| Paper or plastic--Or neither? Seattle votes today on 20-cent fee for disposable bags Seattle voters will decide today if they are willing to pay 20 cents for each disposable bag they carry out of a grocery store--paper or plastic . Many residents of the eco-conscious city already opt for their own reusable cloth shopping bags; could a financial incentive encourage more to follow suit? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped? Tropical cyclones, or hurricanes as they are known in the regions bordering the Atlantic Ocean, are among nature's fiercest manifestations, capable of releasing as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs. Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast leaving more than 1,800 people dead; Typhoon Morakot killed more people and did more damage to Taiwan than any other storm there in recorded history; and Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar (Burma) and resulted in at least 146,000 fatalities. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Brain-Training Software to Improve Your Driving Skills (preview) In the film noir classic Double Indemnity , insurance agents are presented as cold-blooded in their pursuit of the facts. But it wasn’t until I saw a recent advertisement for Allstate, the insurance company, that I realized how seriously insurance agents take neuroscience. Allstate was advising parents to vote for graduated driver-licensing laws because teenagers’ “dorsal lateral prefrontal cortexes” are immature.There’s a reason, as this ad implies, that there are age brackets for auto insurance premiums. We drive the way we do because of our brains, which start off immature, pass through an all-too-brief peak and, often, descend slowly into decrepitude. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Climate Change Imperils the State of the Planet--Will the World Act? NEW YORK CITY--More than 100 countries have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord --the nonbinding agreement to combat climate change hastily agreed to this past December at a summit of world leaders. As signatories, the countries agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep global average temperatures from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The countries that have signed up to date represent more than 80 percent of the global emissions of such heat-trapping gases. [More] rss.sciam.com |
All-out geoengineering still would not stop sea level rise Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space . Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it --or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions . Even replanting trees . All have been mooted as potential methods of " geoengineering "--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it. [More] Geoengineering - Royal Society - Charcoal - Current sea level rise - Climate change rss.sciam.com |