TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People? In an era of changing climate and sinking economies, Malthusian limits to growth are back--and squeezing us painfully. Whereas more people once meant more ingenuity, more talent and more innovation, today it just seems to mean less for each. Less water for every cattle herder in the Horn of Africa. (The United Nations projects there will be more than four billion people living in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from half a billion in 1995.) Less land for every farmer already tilling slopes so steep they risk killing themselves by falling off their fields. (At a bit less than six tenths of an acre, global per capita cropland today is little more than half of what it was in 1961, and more than 900 million people are hungry.) Less capacity in the atmosphere to accept the heat-trapping gases that could fry the planet for centuries to come. Scarcer and higher-priced energy and food. And if the world’s economy does not bounce back to its glory days, less credit and fewer jobs.It’s not surprising that this kind of predicament brings back an old sore topic: human population and whether to do anything about it. Let’s concede up front that nothing short of a catastrophic population crash (think of the film Children of Men, set in a world without children) would make much difference to climate change, water scarcity or land shortages over the next decade or so. There are 6.8 billion of us today, and more are on the way. To make a dent in these problems in the short term without throwing anyone overboard, we will need to radically reduce individuals’ footprint on the environment through improvements in technology and possibly wrenching changes in lifestyle. [More] Presented By:You Need the Speed of Norton 2009Introducing the revolutionary Norton Internet Security 2009. With a one-click, one-minute install, under 7MB of memory usage and fewer, shorter scans, it?s the fastest security suite anywhere. Get your FREE trial today!Click to Learn More www.norton.com/speed Ads by Pheedo rss.sciam.com |
Environmental fugitive arrested in Mexico Who knew that the EPA has its own most wanted list? On Friday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that U.S. and Mexican agents nabbed Robert Wainwright living the high life south of the border. Wainwright, arrested in Zamora this week, was wanted for allegedly dumping steel mill waste in an Indiana wetland while working as a manager for Sterling Material Services in Lake County. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Death of the directory: When was the last time you opened a phone book? They can be used to press flowers--or as a booster seat, door stop or laptop desk. However, fewer and fewer phone books today are employed as originally intended--to look up telephone numbers. So why are they still regularly dropped at our doorsteps? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Will E.T. Look Like Us? What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKAXrmkx12g ). Richard Dawkins himself made this interesting observation in a private communication after viewing it: I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates, and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached [referring to paleontologist Dale A. Russell’s illustrated evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid]. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Continuum of Change: The Hairless Human Darwin doubters have sometimes questioned evolutionary theory by asserting that no “missing link” exists between humans and other primates. But the fossil record shows that there was no instant leap to humanity: rather our species’ physical hallmarks appeared gradually over the past several million years. “Humans did not suddenly come into existence, but we share features with many other [species],” John G. Fleagle, an anatomist at Stony Brook University, has said. Fingernails evolved 54 million years ago (mya) and the opposable thumb 25 mya, for instance. The pelvis shape needed for walking upright as well as the knee appeared more than 3.5 mya, and the foot arch arose around 1.8 mya. Although skull construction was set around 35 mya, brains only ballooned in size between 2 and 1 mya, and the chin dates from around 200,000 years ago. With apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: what a patchwork is a man.One feature that visibly separates us from most other mammals is our lack of fur. As Nina G. Jablonski explains in our cover story, “ The Naked Truth ,” the transition of hirsute to hairless helped to set the stage for the emergence of large brains and symbolic thought. The appearance of bare skin was one of a suite of adaptations that allowed our ancestors to thrive on the savanna as grasslands expanded in Africa starting about three million years ago. [More] rss.sciam.com |