KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Imagine the Sunflower State without its sunflowers. That’s one of the dire predictions contained in a new report on global warming released by the National Wildlife Federation, which says the Kansas state flower could move north to other states in a few decades. Increasingly warm temperatures also could mean the end of the state tree, the eastern cottonwood, according to ‘The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming.’ ‘Everything being equal, these plants won’t thrive and will shift north,’ said Patty Glick, the report’s author and senior global warming specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. While conditions could change, Glick and other say projected increasing temperatures also could wipe out cool-weather grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass, and many fescues that cover lawns in the region. Some experts think global warming will cause temperatures in Kansas to rise an average of 5 to 12 degrees in the next several decades. The projection that the sunflower could fade from Kansas’ landscape surprised some experts and scientists. ‘This is a plant that has survived for eons,’ said Dennis Patton, a horticulturist with the Johnson County Kansas State University Research and Extension office. ‘It is hard […]
One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a commercial flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, ‘Isn’t that AL GORE?!’ There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. ‘I’ll move them,’ I said; and Gore, before he could think, said, ‘No, don’t.’ Six […]
All Things Considered, May 17, 2007 · Researchers have found a way to encourage new hair growth in mice, and they’re hoping something similar can be done with humans. Hair comes from a complex mini-organ in the skin called a hair follicle. According to traditional thinking, new hair follicles only form in junior mammals. Once you’re an adult, and you lose some hair follicles, you’re out of luck in the hair department. Now it’s a funny thing about dogma, it tends to color the way you look at the world. Jonathan Vogel is a dermatologist at the National Institutes of Health. He says scientists who study how wounds heal relied on dogma to explain something they always see. ‘We know when we make wounds in mice that eventually that area is replaced with hair,’ Vogel says. ‘It’s not like the mice typically go round with large patches of skin without hair. But I guess we assumed that that was not new hair.’ Instead, it was thought that areas that previously had hair migrated in as the wound healed. But as George Cotsarelis reports in the current issue of Nature, that explanation appears to be wrong. Cotsarelis […]
BAGHDAD — More than 60 people were killed and dozens wounded in mortar strikes, drive-by shootings, roadside explosions, suicide bombings and other violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, as a new study warned that the country was close to becoming a ‘failed state.’ The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, said the country had tread close to ‘the edge of the abyss’ but now was making progress on political reforms needed to help mend sectarian and ethnic rifts that have pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Crocker cited what he said was Iraqi political progress toward agreements on constitutional reforms, the sharing of oil revenue and allowing former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath political party to take government and other public jobs. U.S. officials hope political compromises among Iraq’s Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds will complement a U.S. troop buildup in the capital and help to improve Iraq’s security situation. Contrary to Crocker’s assessment, some critics say that political progress has been too slow, while military counterinsurgency strategies have achieved mixed results, reducing some kinds of sectarian violence — such as killings by death squads — but having little impact on others, such […]
A subtle homepage redesign that gives more prominence to Google’s greatly expanded range of products and services, along with an improved set of results from the US Google.com search engine called ‘Universal Search’ ensures Google’s lead as the most accurate and relevant search engine is undiminished. This is despite some commentators believing Google’s better search results aren’t in Google’s or users best interests, but clearly, information resides in more than just HTML web pages, but also in scanned books, blogs, video clips, news stories and more. Being able to access this on one page of results gives you more – and better – information on the topic at hand. It helps you find information more easily, because it has brought you what should be relevant information that you didn’t even ask for, such as images or videos or blog entries or news stories, all of which could hold the answer to what you want to know. Google say their vision for universal search is to ‘ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
