The wet side of Greenland. Apparently almost the entire Greenland ice sheet, including the summit, are experiencing above-freezing temperatures this year, with ice sheet albedos at an all time low, leading to a dramatic increase in meltwater flow, doubling previous flow records in some rivers. Yikes!
Tag: science
Heat Waves and Climate Change
A short literature review on the connection between the present fires and heat, and climate change. No individual local weather event can be reliably pinned to climate change, but the probability of a winter and spring like the ones we’ve had in 2012 without climate change are very low. We are living in a different world now, and we don’t know how it’s going to work.
Sequencing Risks
A reporter from Bloomberg joins the PGP, only to discover that he carries a rare and potentially pathogenic acquired mutation, found in people with blood disorders. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, and neither do the doctors, really. Which is half of what this study is all about. What do we need to learn as a society to deal with knowing our sequences? A lot, I’m guessing.
Open Climate Science Course
The University of Chicago has created an Open Courseware style Climate Science 101, with videos of the lectures and self-assessment materials online. It’s aimed at non-science undergraduates. If you, or someone you know, want to get a little more in depth knowledge about climate science on their own time, it’s a great resource.
PLoS ONE: The Network of Global Corporate Control
The Network of Global Corporate Control, as revealed by a research group at ETH Zurich (kind of the Swiss MIT). Their core finding: a densely connected “super entity” of 147 corporations, about 75% of which are financial intermediaries, has an amount of control which is ~10 times as great as their economic scale would suggest. They are all majority owned by by other members of the super entity, and so have co-incident interests, and are likely to act as a bloc to protect themselves and each other, and to be subject to simultaneous group failure when under duress. Not like this is a huge surprise or anything, but it’s nice to see it described in a quantitative framework.
The capitalist network that runs the world
A team at the Swiss equivalent of MIT has revealed a dense knot of power and ownership interconnections within a particular subset of the world’s transnational corporations. It will come as no surprise that these companies are overwhelming financial firms… but this is the first time that anyone has really been able to lay out the structure of this network of power that runs the world in detail, accounting for all of the subsidiary ownerships and mutual shareholding. Tyler Durden would be inspired. The research paper will be published in PLoS One here Real Soon Now.
Solving protein structures with social computation
In just 16 days gamers solved a protein structure that had eluded computational methods for a decade. Distributed social computing? What other computationally difficult problems are susceptible to this kind of approach?
Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling
Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling, a good look at how the processes of science get misconstrued to the public at large, and why it’s not really a good idea for science journalism to focus on the current literature.
Scientific Civil Disobedience
Tens of thousands of academic papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are being shared via BitTorrent thanks to the work of someone going by the name Greg Maxwell. All of the papers are out of copyright — they date from the time of Newton up through 1923. Nevertheless, they have until now been locked up behind a paywall. Hopefully others in possession of such troves will follow suit. Scientific publishing is long overdue for this kind of shakeup.
A Space Aged Hiatus
Like a lot of scientifically inclined technophillic folks, the space shuttle’s last flight makes me feel a little melancholy. I believe there are very good reasons to send people off world. If we are both lucky and conscientious then in the fullness of time humanity — or whatever inherits our history — will mediate the migration of the terrestrial biosphere beyond this pale blue homeworld. In doing so, we will ensure, or at least increase the probability, of life’s persistence into deep cosmological time and space. This goal, or something akin to it, is what has motivated a lot of people (myself included) to work on space exploration over the last half century. It is an enduring motivation, but to the public at large and to policymakers, I think it comes off as esoteric, cultish, or at least eccentric.