TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Solar Forecasts and Climate Change [Below is the original script. Some changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]Ultimately, global warming can be blamed on the sun. It's the sun's light that bathes the Earth and then gets sent back towards space as heat. But some of that heat gets blocked by those pesky carbon dioxide molecules building up in the atmosphere--inexorably warming our planet. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Observing Others' Self-Control Can Sap Your Own Mentally simulating another person’s efforts to use self-control may trick your brain’s “fuel gauge” into mistakenly thinking that your own resources have been depleted, a new study suggests. “We’re not as individual as we might like to think,” says Yale University psychologist Joshua Ackerman. “Often how we understand the world is by relying on the understanding of other people.”If your friend scratches her eyebrow or crosses her arms, studies suggest, odds are you’ll unthinkingly mimic the gesture. In the same way, research has shown, goals are also contagious: seeing another person pursue a goal--say, thwarting the urge to have one more Girl Scout cookie--automatically activates the same goal in one’s own mind. And neuroimaging studies indicate that mentally simulating another person’s experience triggers the same sensory and emotional brain pathways that are activated when one actually performs the action. For example, watching a video of someone about to cut her finger with a kitchen knife triggers brain areas involved in pain perception. [More] rss.sciam.com |
A Hiker in the City To the Editor:. nytimes.com |
Climate Change May Mean Slower Winds This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades’ worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex.The study of decreased wind speeds came from a team led by Sara Pryor, professor and chair of the atmospheric science program at Indiana University. It examined wind speed data from hundreds of locations across the U.S. The team attempted to correct for any change in instrument position (such as what would happen if an airport places its anemometer atop a new control tower) and calculated for each site the average annual wind speed. Pryor and her colleagues found that in most of the U.S. wind speeds appear to be waning, in many locations by more than 1 percent a year. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Draft text of new "Copenhagen Accord" Here is the latest draft text of the " Copenhagen Accord " put forward on December 18 by the U.S., China, India and South Africa, among other countries, at the climate summit in the Danish capital. Copenhagen Accord [More] rss.sciam.com |