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Progress in vaccination against vespid venom
Especially in late summer, apprehension about wasp stings increases among allergy sufferers. So-called hyposensibilization therapy can help, but it is linked to a heavy burden on patients and health insurers. Researchers have now presented a new method which facilitates a personalized procedure.
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Forest and watercourse interplay important for restorations
Humans utilize forests and watercourses in a way that depletes ecosystem habitats, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Many areas are restored to break the trend, but to succeed you need to consider not only the ecosystem in mind, but also surrounding ecosystems.
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A brain circuit to push past nutritional stress
Nutritional stress is a normal part of life; going hungry on a short-term basis generally does not impair important functions. The brain coordinates the response to nutritional stress but how it does this was, until now, not well understood. Researchers have now discovered a brain circuit that allows fruit flies to take a major developmental step in their lives despite nutritional stress.
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Nutrition matters: Stress from migratory beekeeping may be eased by access to food
In the first large-scale and comprehensive study on the impacts of transporting honey bees to pollinate various crops, research shows that travel can adversely affect bee health and lifespan. Some of these negative impacts may be reduced by moving bee colonies into patches with readily available food or by providing supplemental nutrition when there are few flowers for honey bees to visit.
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Weevil (Steremnius t

Weevil (Steremnius tuberosus) collected in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, British Columbia, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG22155-B12; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=SSPRB1272-15; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACD0255)

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The Temple of Jupite

The Temple of Jupiter and Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, Italy (© Design Pics Inc/REX/Shutterstock) 2016-08-24 [www.bing.com/search]
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@imogenb19

Imogen Bird
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design

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/art-experts-earthquake-damage-historic-italian-buildings-amatrice
Art experts fear serious earthquake damage to historic Italian buildings

Some of the greatest destruction to Italy's artistic heritage has been in Amatrice, voted one of its most beautiful towns

Dozens dead after quake in Italy live

Art experts fear numerous historic Italian buildings and their contents were damaged in Wednesday's earthquake, across a region where almost every hilltop town and village has beautiful churches and monuments.

The Dutch classicist David Rijser, an expert on the culture of Abruzzo, said there had been damage to the central region's many churches, funeral monuments and museums. “It has been a true drama, there is a lot that has been lost,” he told Dutch radio.

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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/24/radical-alternative-reyner-banham-man-changed-perception-los-angeles
A 'radical alternative': how one man changed the perception of Los Angeles

In the 1960s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham declared his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals hated. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it but what would he think of LA today?

“Now I know subjective opinions can vary,” the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, “but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer ...”

Three years later, Raphael's words appeared in print again as an epigraph of Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book ever written. Ever since publication, it has shown up on lists of great books about modern cities even those drawn up by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Los Angeles offers radical alternatives to almost every urban concept in unquestioned currency.

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Evel Knievel's Son + a Return to The Rocket Ride to Hell!
"You'd have to be drinking to even consider it."
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astronomy

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond/~3/VoU-87_TQ9s/news-alert-eso-unveils-clear-evidence-of-habitable-earth-like-planet-orbiting-proxima-centauri-only-.html
NEWS ALERT! ESO Unveils 'Clear Evidence' of Earth-Like Planet in Habitable Zone Orbiting Proxima Centauri --"Only 4.25 Light-Years Away"

Astronomers using European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other facilities have found clear evidence of a planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. The long-sought world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This rocky world is a little more massive than the Earth and is the closest exoplanet to us -- and it may also be the closest possible abode for life outside the Solar System.

Just over four light-years from the Solar System lies a red dwarf star that has been named Proxima Centauri as it is the closest star to Earth apart from the Sun. This cool star in the constellation of Centaurus is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye and lies near to the much brighter pair of stars known as Alpha Centauri AB.

During the first half of 2016 Proxima Centauri was regularly observed with the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile and simultaneously monitored by other telescopes around the world. This was the Pale Red Dot campaign, in which a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, was looking for the tiny back and forth wobble of the star that would be caused by the gravitational pull of a possible orbiting planet.

As this was a topic with very wide public interest, the progress of the campaign between mid-January and April 2016 was shared publicly as it happened on the Pale Red Dot website and via social media. The reports were accompanied by numerous outreach articles written by specialists around the world.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé explains the background to this unique search: "The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing. Since then we have worked hard to get further observations off the ground with help from ESO and others. The recent Pale Red Dot campaign has been about two years in the planning."

The Pale Red Dot data, when combined with earlier observations made at ESO observatories and elsewhere, revealed the clear signal of a truly exciting result. At times Proxima Centauri is approaching Earth at about 5 kilometres per hour -- normal human walking pace -- and at times receding at the same speed. This regular pattern of changing radial velocities repeats with a period of 11.2 days. Careful analysis of the resulting tiny Doppler shifts showed that they indicated the presence of a planet with a mass at least 1.3 times that of the Earth, orbiting about 7 million kilometres from Proxima Centauri -- only 5% of the Earth-Sun distance.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé comments on the excitement of the last few months: "I kept checking the consistency of the signal every single day during the 60 nights of the Pale Red Dot campaign. The first 10 were promising, the first 20 were consistent with expectations, and at 30 days the result was pretty much definitive, so we started drafting the paper!"

Red dwarfs like Proxima Centauri are active stars and can vary in ways that would mimic the presence of a planet. To exclude this possibility the team also monitored the changing brightness of the star very carefully during the campaign using the ASH2 telescope at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations Observatory in Chile and the Las Cumbres Observatory telescope network. Radial velocity data taken when the star was flaring were excluded from the final analysis.

Although Proxima b orbits much closer to its star than Mercury does to the Sun in the Solar System, the star itself is far fainter than the Sun. As a result Proxima b lies well within the habitable zone around the star and has an estimated surface temperature that would allow the presence of liquid water. Despite the temperate orbit of Proxima b, the conditions on the surface may be strongly affected by the ultraviolet and X-ray flares from the star -- far more intense than the Earth experiences from the Sun [4].

Two separate papers discuss the habitability of Proxima b and its climate. They find that the existence of liquid water on the planet today cannot be ruled out and, in such case, it may be present over the surface of the planet only in the sunniest regions, either in an area in the hemisphere of the planet facing the star (synchronous rotation) or in a tropical belt (3:2 resonance rotation). Proxima b's rotation, the strong radiation from its star and the formation history of the planet makes its climate quite different from that of the Earth, and it is unlikely that Proxima b has seasons.

This discovery will be the beginning of extensive further observations, both with current instruments and with the next generation of giant telescopes such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Proxima b will be a prime target for the hunt for evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe. Indeed, the Alpha Centauri system is also the target of humankind's first attempt to travel to another star system, the StarShot project.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé concludes: "Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us. Many people's stories and efforts have converged on this discovery. The result is also a tribute to all of them. The search for life on Proxima b comes next..."

The Daily Galaxy via ESO

"Close Encounter!" --The Rogue Star That Passed Through Our Solar System

"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)

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China Unveils Plans for a Manned Radar Station on the Moon --"Leading Space Scientists Have Joined the Project"

The Chinese government has unveiled plans to build a permanently manned radar station on the moon to monitor Earth. The project was launched earlier this year and received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The proposed facility, which may include quarters for astronauts and a powerful radar antenna array at least 50 meters high, could monitor wider areas of our planet than existing satellites, according to scientists involved in the study.

The base, which would be used for scientific research and defense monitoring, could also produce more powerful and clearer images of earth as the high-frequency microwaves emitted by the radar station could not only penetrate cloud, but also the earth's surface, allowing it to monitor areas on land, under the sea and underground.

Leading space scientists in China have joined the radar station project. The team held a two-day brainstorming session at the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing last month. Those taking part included Yan Jun, the director of the National Astronomical Observatories; Professor Lin Yangting, a planetary researcher whose team discovered evidence of coal-like carbon in an asteroid; and senior scientists from China's unmanned lunar exploration missions. The team leader is Professor Guo Huadong, a top radar technology expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Guo initially proposed the moon-based radar station in a research paper in the journal Science China Earth Sciences three years ago, suggesting that the moon had numerous advantages over satellites or a space station as an earth observation platform, including stability and the unlimited durability of any complex on the lunar surface.

The data collected by lunar radar would help with a wide range of scientific research issues such as monitoring extreme weather conditions, global earthquake activity, agricultural production and the collapse of the polar ice caps, he wrote.
To generate high intensity radio beams that could reach earth, the radar station would need an enormous amount of power so a solar or nuclear power plant would have to be built, Guo said in the paper.

The radar would generate at least 1.4 gigabytes of data each second, a volume far exceeding the bandwidth of current long-distance space communications technology, but this would not be a problem if the station was manned by astronauts who could process the information on site, he added.

Guo gave no precise estimate on costs for the project, but cautioned it would be “very expensive”. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Many researchers interviewed by the South China Morning Post, however, expressed scepticism about the scheme, arguing it was a waste of money, time and human resources. “It's a lunatic idea,” said one mainland space scientist informed of the project, but not directly involved. The cost of building such as a large scale facility on the moon would be “higher than filling the sky with a constellation of spy satellites”, which could “do the same job at only a fraction of the cost”, said the scientist, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

“Either the radar has to be extremely powerful, or the antenna extremely large, otherwise it won't be able to pick up the radio waves bouncing back from the Earth,” said Professor Zhou Yiguo, a radar technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It is an important subject of research, but whether its advantage over satellite constellations can adjust the high cost and risk will need careful evaluation.”

The lunar radar project comes as China shows signs of wanting to play a leading role in a renewed race to the moon, according to some space experts.

The design of a giant rocket the same size as the Saturn V in the US Apollo missions will be completed by 2020 to pave way for large scale activities in space including a “manned moon landing”, according to a scientific and technological innovation plan announced by the central government earlier this month.

China's scientific authorities appear optimistic about the prospects for the lunar radar base, despite the concerns voiced by some experts.

The Daily Galaxy via kcwtoday.co and South China Morning Post

Image credit: pics-about-space.com

Oldest Stars of the Universe --Harbor Clues to Its Evolution

Milky Way Found to Be Much Larger Than Thought --Extending Width 50% to 150,000 Light Years!

"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)

"Search Older Super-Earths for Detectable Life" --Their Oceans Can Last for Billions of Years

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Scientists Reprogram Brain With a Beam of Light --"Human Brain is Plastic, Not Hardwired"

Neurons that fire together wire together, say scientists at Columbia University, suggesting that the three-pound computer in our heads may be more malleable than we think. Their findings suggest that groups of activated neurons may form the basic building blocks of learning and memory.

“I always thought the brain was mostly hard-wired,” said the study's senior author, Dr. Rafael Yuste, who is co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science (KIBS). “But then I saw the results and said ‘Holy moly, this whole thing is plastic.' We're dealing with a plastic computer that's constantly learning and changing.”

The neuroscientists demonstrated that a set of neurons trained to fire in unison could be reactivated as much as a day later if just one neuron in the network was stimulated.

The researchers were able to control and observe the brain of a living mouse using the optogenetic tools that have revolutionized neuroscience in the last decade. They injected the mouse with a virus containing light-sensitive proteins engineered to reach specific brain cells. Once inside a cell, the proteins allowed researchers to remotely activate the neuron with light, as if switching on a TV.

In this photo of living mouse neurons, calcium imaging techniques were used to record the firing of individual neurons and their pulses of electricity. (Credit: Yuste Lab/Columbia University)

The mouse was allowed to run freely on a treadmill while its head was held still under a microscope. With one laser, the researchers beamed light through its skull to stimulate a small group of cells in the visual cortex. With a second laser, they recorded rising levels of calcium in each neuron as it fired, thus imaging the activity of individual cells.
Before optogenetics, scientists had to open the skull and implant electrodes into living tissue to stimulate neurons with electricity and measure their response. Even a mouse brain of 100 million neurons, nearly a thousandth the size of ours, was too dense to get a close look at groups of neurons.

In the above video, neurons repeatedly stimulated with light are trained to work together. They can be reactivated as a group if just one neuron is stimulated as much as a day later. The experiments are detailed in a new study in the journal Science.(Credit: Yuste Lab/Columbia University)

Optogenetics allowed researchers to get inside the brain non-invasively and control it far more precisely. In the last decade, researchers have restored sight and hearing to blind and deaf mice, and turned normal mice aggressive, all by manipulating specific brain regions.

The breakthrough that allowed researchers to reprogram a cluster of cells in the brain is the culmination of more than a decade of work. With tissue samples from the mouse visual cortex, Yuste and his colleagues showed in a 2003 study in Nature that neurons coordinated their firing in small networks called neural ensembles. A year later, they demonstrated that the ensembles fired off in sequential patterns through time.

As techniques for controlling and observing cells in living animals improved, they learned that these neural ensembles are active even without stimulation. They used this information to develop mathematical algorithms for finding neural ensembles in the visual cortex. They were then able to show, as they had in the tissue samples earlier, that neural ensembles in living animals also fire one after the other in sequential patterns.

The current study in Science shows that these networks can be artificially implanted and replayed, says Yuste, much as the scent of a tea-soaked madeleine takes novelist Marcel Proust back to his memories of childhood.

Pairing two-photon stimulation technology with two-photon calcium imaging allowed the researchers to document how individual cells responded to light stimulation. Though previous studies have targeted and recorded individual cells none have demonstrated that a bundle of neurons could be fired off together to imprint what they call a “neuronal microcircuit” in a live animal's brain.

“If you told me a year ago we could stimulate 20 neurons in a mouse brain of 100 million neurons and alter their behavior, I'd say no way,” said Yuste, who is also a member of the Data Science Institute. “It's like reconfiguring three grains of sand at the beach.”

The researchers think that the network of activated neurons they artificially created may have implanted an image completely unfamiliar to the mouse. They are now developing a behavioral study to try and prove this.

“We think that these methods to read and write activity into the living brain will have a major impact in neuroscience and medicine,” said the study's lead author, Luis Carrillo-Reid, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia.

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/kavli-news/researchers-reprogram-network-brain-cells-thin-beam-light#.V70PaZgrK00

Today's 'Galaxy' Insight --"Our Quantum Cosmos"

Star Streams of the Milky Way --"Trace of the Orbits of Ancient Globular Clusters"

NASA: "Milky Way Center is a Bizarre Place --It's a Mystery"

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The real thing

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

The European Service Module that will power NASA's Orion spacecraft to the Moon and beyond is taking shape in the assembly hall at Airbus Defence and Space, Bremen, Germany. The spacecraft module will provide propulsion, electricity, water, oxygen and nitrogen and thermal control.

Seen here is the primary structure that provides rigidity to the European Service Module much like the chassis of a car. It absorbs the vibrations and energy from launch while a secondary structure protects the module from micrometeoroids and space debris.

Assembly of the thousands of components needed to build the advanced spacecraft started on 19 May with the arrival of the primary structure that was shipped from Turin, Italy, by Thales Alenia Space. In 2018 this structure will be an element of the European Service Module that will be launched into space, as part of the Orion spacecraft, on its first mission to fly more than 64 000 km beyond the Moon and back.

In the background is a poster of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) that was also assembled in this hall in Bremen. Five ATVs flew to the International Space Station to deliver supplies and raise its orbit. Developing ATV provided the experience necessary to develop the European Service Module in Europe.

Credit: Airbus DS

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Today's StarTalk Radio --"Water in the Universe from Earth to the Ocean of Jupiter's Europa & Beyond" (LISTEN)

Find out just how abundant water is in the Cosmos, when cosmochemist Natalie Starkey hosts StarTalk All-Stars for the first time. She's joined by co-host Chuck Nice and planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Get the scoop on new evidence that suggests most of Earth's water didn't come from comets, but rather from the same rocky material that built up our planet. Explore whether a planet is “born wet” or not, and how the formation of a celestial body determines what kind of water it has.

Is the water ice on comets salty, fresh, or just “dirty” with minerals and “gloopy” from complex organic hydrocarbons? Would comets and asteroids be more useful providing water for Earth, or as fueling stations for space exploration, providing hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for breathing and water for drinking?

Natalie and Lindy look at the status of water here on Earth, from pollution, to scarcity, to the lack of regulations protecting our aquifers. And of course, no discussion about space water would be complete without pondering the possibility of life, whether in the ancient subsurface oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus (below), or on one of the 600 million Earth-like exoplanets scattered throughout the universe. Lindy also shares the story of when she first “made” water in a lab by burning hydrogen, and you'll hear why, for humans, there's no man-made alternative to water.

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culture

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Russian poster for STEPS THROUGH MIST (Zorz Skrigin, Yugoslavia,...

Russian poster for STEPS THROUGH MIST (Zorz Skrigin, Yugoslavia, 1967)

Artist: unknown

Poster source: Posteritati

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In the Attic of Early Islam

One of the most memorable moments in The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, comes in the section on lions, which were still indigenous to the Middle East in Nuwayri's time. He could scarcely have imagined that his book, written with such confidence from the heart of a mighty empire, would one day appear to us like that lion: a vanished, near-mythical creature at the desert's edge.

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Who Is Kim Jong-un?

North Korea's young ruler has surprised the skeptics. In five years he has turned a most unpromising situation into a certain kind of success. He has refuted those at home and abroad who doubted his vigilance and ruthlessness, fostered a mild economic recovery, and advanced his country's position as a nuclear power.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/24/proxima-b-will-be-our-prime-laboratory-in-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life
Proxima b will be our prime laboratory in the search for extraterrestrial life

The discovery of a rocky planet in the habitable zone around our sun's nearest star is just the beginning of decades of intense research and exploration

Has life gained a foothold on a planet that orbits our nearest star? The question, a variation on one of the greatest mysteries humans have pondered, is now front and centre in astronomers' minds. The short answer, of course, is nobody knows. But over the coming months, years and decades, scientists will throw every instrument and clever technique they have at Proxima b, an Earth-sized planet warmed by a small, cool star in Centaurus, to find out.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016/aug/24/proxima-centauri-planet-could-tell-us-about-alien-life-in-the-universe-exoplanet-proxima-b
Proxima Centauri planet could tell us about alien life in the universe

The newly discovered exoplanet Proxima b could hold the answer to the perennial question: is there life elsewhere in the universe?

Nature could hardly have been kinder to us. The discovery of a potentially habitable planet on our astronomical doorstep is nothing short of astronomers' wildest dreams coming true.

In a world where discoveries seem to be coming thick and fast (think water on Mars, gravitational waves, Higgs boson) it is vitally important that we now focus our efforts on learning all we can about this tantalising world because of its potential to tell us something about life elsewhere in the universe.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/24/earth-like-planet-found-orbiting-our-suns-nearest-star-raises-hopes-for-life-proxima-b
Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life

Thought to be at least 1.3 times mass of Earth, planet lies within ‘habitable' zone of Proxima Centauri, raising hopes for life outside our solar system

The search for life outside our solar system has been brought to our cosmic doorstep with the discovery of an apparently rocky planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun.

Thought to be at least 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, the planet lies within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star Proxima Centauri, meaning that liquid water could potentially exist on the newly discovered world.

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4 days to go! What are you going to do?????

I'm gonna keep going.

This project started out as a way for me to learn how to use new software and create new things, and it's gonna keep going in that same direction.

I don't think I'm done with this project.

So, here's what you can expect out of me and this blog, 3d stuff, Iv'e been postponing this because… well… laziness. Generative art, I'm gonna get a massive amount of tea herbs so the massive headache I'm gonna get, doesn't seem so bad, when I try and do some coding stuff.

I am preparing a small surprise for you guys, hopefully you'll like the idea.

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technology

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Peter Thiel just backed a startup that helps you sue companies algorithmically

If Peter Thiel was trying to convince the world he wasn't a lawsuit-happy nerd, this probably isn't the best way to do it. Reports today detail Thiel's latest investment, a $100,000 Thiel Foundation grant to a company, Legalist, that makes trial-by-algorithm a real thing. Legalist, founded by two Harvard undergrads, combs through a mountain of local legal filings to find cases that have a high probability to succeed. The algorithm applies 58 variables that are said to be good indicators of the strength of the case against the opposing party. For cases it deems winnable, the company will invest between…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Apple wants Unicode Consortium to add these 5 new emoji

iOS 10 will include over 100 new emoji. Apple things that's about five too few. Apple's Peter Edberg, a software engineer that's been with the company 28 years, reached out to the Unicode Technical Committee recently and shared five mockups that he — and Apple — think should be included. ? Apple requests five new emoji professions: Artist, Firefighter, Pilot, Astronaut, Judge https://t.co/rEEHdhOFiK pic.twitter.com/aFzpS0k1zj — Emojipedia ? (@Emojipedia) August 24, 2016 The new emoji — an artist, firefighter, pilot, judge and an astronaut — would be in addition to the 72 new emoji Unicode just approved, most of which have made…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Shh! A recently discovered Earth-like planet could be listening

Researchers have identified a number of planets outside our solar system that both resemble Earth and carry a better than zero chance at containing life. None of these is as close to Earth as newly-discovered Proxima b. Only 4.2 light-years away — about 25 trillion miles — Proxima b is our nearest neighbor outside this solar system. If you're keeping score at home, 25 trillion miles is about 300,000 times further than the Earth is from the sun. While the distance sounds daunting, it's a relative stone throw in the greater scheme of things and further details just how vast…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Woz warns Apple: Don't kill the headphone jack

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn't impressed with the company's plans to ditch the headphone jack. According to rumors, the next iPhone will be so much thinner, Apple may have to drop the headphone jack. Instead, customers would use the same lightning port used to charge the phone as a headphone jack — or go wireless and use Bluetooth. But that's not a one-size-fits-all solution. According to Wozniak: I would not use Bluetooth … I don't like wireless. I have cars where you can plug in the music, or go through Bluetooth, and Bluetooth just sounds so flat for the same…

This story continues at The Next Web
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How big banks learned to stop worrying and love the blockchain

From its inception, banks have all but dismissed Bitcoin while embracing the technology that powers it — blockchain. Bitcoin is volatile, prone to theft and confusing for the average customer. The blockchain, however, is merely a digital ledger or transactions, a tool that could decrease costs significantly for major banks. Several of these big banks have now teamed up to create their own solution. Led by UBS, the group — Deutsche Bank, Santander, BNY Mellon and ICAP — teamed up to create ‘Utility Settlement Coin,' (USC) which — if we're honest — sounds a lot like the in-game currency for a…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Google's AI trumps JPEG compression in reducing image file sizes

A group of researchers at Google appear to have taken a leaf out of HBO comedy Silicon Valley's book for its latest project. The team has developed a way to use neural networks that mimic the workings of the human brain to compress images more efficiently than traditional methods. The researchers trained an AI system (built using Google's TensorFlow, which the company open sourced last year) to learn how compression works using 6 million photos for reference. It broke these images into 32 x 32 pixel pieces and selected 100 pieces with the least effective compression to learn from; the idea…

This story continues at The Next Web
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design

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WPP weathers Brexit storm to post positive results

"Sir — WPP, chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell

WPP has released its interim results, revealing signs of cautious optimism for its businesses, which have generally stood up well since Britain voted to leave the EU.

This has partly been put down to the falling value of the pound. In its analysis of current trading, WPP says that there was strong trading in the UK in July, which may be a reflection of a “post-Brexit vote recovery, driven by a weaker pound sterling.”

Upturn in July

July has been a positive month across all WPP regions and sectors with like-for-like revenue and net sales up 4.6% and 1.9% respectively.

The main results give a view of the financial performance of the group for the six months preceding 30 June 2016.

As a group WPP has posted pre-tax profits of £690 million, which is up 15.8%. Meanwhile constant currency revenue a measure which eliminates the effect of exchange rate fluctuations is up 8.9% and like-for-like revenue is up 4.3%.

“Pre-Brexit vote uncertainties”

In the UK “pre-Brexit vote uncertainties” were cited as a reason for a slow-down in growth, which stood at 3.5% in the second quarter, but 4.7% in the second quarter of this year.

Internationally, branding and identity, which is grouped together with healthcare and specialist communications, showed like-for-like net sales growth of 3.7% in the second quarter, compared with 5.2% in the first quarter.

However, the branding and identity, direct, digital and interactive groups margins were “up strongly” and it was the healthcare and specialist communications businesses which had put pressure on the sector.

UK-based WPP design consultancies include Brand Union, Coley Porter Bell, Fitch, Landor and The Partners.

The post WPP weathers Brexit storm to post positive results appeared first on Design Week.

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DesignStudio gives Future Finance an “optimistic” new look

DesignStudio has unveiled a new visual identity for Future Finance, which looks to reconcile serious subjects such as student loans, with an attention grabbing new look.

It needed to appeal to wide range of student customers, including undergraduates, medical students, lawyers and MBA graduates.

Series of joined-up shapes

The redesign, which includes a different logo and website, centres on “the individual paths we all take to realise our potential”, according to DesignStudio.

The consultancy has used a series of joined-up, distinctive shapes, intended to be a connector between the customer and their future self.

Alongside the kit of Perspex shapes, an “optimistic”, bright colour palette has been used throughout to “side-step the cold, functional world of finance to speak directly to students and their potential,” says the consultancy.

“Brave and bold”

Speaking about the rebrand, DesignStudio's executive creative director, James Hurst, says: “The opportunity that Future Finance offers its customers is extraordinary.”

“Capturing that ambition and impact on real lives means being brave and being bold. This is an identity that signals a brand both connected to you and your connection to a more enriching future.”

The post DesignStudio gives Future Finance an “optimistic” new look appeared first on Design Week.

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How brands can collaborate better creatively

"Georgia — Georgia Fendley, executive creative director, Construct

It would be great to see our cultural institutions sharing quality content with our social institutions; let's take the National Gallery to the NHS. Prescribing culture as part of a cure is an interesting concept and might work just as well, if not better than any other therapy.

Genuine collaborations are sustainable, benefit everyone involved and share and grow knowledge within the participating organisations, what's not to love!

"Tom — Tom Sharp, creative director, The Beautiful Meme

71% of the population wear glasses. Specsavers own the negative of poor eyesight, but no brand owns the positive; the beauty, drama, life-affirming happiness of seeing properly. Boots, I'm squinting at you.

Now, forests are visually brilliant. The mad, Impressionist dappling of spring sunlight bouncing between leaves. The cosiness of a winter avenue, trees hooded with snow, bowing in pagan prayer. Stopping on a hill to spot three counties. The euphoria of perspective as you stand in a clearing to see the Milky Way bisect a coldly dark sky.

Boots Opticians and The Forestry Commission should talk to each other.

"Jenny — Jenny Theolin, creative partner, Studio Theolin

You know what I would love to see two brands swapping employees for a month. I spent years working on internal brand campaigns and looking at the business from the inside. Instead of an external facing brand collaboration, I would like to see an internal one.

Think the Gucci folk swapping with VOLVO Group's staff, or Nike's people swapping with HSBC's brand team. I am true believer that their people are part of their brand, so this could be a fantastic experience to see just how true they are to it.

The result could be a great PR story and the ideas may spawn new collaboration as well. Anyone wanna give it a go? I'll facilitate.

"Phil — Phil Carter, co-founder and creative director, Carter Wong Design

I'd have to opt for two very disparate entities in Southeastern trains and Amazon. One delivers packages smoothly and efficiently across the globe in such an effortless manner that it's difficult to remember a time before they existed.

The other tries desperately to deliver passengers from one destination to another across a comparatively small network but fails dismally, if the comments of their human cargo are anything to go by.

I can't think of another service industry that has its own Facebook page, I Hate Southeastern trains (note the capital H in Hate, incidentally), dedicated to its general incompetence.

I know there will be many mitigating factors in why they provide such a poor service such as investment in the business, and no doubt union power. However, in a fanciful world wouldn't those commuters view their carriages in a totally new light if they were emblazoned with the Amazon logo? I'm sure it would bring a smile to their faces too.

"Sarah — Sarah Tempest, co-founder and strategy director, Altogether Creative

Recognising an affinity with another brand or spotting a niche, technology or craft that would complement each other brings a whole new level of brand experience and recognition to the customer.

Nike and Liberty have done it so well and I'm eagerly awaiting the outcome of the IKEA and Tom Dixon collaboration.

But rather than a visual or tech collaboration, I'm interested in how charities and brands can collaborate for the better. Viewed favourably by many but controversially in some communities, it could be interesting to encourage an organisation such as Airbnb with the ethos of Belong Anywhere to collaborate with Shelter, the charity campaigning for a home for everyone.

Could there be an Airbnb community shelter in highly populated city communities, a contribution from Airbnb, working with Shelter to help people to really “Belong Anywhere”?

"Simon — Simon Manchipp, owner and co-founder, SomeOne

On 19 June 2009, WHSmith apologised after promoting a book on cellar rapist Josef Fritzl as one of the “Top 50 Books for Dad” as a Father's Day gift. Yes — you read that correctly.

Now… I'm ever the optimist, it really helps when your job is to launch and relaunch brands. And a team approach is a great way to innovate as well as help rejuvenate brands that have lost their way and become less relevant to their audiences.

So I'd love to see the billion-pound bounder that ties WHSmith up with a smart brand to help save its desperately awful stores.

Could Google save them? It organises the entire internet and makes it useful — perhaps it could reorganise the endless upset of 2kg bars of chocolate being attached to your morning newspaper purchase?

Any brand with its own twitter account (@WHS_Carpet — read it and weep) dedicated to just how deplorable the experience has become needs a strong new partnership.

Sadly, I suspect conventional brand tie-ups will not suffice here. Only the powers of Paul McKenna will do, add in David Blaine, Penn & Teller, hell, let's throw Copperfield in there with Derren Brown too — because only one hell of a magic trick is going to turn this one around…

"Daniela — Daniela Nunzi Mihranian, creative director, Studio Minerva

The Underground is the blood running through London connecting us to inspiring, creative design hubs. Born and raised in London, I was travelling by tube from a young age; let's give it an overhaul and bring some personality back.

The British interior and lifestyle brand House of Hackney would do wonders with the interior of the classic underground train. Reupholstered seats in London-designed and manufactured fabrics, celebrating what is great about our city and its famous Underground.

House of Hackney could work its magic of tradition for a new generation making our journey that bit more inspiring.

The post How brands can collaborate better creatively appeared first on Design Week.

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astronomy

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Can one cosmic enigma help solve another?
Astrophysicists have proposed a clever new way to shed light on the mystery of dark matter, believed to make up most of the universe. The irony is they want to try to pin down the nature of this unexplained phenomenon by using another, an obscure cosmic emanation known as 'fast radio bursts.'
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NASA's WISE, Fermi missions reveal a surprising blazar connection
Astronomers using observations from NASA's WISE and Fermi missions have confirmed a connection between the infrared and gamma-ray light emitted by blazars, a class of distant galaxies powered by monster black holes.
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Cosmic neighbors inhibit star formation, even in the early universe
Researchers have discovered four of the most distant clusters of galaxies ever found, as they appeared when the universe was only 4 billion years old. This sample is now providing the best measurement yet of when and how fast galaxy clusters stop forming stars in the early universe.
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science

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Voyager 2's closest Saturn swoop was 35 years ago today

Only Cassini's been there since, V'ger 2 is now 15 light-hours away

The Voyager mission is celebrating another remarkable milestone, the 35th anniversary of Voyager 2's closest encounter with Saturn.…

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gaia

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Robert 'Robin' Gottfried: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? Does Anyone Really Care?
Photo credit: Pixabay

The following is a guest post written by my friend and colleague, Jerry Cappel.

Have you heard of the term, "Body Burden"? It ...

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A Gorgeous Animated Map Showing How Climate Change Will Force Species To Migrate In North America
Using flow models from electronic circuit theory, researchers plotted movement routes for each species , connecting current habitats with their projected locations under climate change.
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gaia

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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fedward-flattau%2Fthe-poaching-mentality_b_11687258.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8
The Poaching Mentality
While poachers are considered destructive criminals of the first order, few think of society as harboring a similar, if less blatant mentality in the handling of natural resources.

Yet a poacher-like attitude is more pervasive in society than one would expect, with instant gratification resulting in behavior that "kills the goose that lays the golden egg".

It's easy to separate ourselves as law-biding citizens from the heinous acts of poachers. Public outage is widespread at the wanton desecration of such species as the elephant and rhino, propelling them towards extinction.

On the European continent, it is easy to denounce French poachers' illegal pursuit of an immediate payoff from the trapping and wholesale depletion of goldfinches. Criminal traffickers are selling these wild song birds, which the public unfortunately snaps up as household pets. The methodology for capturing these birds produces cruel collateral damage in which nine goldfinches perish for every one recovered. Not surprisingly, in the past 16 years, the once ubiquitous goldfinch population in France has been reduced by half and the carnage continues, despite stepped up law enforcement. At some point, the poachers could conceivably exhaust the population and then move on to the next bird "du jour".

Bad news, but is humanity in general engaged all too often in a variation of the poacher's same reckless behavior?

In that vein, I think back years ago to a drive in the Chinese countryside. An eerie silence prevailed over the land. No birds, no insects, or other signs of wildlife were in evidence. The only animals to be observed were some domesticated stock when one passed an occasional farm.

The mystery was dispelled when I entered a nearby town and visited its open market. For sale primarily as culinary fare or decoration was every life form, big or small that had once inhabited the surrounding countryside.

This is an extreme example, but the truth is that no people are immune at times from being moved by greed, desperation, or some other motivation to care only for the moment in exploiting a resource.

The July 2014 Science Magazine identified 322 birds, mammals, and reptiles eradicated due to human activity. Most were probably not depleted in the purposeful fashion of the poacher, but the outcome was the same.

In our own country, streams that were once drinkable no longer are as a result of human activity. Some marine species have been decimated from overfishing, and forests with rare plants have been stripped bare. Wolves were wiped out in the Rocky Mountain West at agricultural interests' request, upsetting the balance of nature.

Are poachers an advance team for a human race of two-legged lemmings inexorably caught in a fatal march to the sea? Or will mankind be able to pull back from the brink and commit itself to a sustainable use of the earth's remaining natural resources?

Stay tuned.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Mutually helpful species become competitors in benign environments
Nature abounds with examples of mutualistic relationships. Think of bees pollinating flowers whose nectar nourishes the bees. Each species benefits the other, and together their chances of survival are better than if they lived apart. Now scientists have found that such mutualistic relationships aren't always set in stone. Depending on environmental conditions, once-simpatico species can become competitors, and in extreme cases, one species can even drive the other to complete extinction.
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gaia

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Arctic gives clues on worst mass extinction of life
Extreme global warming 252 million years ago caused a severe mass extinction of life on Earth. It took life up to 9 million years to recover. New study finds clues in the Arctic as to why this recovery took so long.
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gaia

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Endangered Cuban solenodon evolved after the extinction of dinosaurs
The Caribbean islands form a natural laboratory for the study of evolution due to their unique biological and geological features. There has been heated discussion since the early 20th century on how species appeared on the islands. The Cuban solenodon is a small, rare, endangered animal, belonging to the mammalian order Eulipotyphla. It is a mole-like nocturnal animal with a long snout that feeds on insects and is found in only a few fragmented locations in Cuba. Its evolutionary origins have been widely contested and have remained relatively elusive because they have been so difficult to capture and examine.
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general

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Health Care Is A Business, Not A Right
While we're perfectly okay with griping about the cost of a gallon of milk, we don't like to think about healthcare in terms of dollars and cents. Which is why America will never transition over to a single-payer healthcare system.
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gaia

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Predicting plant-soil feedbacks from plant traits
In nature, plants cannot grow without soil biota like fungi and bacteria. Successful plants are able to harness positive, growth-promoting soil organisms, while avoiding the negative effects of others. Which plant traits can predict these interactions, or the success of a plant? Researchers and plant breeders would like to know.
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twitter

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Threshers should be on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) list for protection. https://t.co/W1scwSjCdy
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images

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South West Skyline, London

SNeequaye posted a photo:

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images

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City of London Skyline, London

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FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER*
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science

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Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Longest aircraft hits the deck during second test flight

Video The Airlander 10 hybrid part airplane and part airship has had a bumpy touchdown after piling into its landing site nose first.…

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images

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Jubilee Morning

meezoid posted a photo:

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science

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Watch: A Slow-Motion Sneeze Looks A Lot Like Breathing Fire

What happens when you let loose with a juicy one? A lab of MIT mathematicians and physicists are taking a close look, with the goal of improving public health.

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science

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The Weirdest Thing: One Week From Landing
Today was our last Sunday on sMars. In less than a week, the hatch will open and the six of us will rejoin the world. In some (obvious) ways, we never left. In many ways, we'll be aliens among our own kind.

"2016-08-22-1471852056-7599134-photo1.jpg"

When your whole world looks like this, your values change a bit.

It's easier than you might think to step out of the world - so easy, in fact, that people do it on accident. We spend a weekend in the woods; volunteer for a summer in rural Mexico; go for a long walk across Spain, moving from east to west, from the mountains skirting France to the edge of the Atlantic ocean. After the week, month, season or year away, we re-emerge into daily life in the developed world and suffer from a sort of shock. It happens all the time. It's happened to me dozens of times. In my experience, the magnitude and duration of the shock is generally proportional to the magnitude and duration of how far I stepped away and for how long; and regardless of duration, no sensory system is spared.

"2016-08-22-1471852174-7958942-photo2.jpg"

The littlest things get noticed up here.

Returning from my first trip to the mountains as a kid (age 11), I was struck by how loud Los Angeles was. It took several weeks not to feel like the city was actively trying to melt my brain. On coming back from a summer in Mexico (age 15), I remember looking around and thinking, "Where in the name of (your chosen deity) is everyone GOING in such a blinding hurry?" The pace of urban life struck me as bizarre and amusing - almost circus-like.

Speaking of blinding, having returned from West Africa (age 16), I couldn't believe how bright everything was. Nights in the Ivory Coast are thick and dark: like living inside somebody's lung. The brightest thing to pass you on the blackness is the moonlight reflecting off the whites of people's eyes - and, if they are smiling, their teeth. By contrast, the buildings in America are so aglow that, by contrast, the people walking the streets wear shadows.

Smells are muffled, too. When I returned from my last major trip abroad, the first thing I noticed is that, unlike the Himalayas, the US didn't have a single, distinct smell that accosts you as you're moving along. On the Annapurna, it was one sharp scent after another: hay and wet clay; a steaming dish of vegetables and lentils called dal bat; donkeys trailing bushy dust-cloud-tails behind them as they made their weary way back down the trail. Even the water in Nepal had a smell: it smelled like brightness, if that makes any sense - like the powerful reflection of high-altitude sunlight as it sloughed sleeping snow and ice from the gnarled faces of rugged gray slopes. By comparison, US-smells seemed muddled. Even in hospitals, the acrid scent of disease was always tinged with a motley of industrial cleaning products, personal perfumes, and several kinds of cuisine snuck onto the floors by patients' families.

Even with all that, nothing held a candle to the shock that awaited me and my crewmates after a "quick" two-week trip to an asteroid in April of 2015. While in our capsule, we saw only a field of fixed stars and our asteroid out the electronic portals. Starlight is ever so gentle at a distance. The up-close-and-personal variety proffered by our own dear Sun nearly fried me and my flight engineer when we stepped outside for the first time at the end of that short mission. It's shockingly easy to forget that we all live under the unblinking gaze of a giant nuclear fireball. That is, until you haven't seen it for a while.

So, now it's been a year. In that year, what haven't we seen?

"2016-08-22-1471852230-3366041-photo3.jpg"

You don't see much growing around here, but when you do, it's really exciting.

People come to mind - more than a handful at a time is unheard of in these parts, as are cars, traffic lights, streets, skyscrapers, shops of any kind, and direct contact with nonhuman life forms larger than a mouse. Given all that and my past experiences slipping into and out of various cultures, what do I expect the weirdest thing to be when the hatch opens in two weeks? TV? Telephones? Politics? Smalltalk? Currency - a monetary economy in general?

All of these things will no doubt be strange. Some of them already are when you think about it. In the main, the thing I expect to take the longest amount of time to adjust to won't be people in their nearly limitless perfusion of appearance and behavior. I am from Earth, after all. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations has been the rule in my life, not the exception. I don't believe it will be sights, smells, or sounds, either - not this time. No singular aspect of daily life or sensory experience can compare to the subtle yet undeniable force of the underlying current that drives a society's entire existence; that being: what we value.

"2016-08-22-1471852276-3291740-photo4.jpg"

When this is how you get your water, long showers are not a thing.

What we value on "Mars" stands in stark contrast to what is valued in much of the world today. Here, appearances mean very little. Fashion is nonexistent. Property is largely communal and, even when it is private, it's understood that any object in the vicinity may be pressed into service for the good of the mission. Time functions in much the same way. Any given day consists of hours, minutes, and seconds of activities that you would like to pursue such as eating, sleeping, exercising, running your experiments, writing emails home, working on your thrilling personal memoirs, etc. At best, all these take a backseat to keeping the lights on, the water flowing, storms from blowing in the roof, the communication channels glowing, and the food growing, which is why none of us have memoirs written - yet. They're buried in the trunk beneath the tools we're using to fix the water pump and the composting toilets.

In other words, Martians value the survival of both individuals and our mission above all else. As a result, waste - be it of food, water, power or time - is frowned upon. Effectiveness, efficiency, and willingness to pitch in are the gold standard. The ability to entertain is just as awesome as it is back on Earth, but it comes in second place to industriousness and mechanical aptitude. It's not that we don't, for example, love music. We do, very much. We enjoy movies as much as ever, if not more. Laughter, as it is wherever humans roam, is virtually priceless. It's just that on "Mars" - a land sans cocktail parties, banquets, and award ceremonies - carpenters, plumbers, and paramedics thoroughly outrank singers, actors, and comedians, and always will.

Those values drive our behavior. The first thing that I do when I wake up on "Mars" is check the weather and the power levels. Those set the tone for the day - not just my day but the crew's day; determine our ability to carry out the tasks that have been assigned to us by mission control. Then I grab some water, make sure mission control hasn't sent us an urgent message, and start exercising. In stark contrast, the first thing scheduled to happen when that hatch opens on 8/28 is a 45-minute press conference. That's good. Communicating the goals of our mission and how we accomplished them is very important. Helping people understand why we do what we do is an essential part of our job - and, I would argue, of all science. However, it is undeniably a different kind of important from the kind of important that has consumed our waking - and sometimes our sleeping - hours for the last 359 days.

Across a distance the width of a threshold, the scales upon which we measure importance will vary so profoundly that it's almost as if gravitational forces between the two worlds differ. In countless domains, that which carries weight on Mars barely dips the needle on your world. That which consumes vast amounts of time and energy on Earth may not even register on our radar. In the space between the two, there is no right nor wrong, only sensibilities. In the brief span of time it will take to cross from one world to the next, sensibilities will change drastically. Our values will not.

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Beauty itself, on any planet, but especially in a place made mostly of rock.

I can imagine no sight, no sound, no smell, taste, or touch to equal the magnitude and duration of shock likely to be induced by the disparity in values between daily life in space and daily life in the spacefaring nations of the world. In those first moments back on Earth, the sight of my family, the piercing sweetness of a real pineapple, and the sensation of wind on my face will be golden beyond price; will defy of the very concept of value in the world standing before me; and also, in a completely different way, in the world standing just behind me.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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WATCH: Squishy 'Octobot' Moves Autonomously

The robot designed by a team from Harvard University moves without the help of any rigid parts. Researchers say it is the first proof-of-concept design for an entirely soft, autonomous machine.

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Study Of Breast Cancer Treatment Reveals Paradox Of Precision Medicine

A genetic test of breast cancer tumors helped identify women whose survival odds would not be greatly improved by chemotherapy. But that test isn't as precise as women and doctors might like.

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The Mesmerizing 'Liquid Shard' Brings Pershing Square Back To Life

The moribund Pershing Square Park in downtown Los Angeles briefly came back to life over the past few weeks, thanks to artist Patrick Hearn's monumental and mesmerizing Liquid Shard, which is made of holographic mylar and monofilament and spans some 15,000 square feet. Riding invisible wind currents, the piece undulates along a span 15 feet high to the top of the park's tower, at 150 feet high.

According to Hearn, "the inspiration comes from observing nature and the feeling that we are only aware on a very surface level of what is really going on around us. Unexpected things are revealed in time-lapse or hyper-spectrum photography that fascinate me. Like fractals recurring progressively, we feel the currents of air on our skin but do not see the larger movements."

The video above also shows the incredible capabilities of video-enabled drones. A technology largely unavailable even a few years ago, video-enabled drones now allow artists and designers of all kinds to tell new stories about the places they have created. The value for landscape architects is clear.

As the temporary installation Liquid Shard comes down, Paris-based landscape architecture firm Agence Ter soon start their work redesigning the unloved park. According to The Architect's Newspaper, "the French landscape firm's approach is notable for the 'town square' approach taken to the site, where a large canopy located at the western edge of the park will house cafés and other amenities that open onto a grassy knoll at the center of the park."

Los Angeles city council officials hope the new park will open by 2019.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Canary Wharf and O2

vgallova posted a photo:

London

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The Shard at Sunset

Waterford_Man posted a photo:

From Greenwich Park

Thanks for the views, Please check out my other photos and albums.

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The Shard at Sunset

Waterford_Man posted a photo:

From Greenwich Park

Thanks for the views, Please check out my other photos and albums.

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Rainbows in bubbles

alice_chirdo posted a photo:

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Goodnight sunshine

alice_chirdo posted a photo:

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Albus by Gabriel Gomez

Albus by Gabriel Gomez

Simple portrait

Gabriel Gomez: Photos

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A levitation exercice by Paulo Correia

A levitation exercice by Paulo Correia

POMBAL BUS STATION

Paulo Correia: Photos

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The Long Flight Home Avro Lancaster NXJust Jane by David Stoddart

The Long Flight Home Avro Lancaster NXJust Jane by David Stoddart

"The Long Flight Home" - Avro Lancaster NX611 Just Jane. New Photoshop Composite. The Mountains are a stock image i bought and the Avro was photographed by me at Lincs Aviation on the SonyA7Rii, i paid 2.00 for a cockpit viewing, bargain! Photoshop time 6 hours.... More shots to come of the Lancaster, luckily i had the 10mm Voigtlander with me in the cockpit... Limited Edition prints available from the website now. www.davidstoddartphotography.co.uk #avaiationphotography #warbirds #lancaster #battleofbritain #photoshop #composite

David Stoddart: Photos

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Climate Change This Week: Heating Up, Melting Away, Upping Wind Power, and More!
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

"2016-08-24-1472059826-1194294-jeweledflowermantisbizarreCreobrotergemmatusasiaSourcepinterest.comccr302.jpg"

Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, like this Jeweled Flower Mantis found in Asian forests, is another reason to save these important ecosystems. Source Pinterest

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

OO Malaysia: Sarawak Establishes 2+ Million Acres Of Protected Areas and may add 1.1 million more... now will these truly be protected from illegal deforestation? Stay tuned, folks.

"2016-08-24-1472059889-5550597-dawnsunthruforestCreditDanatfreedigitalphotos.netccr3423.jpg"

Credit Dan at freedigitalphotos.net

OO Rising Temperatures Stunt Tree Growth new research finds iconic Douglas firs across the West are water- and heat-stressed.

"2016-08-24-1472059932-7983435-wildfireCAsobranes2016Sourcewww.wcvb.comccr3423.jpg"

Rising Temperatures Fuel Fires - the Sobranes, CA wildfire has destroyed nearly 70,000 acres of forest and destroyed over 40 homes. Source www.wcvb.com

OO 43 Large US West Wildfires as of August 24, 2016 shows the US Forest Service wildfire map.

OO New England Is Being Deforested since the 1980s due to expansion of affluent suburbs, says a new study; since then 5% of its forests has been lost.

Sounds small? "Even a small-scale rate of deforestation will have a large impact over time," says study co-author Pontus Olofsson of Boston University.

When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

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HOT NEWS

"2016-08-24-1472059964-3868185-heatwaveheatwavepeoplehotTDCccr309.jpg"

OO Extraordinary Heat Wave In Eastern U.S.,
With Extreme Humidity - recently, for the second long stretch this summer, with heat indices approaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

"2016-08-24-1472059990-2231083-camelsdesertdroughtheatwavemideastmoroccoTDCccr3423.jpg"

Camelot It Isn't as Africa and the Mideast heats up, literally and socially.

OO Epic Middle East Heat Wave Could Be
Global Warming's Hellish Curtain-Raiser - with record-shattering temperatures this summer scorching countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and beyond, climate experts warn that this could be a harbinger of worse to come.

OO It's Hotter Nights - More Than Hotter Days -
That Make Heat Waves Dangerous thanks to climate change. Hot nights deprive the body of a needed cool break from daytime heat, but under climate change, nights are heating up faster than days.

OO Heat Waves Bring Warnings About Synthetic Turf Risk - synthetic turf is much hotter to run on than natural grass: when air temperature reaches 90 F, turf temperatures have been measured at 165 F!

YEOW!! Time to hot foot it out of there - and returning the space to grass...

"2016-08-24-1472060020-8762199-2015worldtemperaturedifferencemapSourcewww.theguardian.comccr3423.jpg"

2015 Was Not Cool - practically anywhere on the planet; most areas were hotter than average. Source www.theguardian.com

OO Environmental Records Shattered
As Climate Change 'Plays Out Before Us - with the temperature of the air and oceans breaking records, sea levels reaching historic highs and carbon dioxide surpassing a key milestone, a major international report has found.

Related Headlines:

OO 2015 Set Frenzy Of Climate Records - and 2016 has broken or is poised to break several of 2015's records: check out their interactive.

OO Latest Climate Report:
Heat, More Heat And Signs Of Worse To Come - with 2015 record warm temperatures on every inhabited continent as ice melted and the seas rose at alarming rates. It hasn't stopped.

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FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE

@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!

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MELTDOWN

"2016-08-24-1472060095-6317421-arcticseaiceextent1880to2016julyCreditHollyTichneyatUKMetOffice1980to2016septNSIDCccr3423.png"

Credit NSIDC; Holly Tichney at UK Met Office

OO A Pieced History of The Arctic's Sea Ice Back To 1850 shows that Arctic sea ice cover has declined over recent decades, with the greatest decrease in the summer, with sea ice extent reducing roughly 12% per decade since the satellite record began in 1979.

OO The Alaskan Highway Is Literally Melting - with bumps and sometimes wide deep cracks scarring huge swathes of the road.

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SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

"2016-08-24-1472060262-4888345-africarefugeecampfamineoxfamSourceWilipediaccr3423.jpg"

Source Wikipedia

@@ How Climate Change Fuels Conflict - as temperatures soar and drought increases, many in Africa are losing their livelihoods. Looking for other ways to survive, some are turning to groups like Boko Haram.

OO Africa: Fleeing Disasters, Escaping Drought, Migrating - most agree that Africa is the most impacted region by widespread violence and climate catastrophes.

OO Britain Protests Immigration But Ignores A Root Cause: Climate Change with its politicians skeptical of action on global warming.

"2016-08-24-1472060295-5308505-droughtsignprayforrainsourcefacebookccr253.jpg"

OO US: Thirsty Westlands Faces Escalating Woes - think drought, and water wars.

OO So California: Stagnant Heat Brings Worst Smog In Years
And Surge In Hospital Visits

OO Climate Change Threatens Japan's Agriculture

"2016-08-24-1472060332-9409783-louisianafloodingCreditIsaacLandovatwww.wunderground.comccr3423.jpg"

TheWannabe Atlantis: Louisiana Floods Bigtime with thousands of homes destroyed, and several killed. Credit Isaac Landov at www.wunderground.com

OO 3 Killed In 'Historic' Louisiana Floods; Thousands Rescued

OO Philippines: Five Dead, Tens Of Thousands Flee Floods caused by days of unrelenting rain.

OO India Climate: Extreme Heat, Drought - And Now, Rain - this year's strong monsoon has created floods:

affecting 8+ million people;
1+ million people are living in temporary shelters;
some 300 people have died.

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A SWEET SPOT IN CREATING SUSTAINABLE POPULATIONS

"2016-05-11-1462993989-2532103-medicines360.orgbanner5Sourcemedicines360.orgccr328.png"

Triple Win: Using Profits to Provide Needed US Family Planning - Medicines360.org is key to creating a sustainable US population and bright futures for women - AND saving taxpayers many billions yearly in community costs by preventing unintended pregnancies. Source medicines360.org

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GOOD IDEAS

"2016-08-24-1472060368-9767226-googleheadquartersSourcewww.computerworld.comccr3423.jpg"

Source www.computerworld.com

OO In Corporate March To Clean Energy, Utilities Not Required - companies like google are buying renewable energy directly from the producers.

OO The New Green Grid: Utilities Deploy 'Virtual Power Plants' by linking together networks of energy-efficient buildings, solar installations, and batteries, US and Europe companies are increasingly helping utilities reduce energy demand at peak hours and supply targeted areas with renewably generated electricity.

OO An Expanded Power Grid Could Help California Fight Climate Change - by 2019, CA's largest utilities could be slashing their use of fossil fuels by swapping CA solar energy for Rocky Mountain wind power in a sprawling Western electricity grid.

"2016-08-24-1472060845-3774550-CaliforniasolarpanelsParkviewTerracePowaySourcewww.gogreensolar.comccr3423.jpg"

Source www.gogreensolar.com

OO California, New York Are Going Clean Energy -
But CA Is Ditching Nuclear

OO California: Tiny Town To Cut Emissions Via A Utility Collective to buy power on behalf of residents and businesses, acquiring more clean power as part of a potential climate plan committing to climate changing gas reductions.

OO Creative Incentives To Boost Groundwater Recharge In California - an innovative program offers landowners incentives to collect stormwater run-off to recharge groundwater.

"2016-08-24-1472060885-5392358-offshorewindfarmwboatsDenmarkSourcewww.siemens.comccr298.jpg"

A Future Block Island View? Source www.siemens.com

OO Rhode Island To Have First Us Offshore Wind Farm

OO US Tribes Work With Scientists Against Climate Change

"2016-08-24-1472060920-3025075-chinesedragongreenccr234.jpg"

OO China To Use Tougher Environmental Standards
To Tackle Capacity Glut - including those of safety and energy efficiency, to rein in overproduction in key industrial sectors, such as steel, cement, coal, aluminum and glassmaking.

OO Australia: A Mining Shows How To Turn To Clean Renewables - as in wind and solar power.

OO Europe Aims To Close Loophole On Wood Energy that promotes burning wood for electricity by an industry that's felling American trees, a reform that is urgently needed, says a new report.

"2016-08-24-1472060952-598987-topofpostmarkssoillevelin1852HolmeFenUKCreditMeganDarbyccr3423.jpg"

Soil Once Covered That Green Pole - back in 1852; farming has since eroded much of the rich soil. Credit Megan Darby

OO No-Dig For Victory:
Saving Britain's Soils From Climate Stress Takeaways:

Tilling soil exposes its carbon to air;
Exposed carbon converts into climate-changing CO2
And robs soils of needed carbon.
No till farming equipment is needed to plant seeds.

OO Seoul To Limit Old Diesel Vehicles To Fight Air Pollution

"2016-08-24-1472060981-5695854-windfarmcowsbisonwyomingTDCccr3423.jpg"

OO Wisconsin Taxes Wind Farms - too bad they didn't think of this in coal's heyday... those old mines will continue to cause environmental headaches, both in local pollution and climate change generated.

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NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS

"2016-08-24-1472061011-5262264-arcticbirdhabitatredknotAKTDCccr3423.jpg"

A Knotty Future awaits this Red Knot (hey, I don't make up these names) and many other Arctic birds, as climate change drives a wedge between their breeding seasons and the emergence of their food sources.

OO Warming Climate Expected To Squeeze Out Arctic Bird Habitat - birds are hardwired to migrate according to daylight patterns; their food sources, insects, are hardwired to emerge based on temperature. This sets up a lethal mismatch in a warming future for breeding shorebirds, shows a new study.

About two-thirds of the studied species will lose most of their important breeding habitat by 2070.

OO Climate Change Could Make Beaches Saltier indicates a new study. Takeaways:

increasing temperatures up evaporation from beaches;
this makes the seawater trapped just beneath the surface saltier.
This could potentially affect coastal aquifers,
and beach life, such as crabs and shore birds.

"2016-08-24-1472061047-4730624-healthytobleachedcoralreefGreatBarriermehccr333.png"

Marine Heatwave Caused Massive Bleaching on the beautiful giant Great Barrier Reef, turning undersea rainbows into ghostly white coral graveyards.

OO 'The Blob':
How Marine Heatwaves Are Causing Unprecedented Climate Chaos - a giant mass of hot seawater off California caused massive die-offs of sea birds, marine mammals, fish and more during 2014-2015.

Such marine heatwaves are increasing worldwide, especially in Australia, where in 2015 they permanently destroyed 60+ miles of kelp forests. These forests sustained about $10 billion worth of fish and tourism industries.

"2016-08-24-1472061084-8809842-beautifulkelpforestAustraliaSourcewww.toptenplus.comccr338.jpg"

Gone Forever are many miles of kelp forests off Australia, along with all the fascinating creatures that lived among them, doomed by marine heatwaves. Source www.toptenplus.com

In 2016, marine heatwaves caused disastrous coral die-offs on the Great Barrier Reef there, and massive die-offs of mangroves, important natural coastal storm barriers.

OO Arctic Fish Populations Changing As Ice Dwindles, report says, with twenty species, including sleeper sharks, as newly documented denizens of the Arctic Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

"2016-08-24-1472061115-8121597-lightningalbertacanadaoverforestSourcewww.tehwethernetwork.comccr3423.jpg"

Did This Just Start A Bog Fire? Lightning can if the bogs are hot and dry. Source www.tehwethernetwork.com

OO A New Climate Danger: Carbon Released By Burning Bogs - rising temperatures can dry out northern peatlands, increasing the risk of fires that release thousands of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Bog fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish, and can burn for decades.

OO Mountain Biodiversity More Vulnerable To Climate Change
than previously reported, a new study shows.

"2016-08-24-1472061143-6276591-oystersonthehalfshellSourcewww.tabasco.comccr294.jpg"

Untouchable? As waters warm and enable toxic algal blooms, oysters and other shellfish concentrate the toxins in their flesh, making them poisonous. Source www.tabasco.com

OO Study Links Global Warming To Rise In Waterborne Illnesses - such as food poisoning from oysters, along with other nasty infections, a new study shows.

"2016-08-24-1472061170-1623073-blueneoncichlidendemictoLakeTanganyikaSourceaquariumpictures.blogspot.comccr3423.jpg"

A Cornucopia of Cichlid Fish evolved in Lake Tanganyika, such as this Blue Neon, and are being lost as the lake slowly warms over the centuries - an outdoor laboratory that previews what will happen to fish in a global warming world. Source aquarium-pictures.blogspot.com

OO World's Longest Lake Is Being Depleted Of Life As Waters Warm - loss of biodiversity in Lake Tanganyika, Africa's oldest and deepest lake, has been driven by 500 years of sustained climate warming, a study of core sediments has found.

OO Sea Lions Decline Tied To Declining Food Sources In Warming Waters in the Falkland Islands.

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CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE FUNNIES

"2016-08-24-1472061200-3911782-TheMadhouseEffectbookMichaelMannTomTolesamazon.comccr3423.png"

@@ The Madhouse Effect - Enjoy the cartoons as you learn about the science, policy and solutions of climate change - and the strange pathology of climate denial.

Probably too many and big words for Donald Trump, but fine for ages 12 and up. You can get it here - a great gift for friends and family who need it.

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

"2016-08-24-1472061230-8134741-NewYorkgoesgreenfutureSourcewwwurbanplantscapes.comccr3423.jpg"

New York Goes Green - well, at least with its energy... but a farmer can dream of more...Source wwwurbanplantscapes.com

OO New York Approves Plan For 50 % Renewable Energy By 2030 The ambitious plan will rely on big subsidies to nuclear power plants to help reduce the state's reliance on fossil fuels.

OO Apple Can Sell Power As Tech Giants Boost Energy Investments - It spent $850 million last year on a 130-megawatt solar farm near San Francisco, and can now begin selling power into wholesale markets.

"2016-08-24-1472061263-6374852-eiffeltowerParisClimat2015Sourcecleantechnica.comccr307.png"

Born in 2015, Walking in 2016? The global climate agreement created in Paris, December 2015, may start going into effect soon.

OO Global Climate Deal Likely To Enter Into Force In 2006 a new study shows.

OO Massachusetts' Ambitious Clean Energy Bill
Jolts Offshore Wind Prospects - making offshore wind a big part of its renewable energy requirements.

OO Toyota, Tesla And Vestas Ranked Among World's Top Green Companies and are outperforming most polluting counterparts by three to one.

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CLIMATE LEADERSHIP

"2016-08-24-1472061297-4282128-ObamawsolarpanelsbackgroundcredAPphotoJulieJacobsonviacpccr225.jpg"

Pushing Clean Energy And A Safe Future by creating new ways for the US government to address climate change. Credit AP photo, Julie Jacobson

OO Every US Govt Agency Will Have To Consider Climate Change in their decisions from now on, as the White House's Council on Environmental Quality has finalized a process of shaping how the agencies will do so.

Related Headline:

OO Obama Broadens Use Of 'Climate Tests' In Federal Project Reviews to account for the carbon emissions and other climate impacts of their major decisions, new guidelines say.

OO Obama To Roll Out New Climate Change Measures for combating climate change before he leaves office.

"2016-08-24-1472061327-8716938-HillaryClintonmakingapointSourcewww.huffingtonpost.comccr302.jpg"

OO Clinton Makes Pitch For 'Modern Grid' essential for transitioning to clean renewable power; she called for billions of dollars in added infrastructure investments recently.

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CLUELESS LEADERSHIP

"2016-08-24-1472061365-9327450-trumpimmigrationmodifiedclimatecartoonCreditNateBeelerattheColumbusDispatchccr329.jpg"

Credit Nate Beeler at the Columbus Dispatch

OO Trump: Climate Change Won't Be 'Devastating - yeah, right - tell that to the flood victims in Louisiana, and the people who lost their homes to wildfires in the west, or to tornadoes in the Midwest...

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ELECTION YEAR:

"2016-03-08-1457470019-7186523-voteforclimateactionDIFyourfamilymehccr317.png"

If You Don't Vote For Climate Action, You Can Forget The Rest - in a climate-changing world of famine, drought, rising seas, giant storms and heat waves, there will be no security in jobs, health, wealth, or national safety. There will be chaos ensuing from increasing crises and disasters. Vote.

OO Global Warming Policies We Set Today Will Determine The Next 10,000 Years - of global warming, a new study shows -- and whether our civilization survives or not: history shows that harmful climate change has destroyed civilizations before.

This time, it could be worldwide. Let's keep "The Hunger Games" in the realm of fiction.

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CORAL CATASTROPHE CONTINUES

"2016-08-24-1472061452-1452098-guamcoralreefbeforeandafterbleachingkilleditccr3423.png"

Another Beautiful Undersea Kingdom Destroyed - a Guam coral reef in a cooler, healthier past, above, and in the wake of a warming present, devastated by bleaching, below.

OO 'I Cried...Right Into My Mask' - Guam's reefs have bleached four years straight, but have received little notice. Takeaways:

Just outside the Pacific "triangle" of high coral biodiversity,
Guam reefs host 300+ types of coral;
An important tourism area, Tumon Bay, has been hard hit
Early in the "bleaching season"

@@ A Coral Convulses: this heated coral expands then expels its symbiotic algae under time lapse photography.

Warming waters can up the photosynthesis of resident algae, leading to toxic levels of oxygen inside coral tissues. Thus, expelling the algae is a short term defense. But continued warm waters can deter algae from re-colonizing the coral, leading to its death.

El Nino worsened conditions on Guam reefs, causing extremely low tides which left parts of the reef exposed to air, and other parts shallow, thus prone to more heating.

"Today, for the first time in the 50 years I've been in the water, I cried for an hour, right into my mask, as I witnessed the extent to which our lovely Tumon Bay corals were...dying," coral biologist Laurie Raymundo wrote.

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SPEAKING OUT

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Source cetology.org

OO When Protest Becomes Sacrament - these Catholic social justice advocates are exemplars of the force behind We Are Seneca Lake, one of the nation's longest-running campaigns of civil disobedience, blockading a facility that enables fracking.

OO Clean Power Plan Offers Chance To Right Past Injustices, advocates say, in a little known provision.

"2016-08-24-1472061581-2365624-justicestatuegreenbyMaryEllenHartecctw98.jpg"

OO Climate Change May Be Doubted By Some,
But Now It's The Law says a federal appeals court in Chicago giving a thumbs-up this week to an obscure regulatory practice that helps the U.S. government account for projected costs of climate change.

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FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

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OO US Must Bury Coal To Save Miner Jobs said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, using ex-miners to clean up the messes left behind by closed coal mines, and having ex-miners help shape a post coal economy.

OO US Coal Regulator To Crack Down On Cleanup Coverage - states should force coal companies to set aside collateral to pay for future mine cleanups and protect taxpayers as the industry braces for further declines, a leading federal regulator said recently.

OO Colorado: Fighting Fracking at the Ballot Box - as the energy industry ramped up publicity for unregulated fracking, activists gathered signatures across the state to put 2 proposed fracking regulations on the November ballot.

They're Baaaaaack... To Drill for more oil, this time off Australia. As if the country hasn't got enough climate change disasters with marine heatwaves destroying its coral reefs, kelp forests and mangroves. Wikipedia

OO BP Reveals Plans To Drill For Oil In Great Australian Bight Marine Reserve a commonwealth marine reserve.

OO Undermining China: Towns Sink After Mines Close - and houses sink into the collapsing network of mine tunnels.

OO India's Coal Ministry Said To Seek Environment Tax On Petcoke an oil-refining byproduct and a coal substitute, is more polluting than coal and should be subject to the same federal taxes, the coal ministry said. Imagine anything like that ever happening in the US...

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If we do not grow sustainably,
Our children will die inhumanely.

@@ How Parents Can Help Prevent Teen Pregnancy

Teen childbearing cost US taxpayers $9+ Billion in 2010
And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:
publicize where women can access affordable contraception.

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They can go here to find locations:

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And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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SOLAR KEEPS RISING

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OO Solar Manufacturers Pivoting Away From Big US Utility Projects because utilities aren't signing as many deals to buy electricity from their giant power plants.

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Check it out here, right now!

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

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Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, Aug 23, 2016

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, some of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues and so does the drought in California. Down south, a stagnating storm front, expected under climate change, brought historic flooding to much of Louisiana.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures - not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

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"2015-12-28-1451344420-5650759-climatechangebar570.png"

There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I've compiled, "Climate Change News Resources," at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by these wild flowers I photographed one summer. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.

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-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.

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Sunset from Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.

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Sunlight hits the top of the building in the City of London know as the Walkie Talkie at sunset Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016. IMG1005

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Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.

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Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.

olliepix posted a photo:

Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016, in the background the River Thames and buildings in the City of London. IMG0946

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Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.

olliepix posted a photo:

Sunset, Canary Riverside, London, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016, in the background the River Thames and buildings in the City of London. IMG0944

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science

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Climate Change Complicates Predictions Of Damage From Big Surf

Earth's changing climate has made the quest to understand wave behavior more important than ever, scientists say. Rising seas, storm surge and dune and reef erosion all shape Florida's Gulf Coast.

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Connecting Every Neuron: The Future of Brain-Mapping and Illness Discovery
The brain has been a mythologized artifact of humanity for as long as we can remember. You've seen its raw potential epitomized in sci-fi films, its grace harnessed by artists, and its endless future encapsulated by scientists. We've barely cracked the surface of its depths, and there are several years of research before we can pat ourselves on the back. That's not to say our current achievements are lackluster - quite the opposite, actually. We've come so far the avenue for continued study is immense.

Many of our goals regarding the brain require one thing -- a full understanding of the connections between our brains' neurons. If we ever wish to fulfill our desire of understanding thought, or illnesses like schizophrenia or autism, we need to map every signal sent between all of the neurons in the brain. And we just have. Get ready for an unprecedented amount of cranial detail.

The new technique, called an MAP-sequence, is a revolution to current standards of mapping neuronal connections. Today, we use pigmented proteins and ridiculously expensive microscopes to see what parts of a patient's brain are firing whenever they visualize a certain thought or desire. That technique isn't wrong or outmoded - in fact it makes a lot of sense. If you can begin to associate the color of a protein with a certain region or function of the brain, we can immediately know what a patient is doing, thinking, or saying when a color pops up under the microscope.

Unfortunately this technique is slow and tedious. The weight of these disadvantages burden understaffed research facilities, and this kind of research seems necessary but impractical. This is where an MAP sequence saves the day. It's ease and utility clears the once obstructed path of neuronal studies.

MAP-sequencing uses a giant library of viruses that contain random RNA sequences. This database is encapsulated in a mixture that's then injected into the brain, where approximately one virus enters one neuron, such that each neuron has its own RNA barcode. Think of a huge dictionary, where a single word maps to a particular neuron. A DNA sequencer can then read the barcodes, and we can form a matrix that shows how a single neuron maps to every other. A connected graph of every neuron in the brain, all in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. Pretty neat.

The beautiful thing about this technology is that when we think about illnesses like autism or schizophrenia, or more broadly, something as abstract as thought itself, our inability to fully understand these issues stem from brain connectivity issues, making this kind of research priceless. It's almost as if we've been studying the brain for the last twenty years without a proper diagram of its wiring, and someone has just handed us a blueprint of its entire circuitry. The possibilities abound, but for starters, we can now discern the true origin of schizophrenia, pinpoint the handful of neurons that are faulty, develop fool-proof medicine, or potentially even deactivate the corrupted brain cells. All of this stems from a crucial set of cerebral details engendered by this research.

"brain"

This technology is truly ground-breaking, but I hope it doesn't distract us from the true nature of human consciousness. Next time you ponder your ambitions, desires, or even your upcoming Netflix binge, smile at the fact that your body wields a tissue whose origin and functionality are incomprehensibly infinite. The future is bright, but solving this dilemma will only spawn more mysteries about the brain, and we should be OK with that.

A reality of science is understanding that the more we peer and examine, the more our studies elude us. There's something eerily beautiful about that, and I hope it inspires fear, curiosity, and most of all, determination, in everyone. Just because the number of questions ahead seem endless, it doesn't mean we can't answer most of them.

Till next time,
Nikhil

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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The World Next Door
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A view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System, is seen in an undated artist's impression released by the European Southern Observatory August 24, 2016.

If it's for real, it's the closest planet beyond our solar system. The closest planet in outer space.

Astronomers using a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile have announced the discovery of a world around the star Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us other than the Sun. They base this on very slight stellar wobbles -- a convincing claim resting on more than a dozen years of accumulated data.

Proxima Centauri's paltry distance (4.2 light-years) is matched by its paltry size: It's a dim bulb, a red dwarf that's only one-seventh the Sun's diameter. The newly discovered planet orbits this star in only 11 Earth days. This cheek-by-jowl relationship ensures that, despite Proxima Centauri's meager energy output, there's enough sunlight hitting the planet to sustain large bodies of liquid water. There could be oceans covering at least some of this world, and where there's water, there might be life.

But is there? It's a question as obvious as the Matterhorn. Unfortunately, it's hard to get an answer.

Some will immediately figure the best tactic would be to send a reconnaissance probe to Proxima Centauri to check out the neighborhood. A nice idea, but so is world peace. Neither is easy to realize in practice. Our fastest rockets would take 75,000 years to get to this planet, by which time the crew's enthusiasm for the project will have soured.

Of course, we could send robots instead. Phil Lubin, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has outlined a scheme that would use ganged lasers to propel tiny probes about the size of a silver dollar to the Alpha Centauri system at roughly one-fifth the speed of light. Alpha Centauri is a double star rather close to Proxima Centauri, and it would be easy to send the probes to the latter, now that it boasts an interesting target for scrutiny. Lubin's scheme has been funded for study by investor Yuri Milner. It's a serious proposal that should now enjoy some enhanced motivation.

But even if Brobdingnagian lasers were launching pygmy probes today, it would be at least decades before anything arrived. And in the interim you can bet your trust fund that hordes of astronomers will be trying to espy this planet with the biggest telescopes they can get their hands on, including the ones in Chile that were used to find it. If they manage to sample the light from this new world, they can -- at least in principle -- sift it spectroscopically for oxygen or other gases tied to biology.

But get real. This planet is small, dim and difficult to see. Very difficult. It will probably require new space-based instruments, such as NASA's James Webb telescope, to get these kinds of data. They're years away.

A more immediate opportunity is to use big antennas to search for emissions that would tell us that this new world has not just life, but technically adept life able to produce radio signals. That's not an entirely easy experiment, as Proxima Centauri is deep in the southern sky, and you can't see it from any observatory north of Miami. But in 1995, the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix made observations of a few hundred southern hemisphere stars using an antenna in Australia. The Parkes Radio Telescope was swung in the direction of Proxima Centauri, and a search was made for microwave signals. None were seen, despite the fact that if there had been a society on this planet using a similarly sized antenna aimed at Earth, we could have noticed it had the broadcast power been a measly few kilowatts or more. If there are aliens hanging out on this world, they were not broadcasting in our direction. We should try again.

So how remarkable is this newly discovered exoplanet? How excited should we be? Some astronomers now estimate that as many as one in five stars hosts a habitable planet, in which case this is just one of tens of billions in our galaxy. In that sense, you could say it isn't so extraordinary.

But on the other hand, none of these other tens of billions will be as close as this one. It will always be special, somewhat akin to Prince William. Sure ,he's just another British kid -- but one who's destined to forever be the subject of our attentions.

Also on HuffPost:

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An Earth-Like Exoplanet Orbits Our Nearest Neighbor
The red dwarf star Proxima Centauri is home to a newly discovered exoplanet, which may look a lot like Earth. This video was reproduced with permission and was first published on August 24, 2016. It...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

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Why Campus Inclusion Matters

Harvard's history is rooted in exclusion, says the school's president Drew Faust. The university began in 1636 to educate clergy who were white, male Puritans. Today, the university is promoting inclusivity—a space that exists “somewhere between diversity and belonging,” according to Faust. In this video, she discusses Harvard's latest efforts to include women and minorities in campus life.

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gaia

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The World Next Door
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Maine's North Woods Monument a Fitting Celebration of the National Park Service's Legacy
If you've spent time in the woods in Maine, you know how hard it is to describe the peace and wonder that come with being amidst such natural beauty. Henry David Thoreau probably said it best when he wrote that "the tops of the mountains are the unfinished parts of the globe" and the gateways to the secrets of the gods.

On Wednesday, August 24, 2016, almost a hundred years to the day since the National Park Service was created, this area achieved federal recognition when the Obama Administration declared it a National Monument, paving the way for its intended use: to serve as a national park. A fitting way to celebrate the National Park Service's centennial!

In one hundred years, "America's best idea" has ushered in protections for incredible and vulnerable lands, allowing forests and prairies and bodies of water to thrive, and preserving natural and historic formations and other unique geological features.

In Maine's North Woods, pristine forests that have been preserved for hundreds of years have recently seen dramatic and unpredictable shifts in ownership. Continuing this way would have been risky for the North Woods' future.

With amazing views of Mount Katahdin, rare plant species, seven ponds, many hiking trails, and wildlife like eagles, moose, and Canadian lynx, this region is incredibly valuable and its protection is well deserved.

Further, it's estimated that a national park would bring needed jobs and investment to an area whose economy sorely needs it.

Vision Shift

President Obama's protection of Maine's North Woods honors the legacy of his many predecessors of both political parties who have used the Antiquities Act to protect our natural and historic heritage while creating the recreational and economic opportunities these wonders generate. In the United States, we're incredibly lucky that we can experience everything from climbing mountains to sailing enormous lakes to exploring the Grand Canyon and more. Without leaving our borders, we have access to some of the world's most breathtaking scenery and natural beauty.

In the National Park Service's first 100 years, we have celebrated our most valuable and iconic natural surroundings by investing in their care and protecting them for future generations. This is successful, inspiring, and worthy of praise: these lands and the history saved within them will be handed down to future generations of Americans to visit, enjoy, and revel in. It's no wonder that Presidents tend to establish these monuments and parks while envisioning their legacy.

In the past decade, there has been growing awareness of our most valuable and vulnerable marine resources have not had the same level of attention and preservation measures. Hidden out of sight, it's easy to forget that entire mountains and forests exist under the surface, too, brimming with marine wildlife and supplying much of the oxygen we breathe.

As we move into the next hundred years of National Parks, it's time for a shift in focus toward #blueparks - the next frontier of conservation in America.

President George W. Bush created the first Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean in 2006. With no areas afforded the same protections in the Atlantic, President Obama now has a historic opportunity to do the right thing and protect special underwater places from commercial extraction.

As we celebrate the North Woods Monument designation and 100 years of National Parks, we also call upon President Obama to turn his attention to our Atlantic ocean and protect New England's Ocean Treasures.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Turning tech into a god is seriously bad news
Artificial super-intelligence may be on the horizon, but as summer festival-goers hear, it's a long way from solving human problems
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First US offshore wind farm will power an entire island
The five-turbine farm off Rhode Island's coast is expected to be supplying first homes by the end of the year
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This is what modern logos would look like if they were from the USSR

A Russian graphic designer named Mike Levchenko is doing his part to mend the icy relationship between his country and the West — or at least Western capitalism — by reimagining a half-dozen global brands as if they were from the Soviet Union.

Levchenko took the logos of McDonald's, Nikon, Samsung, Dior, Apple, Chanel, and Mercedes-Benz, and gave them a Cyrillic spin. Apple's is boxy, but with an unmistakable leaf growing from the first letter. Dior's is cursive and feminine. Mercedes gets a couple spear points to suggest speed. Levchenko also paired each logo with an advertisement, most of which appear modeled on Soviet era ads from the 1950s and ‘60s.

First designed by monks in Bulgaria in the ninth century (shout-out to The Verge's...

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This could be Mozilla's next logo

Mozilla, the open web pioneer, is staying true to its collaborative and open roots by performing a brand redesign right out in public. The company has published its shortlist of new logo proposals, which it will now consider, refine, and whittle down to create its next brand identity. Among them is the above, seemingly abstract, structure that actually spells out Mozilla's name in its multicolored isometric shapes.

There's another quirky design that incorporates various colors and shapes to spell out "Mozilla":

And then there are few more staid and predictable variants:

The unifying feature of all of the redesign concepts is that they're carefully thought through. And even where you might say their...

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Photos of the Day: Aug. 24, 2016

Explore the news of the day with these images from around the world.
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From Panamanian Gang Members to City Tour Guides

The proprietors of Fortaleza Tours have a fragile truce within the "red zone" of Panama City. In the eyes of Panamanian law, once you make it to a gang list, there's no way off. But Fortaleza wants to change that. Not long ago, their tour guides may have been the ones to rob foreigners wandering through the area. Now, former gang members give tourists a behind-the-scenes look at their past gangland life, and all financial transactions with the tourists are voluntary. This documentary by MEL Films, Gang Tours of Panama, shows how violence is waning, the hospitality sector is moving in, and a relatively new feeling of safety has returned to the historic center of Panama City.

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'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses just four light years away

Proxima b is a likely target for Starshot project

Rumours that a terrestrial planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the Sun's closest neighbour, may be Earth-like have been confirmed today in a paper published in Nature.…

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DSM-5 Made A Mistake Eliminating Substance Abuse
DSM-5 made a mistake when it joined together into one big, heterogeneous category ('Substance Use Disorder') what in DSM IV had been two quite different diagnoses ('Substance Abuse' and 'Substance Dependence').

In DSM IV, Substance Abuse described someone who gets into recurrent, but intermittent, trouble as a consequence of recreational binges.

In sharp contrast, DSM IV Substance Dependence described a continuous and compulsive pattern of use, often with accompanying tolerance and withdrawal.

The two DSM IV diagnoses have radically different implications for treatment planning and for prognosis. Artificially lumping them together in DSM-5 forces inaccurate diagnosis, loses critical clinical information, and stigmatizes as addicts, people whose substance problem is often temporary and influenced by contextual and developmental factors.

A college kid who binges occasionally on weekends can get into serious trouble and often requires an immediate intervention, but is very different from someone whose life revolves around drugs and who can't get through a day without them. The majority of substance abusers are in a passing phase, never become addicted in any meaningful sense of that word, and require a very different treatment approach than those who really are addicted. And lumping abusers with the addicted creates unfortunate stereotypes that jeopardize future marital and job prospects, legal status, and insurance eligibility.

The DSM-5 workgroup based its rationale for dropping Substance Abuse on studies suggesting that there is no bright line boundary separating Abuse from Dependence. The results of these studies are certainly not definitive and their interpretation was flawed by a basic DSM-5 misunderstanding of the nature of psychiatric diagnosis. All DSM disorders overlap with other DSM disorders and also frequently with normality. Fuzzy boundaries among near neighbors are ubiquitous and inherent to the entire diagnostic system in psychiatry and are not sufficient excuse to collapse distinctions that are clinically valuable. There was no problem that needed fixing or matter of principle at stake. The change was radical, creates obvious harms, and provides no apparent benefit.

What to do? My suggestion to clinicians is simply to ignore the DSM-5 change. It is perfectly appropriate and clinically preferable to continue making the valuable distinction between Substance Dependence and Substance Abuse. In what follows, I will explain why and indicate how appropriate and easy it is to retain Substance Abuse within the rules of the ICD-10- CM coding system.

Substance Abuse vs Substance Dependence vs Normal Use

There are cases that straddle the boundary between Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence, but much more often they are easily distinguished by marked difference in behavior, treatment needs, and prognosis.

In contrast to Substance Dependence, Substance Abuse is defined by its absence of tolerance, withdrawal or compulsive use. The typical substance abuser gets into recurrent but intermittent (often weekend) trouble as a consequence of episodic recreational binges. He goes through periods when he can take or leave the substance, use it in a controlled way, or abstain altogether. Then comes a binge with bad outcome, then another peaceful period, then another binge, and so on. The label Substance Abuse implies an intervention directed to the harmful consequences of the binges, how to avoid them, and the substitution of other less dangerous recreational activities.

The label Substance Dependence alerts the clinician to the importance, but great difficulty, of achieving abstinence and the significant risk it will trigger severe physiological or psychological withdrawal unless done under close medical supervision. Treatment and rehabilitation services will need to be much more intense, continuous, and long-term.

There is also a considerable difference in prognosis between Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence -while some go on from an early history of substance abuse to later dependence, the majority do not and are much more likely to have an early and permanent remission.

The differential diagnosis of Substance Abuse must also distinguish it from normal, recreational substance use. Substance Abuse is a mental disorder- a label that should not be applied casually to everyone who experiences an occasional episode of substance excess. A few binges does not a mental disorder make or else almost all of us would qualify as mentally disordered at some point in our lives. Binging is always ill advised, risky, and unfortunate, but does not indicate mental disorder unless and until it becomes part of a repetitive pattern that causes significant distress, impairment and/or legal consequences. The person doesn't learn from the repeated painful experience that a couple of drinks (or snorts or pills or joints) can lead to a binge and that a binge can, and often does, have serious (and sometimes even catastrophic) consequences.

In DSM IV, the definition of Substance Abuse is "a maladaptive pattern of substance use manifested by significant adverse consequences" in at least one of four different domains of trouble: 1) driving under the influence; 2) other legal problems (e.g., disorderly conduct, assault, etc.); 3) reduced performance at work or school, and; 4) problems with interpersonal relations and family life.

Prognosis and Risks

For some, Substance Abuse is a stably unstable life pattern- but most people either outgrow it or go on to Substance Dependence. The threshold between the two is crossed when the periodic bingeing turns into continuous use and the motivation switches from pleasurable recreation to needing the substance on a regular basis just to get by.

The risks of Substance Abuse must not be missed or minimized. It can be one of the most dangerous disorders in all of psychiatry- sometimes leading to DUI's and car accidents; raping or being raped; shootings; fights; other crimes; getting fired for using on the job; marital discord; neglect of parental responsibility; and/or spending excessively. Substance Abuse is perhaps the strongest indication in psychiatry for early identification and active intervention- both to prevent the risk of later substance dependence and to avoid the catastrophic harms that can arise from any given binge.

How To Code Substance Abuse

It turns out that including Substance Abuse is much truer to the official coding system than dropping it. All of the official diagnostic codes, used in the US and around the world, are provided by the International Classification of Disease (ICD). DSM codes are merely a subset derived from ICD codes. The editors of DSMs simply pick the ICD codes they feel most resemble the categories they have chosen to include in DSM. There is nothing sacred or official about the DSM-5 choices -- I know because I made the choices for DSM-IV. The ICD coding system is official; the DSM codes are just one groups' fallible adaptation of them.
It is of great significance that the official coding in ICD-10-CM does not follow the DSM-5 decision to eliminate Substance Abuse. Instead, ICD-10-CM retains the DSM-IV terminology and continues to provide separate Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence codes for each of the major classes of substances. Thus, the code for Alcohol Abuse is F10.10; Opioid Abuse is F11.10; Cannabis Abuse is F12.10, etc. with the 3rd character in each case indicative of the specific class of substance.

Also telling is the position taken by the ICD-11 workgroup currently revising the labels and codes that will be used in the next version of the international coding system. They have flatly rejected the DSM-5 change and will continue to separate Substance Dependence and Harmful Substance Use- having
concluded that these two separate categories are needed for both public health and clinical reasons. The DSM-5 mistake thus places it out of line with ICD-10, ICD-11, previous DSM's, and well established clinical practice.

Clinicians remain truer both to clinical reality and to ICD coding when they ignore the new DSM-5 lumping of substance use disorders and instead continue to distinguish Substance Abuse from Substance Dependence. DSM's are explicitly meant to be used only as guides, not worshiped as bibles. Clinicians are free to ignore DSM whenever it makes mistakes that go against clinical common sense and the International coding system.

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Why do we need synchrotrons to study superconductors?
How synchrotrons help reveal the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity

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Black-and-white ruffed lemur

My Planet Experience posted a photo:

The handsome black-and-white ruffed lemur is, along with the red ruffed lemur, the largest member of the Lemuridae family. This species inhabits lowland to mid-altitude rain forests in eastern Madagascar.

Listed as Critically Endangered as the species is suspected to have undergone a population decline of ≥80% over a period of 21 years (three generations), primarily due to observed and inferred continuing decline in area, extent and quality of habitat from slash-and-burn agriculture, logging and mining, in addition to exploitation through unsustainable hunting pressure.
These causes have not ceased, and will to a large extent not be easily reversible.

© www.myplanetexperience.com

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New Solar Study in Nevada Sings Same Old I-Done-it-Wrong Song
Let's address something head on. Solar energy provides a benefit to all consumers, even those who don't have solar panels. Study after study in states from Maine to Arizona, and by groups such as the The Brookings Institution and the Natural Resources Defense Council prove this point. Solar is transforming America's energy use.

Nationally, rooftop solar is growing faster than ever. We reached one million installations nationwide earlier this year, and we're on pace to clear two million in just two more years. That number is expected to hit 4.5 million in the end of 2021, and that's not counting the number of community and utility scale solar projects.

It's not a matter of if solar energy becomes a fixture of every community's electricity generation, it's a matter of when. And the utilities and regulators who fail to recognize this growth, and find ways to give their customers what they want, will be left behind.

In Nevada, however, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) heeded too many false cries about cost shifts and made changes to the rate design structure that effectively brought the state's rooftop solar industry to a screeching halt. In the five months leading up to the PUC's decision, 4,447 applications were filed for residential solar systems. In the five months after, there were just 84.

It doesn't have to be this way. Recent progress in states like New York, Tennessee and Colorado point to a future where solar and utilities find common ground and develop a rate design structure that benefits both of them, in addition to all customers.

Last week, Energy & Environment Economics (E3) put together a draft study claiming that distributed solar generation in Nevada is imposing a $36 million cost on ratepayers. The study comes two years after the same company reached the opposite conclusion, finding that rooftop solar systems create savings for customers. While E3's first study was consistent with other studies in showing solar's value to the community, the latest version insults the intelligence of Nevadan readers.

Good rate design can empower customers to control their energy costs through conservation and adoption of emerging technologies, while sending price signals that allocate capital investment more efficiently, lowering costs for all ratepayers. It's clear when you do the math: the benefits distributed solar generation provide to all far outweigh any costs.

The latest scuffle in Nevada isn't the first time we've seen entrenched interests work to prevent the booming solar industry from thriving in a particular state and giving consumers a choice when it comes to their electric bills, and it won't be the last. So the next time you hear someone claim that rooftop solar puts a burden on everyone else, remember: their numbers just don't add up.

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USAGov's 11 National Parks You Can't Miss in 2016
Time flies whether you're inside or outside. On August 25, the National Park Service turns 100 and the celebrations are a century in the making. In fact, entrance to all national parks will be free of cost from August 25 to 28.

Make plans to visit one of the more than 400 parks available this year. Find your park and get on the road this year. And if you need help deciding which one to visit, check out some of USAGov's favorite parks as chosen by our own staff:

1-Cumberland Gap National Historical Park-Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

The "gap" in the mountains allowed settlers to move further west. I feel the strength of the American spirit when I see the waterways and hiking trails that pioneers used to follow their dreams. - Amber

2-San Juan National Historic Site- Puerto Rico

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

Many things to do in only one park filled with lots of history and beautiful architecture. Growing up in PR my favorite place to go fly a kite was near the "Castillo San Felipe del Morro."- Leilani

3-Shenandoah National Park-Virginia

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

My favorite. I like seeing the beautiful fall foliage of the Blue Ridge Mountains. -Sandra

4-Death Valley National Park- California, Nevada

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

It's so unlike any place I've ever been. I felt like I was on another planet. -Jim

5-Yosemite National Park- California

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

It brings back memories of going camping with my family as a child. I loved the scary stories, good food and an escape from our everyday, fast paced life. -Simchah

6-Grand Canyon National Park- Arizona

"2016-08-23-1471972334-9391717-GrandC2.jpg"

(Photo credit: Carlos Barahona)

It's my favorite national park because of all the breathtaking views. Also, if you're lucky, you'll be graced by the presence of a bald eagle (or two). -Darren

I loved this park because it was another confirmation that this country is as diverse as the people living in it. -Carlos

7-Fort Washington National Park- Maryland

"2016-08-23-1471972474-1179380-fortwashington.jpg"

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

Love seeing the historic fort and grew up going to a lot of picnics and parties there! -Arlene

8-Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park- California

(Photo credit: Nancy Tyler)

I love the way this urban park shows through exhibits and films at sites around the city of Richmond, CA how Americans worked, lived, and created social change on the World War II home front. Talks led by real life "Rosies" and others who experienced the pressures and opportunities of wartime life in America are fascinating, and very moving. -Nancy

9-C&O Canal National Historical Park- District of Columbia, Maryland, West Virginia

"2016-08-23-1471972548-2673532-917112041DD8B71B0B51B4A0B3E77AFE.jpg"

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

I love this place because it offers great views of the Potomac, hiking and rock climbing a few minutes away from the city. This is a nature's gem in the metropolitan area, so you can go often to be out in the nature. - Cecilia

10-Olympic National Park- Washington

"2016-08-23-1471972898-6196560-20160823.jpg"

(Photo credit: Rachel Flagg)

Many wonderful childhood memories and family history with the park and the region; plus, it's the wild Pacific ocean - you can find every shade of grey in the sand, sky, water, driftwood. Beautiful even when it rains... and it rains a lot. -Rachel

11-Acadia National Park- Maine

(Photo credit: National Park Service)

One of the most beautiful parks you'll ever visit, pictures don't do it justice. Acadia is unforgettable. -Ed

Make this year count and join the celebration! Follow USAGov on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat or subscribe to our email newsletter for more information about national parks as well as tips and tools in English and in Spanish from hundreds of government agencies, departments, and programs.

Learn more about USAGov, your guide to government programs and services at USA.gov/explore.

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The city of Karlsruhe, Germany was planned with a palace tower...

The city of Karlsruhe, Germany was planned with a palace tower at its center, surrounded by 32 radiating streets. Because the design resembled the ribs of a folding fan, the city is sometimes called the “fan city” or “Fächerstadt.“ Additionally, this city's urban plan gave rise to the geometry concept of “Karlsruhe Metric” which refers to a measure of distance that assumes travel is only possible along radial streets and along circular avenues around the center.

49°00′33″N 8°24′14″E

Instagram: http://bit.ly/2bngNIT

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August sunset, north London

Francis Mansell posted a photo:

Stitched from 8 shots.

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August sunset, north London

Francis Mansell posted a photo:

Stitched from 4 shots.

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An Earthquake in Central Italy Topples Buildings, Killing Dozens (26 photos)

Central Italy was struck by a powerful, shallow, 6.2-magnitude earthquake at 3:36 am local time, devastating several mountain villages, and resulting in at least 73 deaths so far. Buildings in towns close to the epicenter collapsed on top of each other, falling into the streets, trapping hundreds in enormous piles of rubble. The death toll is still expected to rise as rescue teams reach some of the more remote villages in the region.

An aerial view of Amatrice in central Italy, as it appears after a magnitude 6 quake struck at 3:36 a.m. local time on August 24, 2016. The earthquake and was felt across a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome where residents of the capital felt a long swaying followed by aftershocks. (Gregorio Borgia / AP)

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Why Are Hybrid Animals Sterile?
Well, why are *most* hybrid animals sterile? Turns out, female mules can, on a blue moon, actually reproduce. However, it's still all wonky as her baby is somehow also technically her half sibling. Yeah, shit's weird.
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Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt's Advice: ‘Drop Politics' and Enjoy a Park
In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt dropped politics and took a hike. One result was the National Park System.
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A Century Of Conservation At The National Park Service
One hundred years ago, an idea was formed to protect America's most beautiful and significant settings from the threatening effects of time, development and misuse. Today, thanks to a century of conservation and preservation efforts undertaken by the National Park Service, national treasures across this country remain unspoiled. Our modern mission must maintain and grow those efforts so that our national parks endure to benefit future generations.

Spanning more than 400 areas in all 50 states -- from Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the recently designated Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico to Lowell National Historical Park and the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts -- our national park system has lived up to its longtime label of "America's greatest idea."

On August 25, 2016, this idea will have been a reality for 100 years: a dream set in motion by legendary environmental advocates like John Muir, President Teddy Roosevelt, and the first National Park Service Director Stephen Mather.

While the National Park Centennial is a time to celebrate the park system's cherished legacy, it also provides America with an opportunity to recommit to the novel notion that some places are worth keeping just the way they are. It is a concept that was important to Americans a century ago, and that desire has not waned.

In 2015, the national park system welcomed a record-breaking 300 million visitors. The Find Your Park initiative has helped give voice to visitors' experiences through social media and other mediums, all while encouraging others to discover these extraordinary venues. President Obama's Every Kid in a Park program provided 4th graders and their families with free annual passes to national parks, helping spur interest in the newest generation of explorers and conservationists.

A study released in July 2016 by the National Park Foundation found that 95 percent of the American public thinks protecting national parks for future generations is important and 80 percent are willing to pay higher federal taxes to ensure the protection and preservation of the National Park System.

Our national parks and their future well-being are clearly important priorities for American families - and rightfully so. The cultural, natural and historical significance of national parks, monuments, and public lands is indisputable. After each trip, visitors return home with a more intimate connection to nature and our nation.

But national parks also have an important community impact.

The numbers demonstrate that national parks are not just an investment in the preservation of our country's history. They are also an ongoing investment in America's communities. A recent economic study conducted by the National Park Service showed every federal dollar invested in our parks leads to 10 dollars in economic activity, supporting nearby restaurants, hotels, local outfitters, guides, and more. Nationally, the parks generate $27 billion dollars in economic activity and support 250,000 private sector jobs.

To maintain and grow these benefits, Congress has a role to play. The Democratic version of the National Park Service Centennial Act would generate millions in revenue and allocate an appropriate level of funding to the National Park Service so that they have predictable resources in the coming years to address a burgeoning backlog of maintenance and aging infrastructure projects that swelled after years of shrinking budgets.

This month, the National Park Service celebrates its 100th birthday, with celebrations and free entry to stunning vistas atop mountains, on battlefields, in hot springs, and among ancient ruins. The Centennial celebration is a chance for Americans to not only experience these extraordinary pieces of our shared national heritage, but to prove they must be preserved in perpetuity.

Our national parks belong to all Americans, and for more than a century, they have helped tell the story of who we are as a people and as a country. We have a responsibility to protect the places and traditions that define us, so that the story will still be told another hundred years from now.

Niki Tsongas is the U.S. Representative from the Massachusetts Third District and the Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands; U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich represents New Mexico and is the Ranking Member of the Senate Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks.

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Tiniest grazing mammal was a pig at the front, horse at the back
Presumed extinct since the 1950s, Australia's pig-footed bandicoot quickly evolved to eat grass perhaps because the climate got much drier
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Planes in the red sky...

kevingrieve610 posted a photo:

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Abstract birds...

kevingrieve610 posted a photo:

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Silhouettes

ArtGordon1 posted a photo:

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The Next Agriculture Revolution Is Under Our Feet

By Justin Adams, Global Managing Director of Lands at The Nature Conservancy, and Bianca Moebius-Clune, Ph.D., Director at the Soil Health Division, USDA-NRCS

At the core of agriculture is innovation. Advancements in agricultural technology throughout the past century have allowed farmers to feed a population that has grown from less than 2 billion people to more than 7 billion today.

But, as demand for food continues to grow, our lands are stretched to their limits and crop yields struggle to keep up the pace, the world will need farmers to make another leap. By just 2050, global agricultural production must increase by 60 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Some previous agricultural breakthroughs, though, have come with serious environmental costs to both people and nature. With a changing climate exacerbating today's challenges, it is clear the next agriculture revolution will require solutions that not only increase food production, but also sustain the health of our communities, our land and water, and our climate.

The next revolution
One such solution lies with the soil under our feet. About 70 percent of fresh water worldwide is used to produce food, and 95 percent of food is produced on land. Although historically there has been insufficient attention to the value of healthy soils, the data and case examples are clear: healthy soil is critical for long-term agricultural production.

Perhaps Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it best, as the devastating Dust Bowl swept across the U.S. Midwest in the 1930s: "A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself." We have greatly reduced soil erosion in the United States since the time of the Dust Bowl. But we are still losing soil faster than nature can replace it in many places on the planet. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, every year we lose around 24 billion tons of fertile soil globally (about 2 billion tons/year in the United States, by estimates in the 2012 Natural Resources Inventory), and it takes roughly 2,000 years to generate 10 centimeters (not quite four inches) of topsoil. In order to achieve global long-term food security while better protecting our communities and our environment, we must take soil health more seriously.

The good news is that while it may take hundreds of years to geologically build soil, farmers have demonstrated that they can increase organic matter and improve soil function in just a few years, through soil health management systems. This represents the hope in healthy soil -- the potential of regenerative agriculture.

Recently, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization identified soil organic carbon, soil erosion and soil nutrient imbalance as the top three threats to global soil health. These three elements are intimately related. Increase organic carbon, for example, and the others can improve too.

From nutrient management to carbon storage

Poor nutrient management costs everyone. When farmers pay for improperly planned application or overuse of fertilizers and other soil amendments (and the labor, and fuel to apply them), or when needed nutrients are lost to the environment due to poor soil physical and biological functioning, consumers see higher prices in supermarkets and restaurants.

The environment takes a hit, too: nutrients enter water systems, stimulating algal blooms that contaminate drinking water and suffocate aquatic life. We saw this on the Ohio River in the summer of 2015, and we see it every summer with the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone, which has been averaging an area the size of Connecticut for the past few years -- caused largely by excess soil run-off.

Likewise, better nutrient management coupled with other soil health practices have far-reaching positive impacts. For example, better nutrient balance can reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide -- strengthening the significant opportunity for farmers to be a part of the global climate solution. Adding biochar to soil can increase soil carbon stocks and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while also improving the soil's ability to retain nutrients. And strategic crop rotations and nitrogen-fixing cover crops can also improve nutrient balance while limiting erosion and increasing soil carbon sequestration. (Paustian et al., 2016)

Better soil health management can often achieve these environmental benefits at a lower cost than other approaches -- and for farmers there is real profit potential. Improving infiltration and water-holding capacity, for example, can significantly reduce irrigation water needs, lessen dust pollution, and improve nutrient uptake by plants, which can reduce input costs, and reduce plant stress, disease and pest pressure. Over time, these practices can see a material increase in crop yields and quality. Importantly, we must work with the agricultural industry to find the right policies and business models that unlock this sort of economic potential for both the land owners as well as the farmers who are often tenants on the land.

Better soil health starts with collaboration

With farming and ranching occurring in all 50 of the United States and on roughly 40 percent of land around the world, there is global opportunity to continue building on the success of our soil conservation work and to share and learn from new experience. It starts with collaboration.

"2016-08-23-1471961854-5009698-TimSmith2.jpeg"

One example is the long-standing collaboration between The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) team at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We've worked jointly with influential farmers like Tim Smith, who was recognized for his leadership in sustainable agriculture by being selected as a 2015 Champion for Change. We recently visited Tim in Iowa to learn how he is focusing on soil health and what is working well.

"Soil health is an awareness," Tim told us. "There's more going on than having [particular] chemical properties ... We're also thinking about the biological properties that exist in the soil that really make the soil work."

Being on Tim's farm let us feel the effect of healthier soil. He contrasted "square and bare" fields that had been traditionally tilled with those that had cover crops. We saw how the fields that had cover crops absorbed water more quickly and kept it in the soil longer. Tim emphasized that these fields are producing more food with less water on the same amount of land.

"Conservation is very important to me," Tim said. "It deals with the land, the soil -- something we cannot replace. This farm has been in the family for 135 years. And a lot of times, I ask other farmers, 'Because of the way we farm and the practices we use, what's our soil going to be like in another 125 or 130 years? Are we going to have the same soils that we have now?'"

As part of his efforts, Tim is involved with the Soil Health Partnership, which is a farmer-led project focused on testing and sharing new approaches to improving soil health. Led by the National Corn Growers Association, both the Conservancy and NRCS are active in the partnership.

Cross-sector action
Soil health might not grab the headlines, but it might just be the most important agricultural conservation endeavor of our lifetime. If we want to meet the growing demand for food while strengthening the health of our communities, our land and water, and our climate, we need to support innovation in soil health and ensure farmers have broad access to the practices and incentives that can shift the paradigm. Part of this is working with businesses and other stakeholders to create new service offerings and innovative finance approaches coordinated with this transition.

There is emerging collaboration in the public sector as well, such as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's new soil science interagency working group that will receive input from 15 different federal departments and agencies. The working group to be co-led by USDA, USDI and NASA, will contribute to finding innovative ways of protecting America's soil.

This is an opportunity to take responsibility -- together -- for the land that feeds us and our children. We invite farmers, ranchers and consumers alike to join in collaboration in this next agricultural revolution -- a revolution that starts under our feet.

Image credits: 1) Soil sampling a wetland in First State National Park. Photo © Devan King/TNC; 2) Soybeans grow through a dense blanket of diverse cover crop residue in this Nebraska field. Photo © Ron Nichols/USDA-NRCS; 3) Tim Smith. Photo © Joseph Murphy/Iowa Soybean Association.

Explore The Nature Conservancy's latest thinking, science and recommendations on land conservation.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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