Ecologically Better Way Construction.

18 04 2008

Five designs have been shortlisted in a competition to create an iconic visitor centre for a Lancashire wildlife haven. Lancashire Wildlife Trust has won the race to save Brockholes Wetland, a former gravel extraction site near Preston. The first phase will include the restoration of the wetlands, creation of ponds, seeding of meadows, planting new hedgerows and trees, making access paths and building proper bird watching hides.

It is hoped that the most urgent works can be completed in about three months, when there will be a grand opening by the Partners. However, this will only be the beginning of a project that will be measured in years. Local people will be encouraged to become involved in the reserve, trained and assisted by Wildlife Trust staff on site.

Brockholes will be an inspirational visitor attraction: a mosaic of lakes, reed beds, flower-rich grassland and woodland. It is encircled by the River Ribble, where otters are returning and is bordered by the largest ancient woodland in Lancashire, where badgers and bluebells thrive. It is already one of the finest sites for bird watching in the North West of England.

Critically, the development of Brockholes will also have a significant economic impact at both a local and regional level – dramatically enhancing a key gateway into the region (the site sits along side the M6), driving increased investment into the area through the extensive visitor and tourism facilities that will be developed on site and by providing an attractive and well managed area of green space for local people.

It is already home to a fantastic variety of birdlife including Lapwing, Sand Martin and Kingfisher, together with more vulnerable species such as Whimbrel, Skylark and Reed Bunting. The rich diversity of wildlife will include Great Crested Newts, bats, dragonflies and damselflies.


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Categories : Ecology, Future, News

Future of the Earth’s Oceans.

27 02 2008

Washington Post science writer Juliet Eilperin took part in a debate on the occasion of the future of the earth’s oceans and answered some interesting questions.

Eastern Market, D.C.: Juliet,
Having just seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” I am more than ever convinced that the unprecedented (and therefore unpredictable) melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps present a clear and present (”present” here means possible within a decade, or a year!) danger to the world’s coastal cities. I would like to find out more on this, specifically on the models used to predict the sea level rise and the way it would actually play out on the continental margins. What’s a good, succinct source?

Juliet Eilperin: One of the scientists I talk to regularly who has studied this question is Michael Oppenheimer at Princeton University-he has written on the West Antarctic ice sheet and I’m sure you can find his work at www.princeton.edu. Konrad Steffan at the University of Colorado at Boulder is a Greenland ice sheet expert, so you can google him to look at his research. And you’re right, both these ice sheets could transform the planet if they melted.

Washington, D.C.: The announcement of the new “preserve” in the Pacific is tempered by the fact that the pro-whaling nations seem about to win their 20-year battle to reopen commercial whaling (scientific and small- to mid-scale commercial whaling were never banned). The “whales are plentiful” argument which Japan, Norway and Iceland have advanced seems to have been purchased with grant-payments to smaller countries in the Whaling Commission. Two questions:

1. Why has there been no press attention to the agonizing inhumanity of whaling (i.e., the animal takes several hours to die, during which time it is live-butchered, fully conscious), as opposed to mere availability statistics?

2. Will Japan, Norway and Iceland win?

Juliet Eilperin: So far we’ve seen a mixed message out of the International Whaling Commission: they voted against a move to secret ballots (which would have helped the pro-whaling camp) and in favor of a declaration backing the idea of returning the commission to the idea of a body that regulates commercial whaling. So stay tuned this week and I can give you a better idea in a couple of days of what’s happening on this.

Washington, D.C.: What do you believe are the most serious short-term threats to the ocean’s health and what, if anything, can the average person do about them?

Juliet Eilperin: Overfishing is the most serious short-term threat to the oceans. Boris Worm, a professor at Canada’s Dalhousie University, recently published a paper with several other researchers in which he wrote about the “roving banditry” of commerical fishing fleets, which rely on modern technology to just fish a population to collapse and then move onto the next target. This is not to say all commercial fishermen are irresponsible: many care about sustaining their livelihoods over the long term. The industry in Alaska, for example, has done a much better job of regulating itself than the New England fishing industry. So that’s the most serious immediate problem (global warming is the most serious long-term threat). And the best thing ordinary consumers can do is eat fish that’s sustainably caught, or get involved in the legislation that’s currently pending before Congress, the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. This is the law that regulates fishing in the United States.


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Categories : Ecology, Ocean

Bio-Electromagnetic Weapons.

18 02 2008

At the beginning of February the U.S. Navy test fired an incredibly powerful new big gun designed to replace conventional weaponry aboard ships. New weapon uses electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants to fire a projectile farther and faster. The railgun, as it is called, will ultimately fire a projectile more than 230 miles (370 kilometers) with a muzzle velocity seven times the speed of sound (Mach 7) and a velocity of Mach 5 at impact.
The test-firing, captured on video, took place Jan. 31 in Dahlgren, Va., and Navy officials called it the “world’s most powerful electromagnetic railgun.”

“I never ever want to see a Sailor or Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage,” said Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. “We should never lose sight of always looking for the next big thing, always looking to make our capability better, more effective than what anyone else can put on the battlefield.”

What is Bio-electromagnetic Weapons?
This is an ultimate weapon system that operates at the speed of light; they can kill, torture and enslave; but the public are largely unaware that they exist, because these weapons operate by stealth and leave no physical evidence. Electromagnetic weapons have been tested on human beings since 1976 and according to “Science in Society” this weapon was being deployed in Iraq.

There is only one electromagnetic spectrum. Nuclear weapons release a great deal of ionizing radiation in the high frequency range above visible light, where the energy of the radiation is capable of breaking chemical bonds. The beginning of working up started in 1959 when Saul B. Sells, a professor of social psychology at a minor US university submitted a proposal to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to build for them the most sophisticated electroencephalography machine that would have an integral computational capacity to analyze and, hopefully, make sense of the brain waves it recorded. In other words, the professor proposed to make a machine that could tell the CIA what a person was thinking, whether or not the person wished to disclose that information. In 1973, Joseph C. Sharp, an experimental psychologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research performed an experiment that was pivotal to the development of the torture equipment being shipped to Iraq today. He had James Lin set up equipment in his laboratory which converted the shape of sound waves into microwave radiation that enabled him to hear himself vocalize the names of the numbers from one to ten in his head, by-passing the mechanism of his own ears. This particular experiment was never published but is mentioned in Lin’s book, Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications, published in 1978.

Today after the weapon test we can definitely say that the inevitable has occurred! But what is in store for us in future? I don’t thing it will be something good. Any weapon wants to be used.


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Categories : Ecology, Future, History, News, Science, Secrets, Technology, Weapons

Do We Have a Future?

5 02 2008

Recent scientific researches argued that a new epoch in the planet’s geologic history has begun. It seams that we have to say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Our world is in trouble.
Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:
Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.
Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.
Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.
Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.
In the February issue of the journal GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester and colleagues at the Geological Society of London argue that industrialization has wrought changes that usher in a new epoch, livescience.com. reports. Scientists of the future will have no trouble deciding if the proposal was timely. All they’ll need to do is dig into the planet and examine its stratigraphic layers, which reveal a chronology of the changing conditions that existed as each layer is created. Layers can reflect volcanic upheaval, ice ages or mass extinctions.
“Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion,” Zalasiewicz’s team writes.
Up to half of Earth’s land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems.
As early as the late 1800s scientists were writing about man’s wholesale impact on the planet and the possibility of an “anthropozoic era” having begun, according to Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term Anthropocene (anthropo = human; cene = new) back in 2000. That year, Crutzen and a colleague wrote in the scientific newsletter International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme about some of the dramatic changes:
“Urbanization has … increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years.”
Up to half of Earth’s land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems.
The epochal idea has merit, according to geologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University.
“In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large, and growing,”Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts show up.”

Calling things by their right the main and only cause of dramatic change is a critical mass of humanity that influences change at a global scale. What is the solution?


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Categories : Ecology, Future, Nature, News, Science, Space, Technology

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