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Homecoming of Odysseus May Have Been in Eclipse - NYTimes.com

Plutarch thought a crucial passage in the 20th book of the “Odyssey” to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse at the time of Odysseus’ return. A century ago, astronomers calculated that such an eclipse occurred over the Greek islands on April 16, 1178 B.C., the only one in the region around the estimated date of the sack of Troy. But nearly all classics scholars are highly skeptical of any connection.

Tags: Science on 2008-06-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ecology and Society:

Ecology and Society is an electronic, peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of current research. Manuscript submission, peer review, and publication are all handled on the Internet. Software developed for the journal automates all clerical steps during peer review, facilitates a double-blind peer review process, and allows authors and editors to follow the progress of peer review on the Internet. As articles are accepted, they are published in an "Issue in Progress." At six month intervals the Issue-in-Progress is declared a New Issue, and subscribers receive the Table of Contents of the issue via email. Our turn-around time (submission to publication) averages around 250 days. We encourage publication of special features. Special features are comprised of a set of manuscripts that address a single theme, and include an introductory and summary manuscript. The individual contributions are published in regular issues, and the special feature manuscripts are linked through a table of contents and announced on the journal's main page. The journal seeks papers that are novel, integrative and written in a way that is accessible to a wide audience that includes an array of disciplines from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities concerned with the relationship between society and the life-supporting ecosystems on which human wellbeing ultimately depends. Content of the journal ranges from the applied to the theoretical. In general, papers should cover topics relating to the ecological, political, and social foundations for sustainable social-ecological systems. Specifically, the journal publishes articles that present research findings on the following issues: (a) the management, stewardship and sustainable use of ecological systems, resources and biological diversity at all levels, (b) the role natural systems play in social and political systems and conversely, the effect of social, economic and political institutions on ecological systems and services, and (c) the means by which we can develop and sustain desired ecological, social and political states. In a recent editorial, Editors-in-Chief Carl Folke and Lance Gunderson summarize their vision for Ecology and Society: We view humanity and nature as co-evolving systems that interact within the bounds of the biosphere at various temporal and spatial scales and across scales. We hope to create a rigorous scientific forum where we can discuss issues related to the linked and dynamic systems of humans and nature and generate an improved understanding of essential interactions that will enhance our capacity to actively adapt to change without eroding resilience or creating vulnerability. (Conservation Ecology Volume 6, issue 1, article 19) We also encourage papers that make use of the unique opportunities of an e-journal: color illustrations, animated model output, down-loadable models and data sets, use of the "Response" option for interactive discussion, and other novel inventions to encourage reader interaction.

Tags: conservation, social-sciences, society, science, journal on 2008-05-28 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Marine Sciences Collection’s Blog

Marine Sciences Collection’s Blog To keep our marine sciences patrons informed about new bibliographic adquisitions in our Collection, services and links of interest

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At Botanical Garden: What Darwin Saw Out Back - New York Times

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CCMA: Benthic Habitats of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands

Benthic Habitats of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Providing a benthic habitat classification manual, a benthic habitat map for the nearshore waters of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and supplemental geospatial data.

Tags: science, conservation, MPA-AMP on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Puerto Rico Sea Grant College Program - Home

Welcome to the University of Puerto Rico Sea Grant College Program. We are an educational program devoted to the conservation and sustainable use of coastal and marine resources in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Caribbean region. Our mission is two-fold: to conduct excellent scientific research in the areas of water quality, fisheries and mariculture, seafood safety, marine recreation and coastal tourism, coastal hazards and coastal communities economic development; and to apply our scientific knowledge to solve a variety of problems our communities of users face every day. For over two decades the University of Puerto Rico Sea Grant College Program has been working to promote sustainable development and the wise use of marine resources in Latin America and the Caribbean region.

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The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

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Bush Sets Greenhouse Gas Emissions Goal - New York Times

Tags: science, conservation on 2008-04-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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President Bush called Wednesday for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and challenged other countries, including major polluters like China and India, to abandon trade barriers on energy-related technology and commit to goals of their own.
The White House cast Mr. Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden as an ambitious effort by a president determined to lead on the climate change issue, even with just nine months left in office.
But critics — including environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers — said the effort was too little, too late. They accused Mr. Bush of trying to derail legislation that would curb emissions even further. And because he did not offer any specifics for how to reach his 2025 goal, they dismissed the speech as irrelevant.
“The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,” he said. “The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology.”
“The train is moving toward legislation to control heat-trapping gases in the U.S.,” David Sandalow, an expert on climate change who worked for the Clinton administration, said in reaction to the speech. “President Bush’s announcement appears to be an effort to throw sand in the gears, offering a weak goal in place of strong legislation.”

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Edward N. Lorenz, a Meteorologist and a Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90 - New York Times

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Edward N. Lorenz, a meteorologist who tried to predict the weather with computers but instead gave rise to the modern field of chaos theory, died Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 90.
In discovering “deterministic chaos,” Dr. Lorenz established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said a committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences.
Dr. Lorenz is best known for the notion of the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.
As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.
The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.
At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.
Even though his model was vastly simplified, Dr. Lorenz realized that this meant perfect weather prediction was a fantasy.
A perfect forecast would require not only a perfect model, but also perfect knowledge of wind, temperature, humidity and other conditions everywhere around the world at one moment of time. Even a small discrepancy could lead to completely different weather.
Dr. Lorenz published his findings in 1963. “The paper he wrote in 1963 is a masterpiece of clarity of exposition about why weather is unpredictable,” said J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Henri Poincaré

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Cholera Epidemic in New York City in 1832 - New York Times

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On a Sunday in July 1832, a fearful and somber crowd of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park for more bad news. The epidemic of cholera, cause unknown and prognosis dire, had reached its peak.
The epidemic left 3,515 dead out of a population of 250,000. (The equivalent death toll in today’s city of eight million would exceed 100,000.) The dreadful time is recalled in art, maps, death tallies and other artifacts in an exhibition, “Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York,” at the New-York Historical Society. The show will run through June 28.
The outbreak, as portrayed in the exhibition and other documentation, highlighted the vulnerabilities of life in overcrowded cities in a time of deplorable sanitation and before medical science recognized the role of germs in disease. Cities were growing faster in population than in understanding what it took to make them fit places to live — an urban problem probably as old as the Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
The initial response to the epidemic, Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University, said recently, exposed more than ever the city’s divisions of class, race and religion. The disease hit hardest in the poorest neighborhoods, particularly the slum known as Five Points, where African-Americans and immigrant Irish Catholics were crowded in squalor and stench.

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Idea Lab - Memory - New York Times

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All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?
Much of the difference lies in the basic organization of memory. Computers
organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations,
with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map,
but we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve
information not by knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint
at what we are looking for.
In the best-case situation, this process works well: the particular memory we need just “pops” into our minds, automatically and effortlessly. The catch, however, is that our memories can easily get confused, especially when a given set of cues points to more than one memory. What we remember at any given moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active at that instant. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can all influence our delicate memories. To take but one example, studies suggest that if you learn a word while you happen to be slouching, you’ll be better able to remember that word at a later time if you are slouching than if you happen to be standing upright.
A team of Toronto researchers, for example, has shown how a technique known as deep-brain stimulation can make small but measurable improvements by using electrical stimulation to drive the cue-driven circuits we already have.
Making our memories both more accessible and
more reliable would require something else, perhaps a system modeled on Google,
which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability
of computers.
And it’s not just humans. Cue-driven memory with all its idiosyncrasies has been found in just about every creature ever studied, from snails to flies, spiders, rats and monkeys. As a product of evolution, it is what engineers might call a kluge, a system that is clumsy and inelegant but a lot better than nothing

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™ El Nuevo Día - La invasión boricua en la NASA

Tags: antropología, science on 2008-04-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Amazon’s ‘Forest Peoples’ Seek a Role in Striking Global Climate Agreements - New York Times

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A Shift in the Debate Over Global Warming - New York Times

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The economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: “Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”
What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak.
“There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary — it is,” said the authors, Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado; Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University. “The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation?”
In short, what is needed, he said, is a “major overhaul of energy technology” financed by “large-scale public funding of research, development and demonstration projects.”

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Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain. - New York Times

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Bush to Science: "Let's be friends" -- Grimm 2008 (401): 3 -- ScienceNOW

¿Por qué no podemos ser amigos? Es la la pregunta que le lanzó el presidente Bush a la comunidad científica. Una pregunta esgrimida un poco tarde. Los comentarios me invitan a usar palabras que tengo vedadas en este blog. Las dejo a su imaginación. Ya lo dijo el grupo War... “sometimes I do not speak right!”. También dijeron… “I kind of like to be your president, so I can show you how your money is spent!” Gente con vision. <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5DmYLrxR0Y8&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5DmYLrxR0Y8&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>

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NASA - Old Solar Cycle Returns

Todavía el Ciclo 23 está disparado. A cuidarse, porque lo que viene es mazacote. Como saben, alguna gente piensa que afecta el comportamiento humano. Pendiente a vecinos, amigos, conyuges y otros personajes de nuestra vida cotidiana.

Tags: science, society on 2008-03-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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