WASHINGTON — In a ‘sneak peak’ revealing a grim side effect of future warmer seas, new NASA satellite data find that the vital base of the ocean food web shrinks when the world’s seas get hotter. And that discovery has scientists worried about how much food marine life will have as global warming progresses. The data show a significant link between warmer water either from the El Nino weather phenomenon or global warming and reduced production of phytoplankton of the world’s oceans, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Nature. Phytoplankton are the microscopic plant life that zooplankton and other marine animals eat, essentially the grain crop of the world’s oceans. Study lead author Michael Behrenfeld, a biological oceanographer at Oregon State University, said Wednesday that the recent dramatic drop in phytoplankton production in much of the world’s oceans is a ‘sneak peak of how ocean biology’ will respond later in the century with global warming. ‘Everything else up the food web is going to be impacted,’ said oceanographer Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He was not involved in the study. ‘What’s worrisome is that small changes that happen in the […]
Consensus. That was the watchword for Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, as they unveiled the panel’s long-awaited report. Like a pair of politically ecumenical Siamese twins, they trudged around Washington chanting their mantra: ‘We believe that a constructive solution requires that a new political consensus be built, a new consensus ¦ at home and a new consensus abroad. And it is in that spirit that we have approached our study group’s task on a bipartisan basis,’ said Baker. We ‘hope very much that in moving forward others will wish to continue to broaden and deepen the bipartisan spirit that has helped us come together.’ Mission accomplished. According to the new NEWSWEEK poll, Americans back the ISG’s recommendations by a two-to-one margin. In interviews with 1,000 adults done Dec. 6 and Dec. 7, 39 percent of Americans said they generally agree with the group’s 79 recommendations, while 20 percent said they disagree. (Twenty-six percent said, in effect: ‘Report, what report?’) What is the new consensus? Nearly two out of three Americans (65 percent) concur with the Iraq Study Group that the U.S. should threaten to reduce economic and military aid to the Baghdad […]
Most children make adorable slip-ups in grammar when they’re learning to speak. Now scientists say the mistakes could vary by gender. Boys and girls tend to use different parts of their brain to learn some fundamental parts of grammar, according to a new study. ‘Sex has been virtually ignored in studies of the learning, representation, processing and neural bases of language,’ said lead author Michael Ullman, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University. ‘This study shows that differences between males and females may be an important factor in these cognitive processes.’ For the study, published in Developmental Science, researchers investigated the different brain systems that children used when they made mistakes like ‘Yesterday I holded the bunny.’ They found that girls tended to use a process that dealt with memorizing words and associations between them, whereas boys used a process governing the rules of language. Research has shown that women tend to be better at tasks that employ what is called declarative memory, such as memorizing word lists. They use what is called a ‘mental lexicon’ to memorize and remember words. Procedural memory, controlled by a different part of the brain, is used to […]
Driving up from London’s Victoria Station with my niece, Jessica, having just arrived in England from the States it began to rain. Serious pelting rain, quite different from the usual London squall. Suddenly a short way in front of us there was a violent blinding flash of lightning and, when our vision cleared, we could see what looked to me like the formation of a tornado — except London is not a city given to tornadoes. In 1958, pretty much to the day, they had had one, but nothing since. Yet, there it was. By the time we got to Jessica’s flat near Kensell Green, the rain had let up but we could hear sirens roaring from every direction. We turned on the television and heard the BBC announcer saying that just a couple of blocks away a tornado had touched down, and destroyed, with the efficiency of a massive bomb, about 70 houses. The phone rang and it was Jessica’s friend. Her windows had been blown out, were she, and her new baby, all right? Walking around to the area takes perhaps two minutes, and the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
