts of society that are not just broken, they are sick. Riddled with disease from top to bottom.
Just let me be clear about this (It’s a good phrase, Mr and Mrs Cameron, and one I looted from every sentence your son utters, just as he looted it from Tony Blair), I am not justifying or minimising in any way what has been done by the looters over the last few nights. What I am doing, however, is expressing shock and dismay that your son and his friends feel themselves in any way to be guardians of morality in this country.
Can they really, as 650 people who have shown themselves to be venal pygmies, moral dwarves at every opportunity over the last 20 years, bleat at others about ‘criminality’. Those who decided that when they broke the rules (the rules they themselves set) they, on the whole wouldn’t face the consequences of their actions?
Are they really surprised that this country’s culture is swamped in greed, in the acquisition of material things, in a lust for consumer goods of the most base kind? Really?
Let’s have a think back: cash-for-questions; Bernie Ecclestone; cash-for-access;Mandelson’s mortgage; the Hinduja passports; Blunkett’s alleged insider trading(and, by the way, when someone has had to resign in disgrace twice can we stop having them on television as a commentator, please?); the meetings on the yachts of oligarchs; the drafting of the Digital Economy Act with Lucian Grange; Byers’, Hewitt’s & Hoon’s desperation to prostitute themselves and their positions; the fact that Andrew Lansley (in charge of NHS reforms) has a wife who gives lobbying advice to the very companies hoping to benefit from the NHS reforms. And that list didn’t even take me very long to think of.
Our politicians are for sale and they do not care who knows it.
Oh yes, and then there’s the expenses thing. Widescale abuse of the very systems they designed, almost all of them grasping what they could while they remained MPs, to build their nest egg for the future at the public’s expense. They even nowwhine on Twitter about having their expenses claims for getting back to Parliamentwhile much of the country is on fire subject to any examination. True public servants.
The last few days have revealed some truths, and some heartening truths. The fact that the #riotcleanup crews had organised themselves before David Cameron even made time for a public statement is heartening. The fact that local communities came together to keep their neighbourhoods safe when the police failed is heartening. The fact that there were peace vigils being organised (even as the police tried to dissuade people) is heartening.
There is hope for this country. But we must stop looking upwards for it. The politicians are the ones leading the charge into the gutter.
David Cameron was entirely right when he said: “It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to think that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and that their actions do not have consequences.”
He was more right than he knew.
And I blame the parents.
(Source: nathanieltapley.com)
