The Earth is alive, asserts a new scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects — for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA — are animate, that is, alive.

Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life,” published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on Earth and in the Universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres.

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Andrulis’ theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable.

The basic idea of Andrulis’ framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called “gyromodel” depicts objects — particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells — as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel’s center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life. An example of this nested, self-similar organization is the Russian Matryoshka doll.

By fitting the gyromodel to facts accumulated over scientific history, Andrulis confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature…

[continues at AstroBiology Magazine]

A newly discovered planet about 600 light years from our little rock has scientists around the world in a spin, with many heralding it as the best chance yet of containing alien life.

The find, announced early last week by NASA, was uncovered by the US space agency’s Kepler spacecraft, launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

The planet, Kepler-22b, is 2.4 times bigger than Earth, orbits a star slightly smaller than our sun and has an average temperature of 22C. It is also closer to its sun-like star, giving it a “year” of 290 days.

What makes this discovery so exciting is that it is the smallest planet right in the middle of what has been dubbed the Goldilocks zone, where it’s not too hot and not too cold to either boil or freeze water, vital for life as we know it.

“It’s very exciting,” said University of Sydney astronomer Dennis Stello, who works on the Kepler project. “This is the first time we have actually found such a small planet in the habitable zone.”

Scientists in the US have warned NASA that the amount of so-called space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point. A report by the National Research Council says the debris could cause fatal leaks in spaceships or destroy valuable satellites.

It calls for international regulations to limit the junk and more research into the possible use of launching large magnetic nets or giant umbrellas. The debris includes clouds of minuscule fragments, old boosters and satellites.

Some computer models show the amount of orbital rubbish “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures,” the research council said in a statement on Thursday.

More on the BBC

That is a new, estimated total number of species on Earth — the most precise calculation ever offered — with 6.5 million species found on land and 2.2 million (about 25 percent of the total) dwelling in the ocean depths.

Announced today by Census of Marine Life scientists, the figure is based on an innovative, validated analytical technique that dramatically narrows the range of previous estimates. Until now, the number of species on Earth was said to fall somewhere between 3 million and 100 million.

Furthermore, the study, published today by PLoS Biology, says a staggering 86% of all species on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and catalogued.

Says lead author Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada: “The question of how many species exist has intrigued scientists for centuries and the answer, coupled with research by others into species’ distribution and abundance, is particularly important now because a host of human activities and influences are accelerating the rate of extinctions. Many species may vanish before we even know of their existence, of their unique niche and function in ecosystems, and of their potential contribution to improved human well-being.”

[Continues at Physorg]

An asteroid 300 metres in diameter is stalking the Earth. Hiding in the pre-dawn twilight, it has marched in lockstep with our planet for years, all but invisible to our telescopes.

The rock is Earth’s first confirmed Trojan, which can orbit the sun in either of two gravitational wells along the same orbital path as our planet. From the sun’s point of view, these wells lie 60 degrees ahead of and behind the Earth, at Lagrange points where gravitational forces between the sun and the Earth balance out.

Trojans are common — Jupiter alone boasts about 5000, and Neptune and Mars each have their own smaller collections. But finding Earth’s has proven difficult, because the Lagrange points lie towards the sun in the sky. Astronomers must look for the objects just before the sun rises or after it sets, and until now the glare of this sunlight has obscured the feeble light reflected from any rocks that might be hiding there.

Now Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, and colleagues have used a heat sensor to see past the gloaming. Using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, they identified a 300-metre-wide Trojan now dubbed 2010 TK7.

Read More in the New Scientist

Mankind has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now — since the days of Marconi.

That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years across.

But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)?

More on jackadamblog

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sometimes asteroids come very close to home, about every six years. The latest asteroid to come closer to Earth than our own satellites appears today. Via Space.com:

An asteroid the size of a tour bus will fly past Earth today (June 27) so closely it will be beneath some of the planet’s satellites.

The rock, named asteroid 2011 MD will zoom by just 7,500 miles (12,000 km) above the planet, making a sharp turn forced by Earth’s gravity before winging off into space again. The flyby will occur at about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).

There is no risk of an impact, NASA scientists said. The space rock, estimated to be between 29 to 98 feet (9 to 30 meters) wide, is likely too small to survive a plunge through our atmosphere anyway. An asteroid this size, if it were mostly stony, would break apart and burn up before hitting the surface. Iron-heavy space rocks are better at surviving the fiery entry, however.

Either way, calculations show that asteroid 2011 MD will make a dogleg shift in its trajectory and scoot on by.

[Continues at Space.com]

The END has been with us for a very long, time and extends well into the future. Need I say that prophesy has, so far, failed? And that this is true as much for ’scientific’ prophesy (see 1962, 1975, 1976, 1989, 1992, 2002, 2005, 2008) as for the cultish kind?

______________________________________________________________

A new survey is under way to search for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but this one has a twist: Instead of listening for alien signals from anywhere in the sky, scientists are aiming radio telescopes at the alien planets most likely to be like our own Earth.

The new search, which began last week, is scanning 86 alien worlds for radio signals that could suggest the presence of an advanced civilization. The extrasolar planets are thought to be the most Earth-like of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered so far by NASA’s prolific Kepler space observatory.

“We’ve picked out the planets with nice temperatures — between zero and 100 degrees Celsius [32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit] — because they are a lot more likely to harbor life,” said physicist Dan Werthimer of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.

This new SETI search is not part of the SETI Institute, which has long served as the Earth’s ears for any signals from intelligent aliens. Earlier this month, the Institute announced it was placing its primary listening station – a network of radio telescopes called the Allen Array — in hibernation due to funding problems.

[Continues at Space.com]

Earth’s continents are constantly changing, moving and rearranging themselves over millions of years  — affecting Earth’s climate and biology. Every few hundred million years, the continents combine to create massive, world-spanning supercontinents.

Here’s the past and future of Earth’s supercontinets.

Read More of Alasdair Wilkins on io9.com

The Future of Oil: Who’s Fooling Whom? – and Why?

Draw a line five miles long to represent the millions of years during which solar energy has been captured and laid down in the earth’s crust in the form of coal, gas and oil. Then put a blip in it. That blip represents the time we have taken to extract and use this embodied energy. We are half way through the blip.

These fuels have given us a material standard of living that precious generations could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. Scientific progress would have been stultified without them. But we treat them as a permanent part of the economy. They are not. Our grandchildren will have to manage without them.

M. King Hubbert said, in 1956, that oil extraction in the US would peak after 15 years and then decline, never to revive. At the time extraction was relentlessly increasing and oil companies said he was mad. In 1971 US oil production duly peaked and has declined ever since in spite of a desperate hunt supported by the most sophisticated equipment in the world. The US is now dependent on imports for two-thirds of its oil. World oil is following the same pattern – the peak will be reached within the next few years.

We know the history of discovery and, obviously, more oil cannot be produced than is discovered. US mainland (48 states) oil discoveries peaked in 1930, 40 years before production peaked. World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s and new discoveries are gradually getting fewer and smaller. New fields will, of course, be found and each will grab the headlines for a time. But they will not change the overall pattern.

The total amount of conventional oil in the world (used, reserves and yet-to-find) is about 2,000 Gb (billion barrels) and about half has been extracted. If the amount of production falls and the demand for oil increases, particularly due to the growing Indian and Chinese economies, the price is going to rise – remorselessly.

We are now on a plateau where the amount of oil that can be produced is not much more than the amount in demand. When the world is in recession there is adequate production and the price of oil stays relatively low. This enables the world to climb out of recession. But then production cannot keep up with growing demand. The price rises adn the world slips back in to recession. The seesaw may last a few years but, in due course, the amount of oil we are able to produce will start to drop, never to recover, and recession will deepen. But instability in the Middle East may upset all predictions.

Saudi Arabia, with the biggest reserves, has a US army presence on its sacred land, a US trained defense force for its rulers, and a US fleet in the Gulf. The Caspian has significant reserves, so the US now has a military presence there, too. Iraq controls the second biggest reserves and is threatened with invasion. Iran is being closely watched as it could close the Straight of Hormuz, cutting off the Gulf. Venezuela has the largest reserves outside the Middle East, so no threat to its supplies will be tolerated. Angola has the largest reserves in Africa – watch this space.

Industrial farming is hugely subsidized and totally dependent on oil. Air travel is subsidized (aviation fuel is not taxed, air tickets do not attract VAT, and major new airports are being planned). Railways have been under-funded for 50 years and are now collapsing. The government has a huge programme for building roads. Excessive use of fossil fuels is causing climate chaos.

If we were sensible our top priority would be to reduce demand. If we wait until oil prices create deep recession we will not be able to afford the huge investment required for renewables.

Central Asia
For the US to be dependent on Russia for pipping oil out of the Caspian region was anathema. Iran was “evil.” The only other route was through Afghanistan. In 1998 the oil company Unocol appealed to a Congressional sub-committee for “the development of appropriate investment climates in the region”. “The construction of a pipeline proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognised government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company”. Dick Cheney was oil-pipeline consultant to several Central Asian republics as well as one of hte three deal-makers for Unocol. He is now Vice President of the US.

In July 2001 Pakistan’s foreign minister was told by the US that military action would go ahead against Afghanistan by mid October. By February 2002, following the Afghan war, the US had established permanent military bases in all Central Asian republics. Secretary of State Colin Powell said “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before [11 September].” Cheney indicated that the US was planning action against “40 to 50 countries”, even the take-over of Saudi Arabia’s oilfields is being discussed. The Bush administration calculates that political upheaval will enable the US to establish direct military control over global oil resources.

It’s world-changing (well if you believe in this sort of thing : ) If you’d like to read what’s really going on here behind the hubbub and learn a bit about astronomy not astrology, Charlie Jane Anders over at io9.com has an excellent post:

What on Earth is going on? And why does everybody suddenly have to work with a new version of the completely meaningless zodiac?

It seems to have started with this article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last weekend, in which one astronomer made some statements about the zodiac. Parke Kunkle is on the board of directors of the Minnesota Planetarium Society and teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kunkle told the Star-Tribune the Earth’s relation to the sun had changed since the Babylonians first created the zodiac.

We got in touch with Kunkle and asked him what he actually told the Star-Tribune. He said he was asked by the Star-Tribune to give them a few bits of information about astronomy, not realizing the article would become a huge discussion of astrology and the relationship between astronomy and astrology. And the main stuff he talked to the Star-Tribune about has to do with the phenomenon of “precession.”

Read More from Charlie Jane Anders over at io9.com

Author: Ryan Kitko (CC)

The Earth could lose more than one fifth of all known plants — forever! Story from the Guardian:

One in five of the world’s plant species – the basis of all life on earth – are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study published today.

At first glance, the 20% figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.

The previous estimate that 70% of plants were either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable was based on what scientists universally acknowledged were studies heavily biased towards species already thought to be under threat.

Today the first ever comprehensive assessment of plants, from giant tropical rainforests to the rarest of delicate orchids, concludes the real figure is at least 22%. It could well be higher because hundreds of species being discovered by scientists each year are likely to be in the “at risk” category.

“We think this is a conservative estimate,” said Eimear Nic Lughadha, one of the scientists at Kew Gardens in west London responsible for the project.

The plant study is also considered critical to understanding the level of threat to all the natural world’s biodiversity, said Craig Hilton-Taylor of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which runs the world’s offical “red list” of threatened species. “Plants are the basis of life, and unless we know what’s happening to plants it has many implications,” said Hilton-Taylor.

The results will be presented to world leaders meeting at Nagoya in Japan in October to discuss the world’s biodiversity crisis, along with new red lists for vertebrates and several groups of the planet’s millions of invertebrate species…

[continues in the Guardian]

A week or two ago the internets were ablaze with the news that not only did famed physicist Stephen Hawking appear to believe in the existence of life on other planets, but he was also of the mind that we should avoid them at all costs, because in his opinion they would be of the face sucking, giant lizard variety.

Many expressed dismay at his sentiment, but it’s really not that fantastic. Hawking’s theory is that if the universe is infinite, it would make sense mathematically for there to be other life forms in existence at various stages of development. His second point really isn’t that bold either. Why do we, in our limited knowledge, assume that advancement entails humanity?

Look at our species. As we advance, are we becoming more or less humane? And look at our history. We happen upon a new land, and what do we do with the native inhabitants? Do we allow them to live peacefully, or do we pull out everything in our arsenal and utterly fuck up their day until they are just a stain on history? Why should other life behave any differently?

The farther we go, the less human we become. Many people wish to relegate horrible atrocities to the past, but the truth is these things never stopped…

Read More: Smirking Chimp

The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.

Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

The changes can be modeled, though they’re difficult to physically detect given their small size, Gross said. Some changes may be more obvious, and islands may have shifted, according to Andreas Rietbrock, a professor of Earth Sciences at the U.K.’s Liverpool University who has studied the area impacted, though not since the latest temblor.

Santa Maria Island off the coast near Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, may have been raised 2 meters (6 feet) as a result of the latest quake, Rietbrock said today in a telephone interview. He said the rocks there show evidence pointing to past earthquakes shifting the island upward in the past.

Read More: Bloomberg

You can’t find New Island on most maps of the Indian Ocean because its location was a secret for most of the twentieth century. But now one man has chronicled the long, strange history of its ancient inhabitants.

The ruins you see here come from a group known locally as the “Old People,” who probably started living on the island 43,500 years ago. In the modern age, the island was discovered in the late eighteenth century by two convict ships that crashed there on the way to Australia. One of those ships was filled with hundreds of female convicts, who eventually founded their own civilization on the island, based on sexual equality and paganism. Today the island is a bustling place, full of trains and welcoming visitors.

Unfortunately, you can only visit via a website created from the imagination of Lee (Rusty) Mothes, a worldbuilder who loves to draw maps and island landscapes. New Island is a place he’s been imagining for over a decade, and he finally put all his pictures and ideas about it into one place, which reads like a work of fantasy travelogue.

Read More of Annalee Newitz’s article “The Lost Culture Of New Island Is 43,500 Years Old” on io9.com

A global plan to put man-made particles into the atmosphere to deflect the Sun’s heat would rapidly lower global temperatures until cuts in carbon dioxide emissions took effect, they argued.

They acknowledged concerns about geoengineering but said multi-national experiments should begin soon before it is too late to reverse climate change or in case a rogue state carried out separate measures.

The environmental scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada, Edward Parson of the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University, were writing an editorial in the journal, Nature.

They called for governments to establish a multimillion-pound fund for research into the simulated volcanoes and other solar-radiation management techniques for shielding the Earth against sunlight.

“The idea of deliberately manipulating Earth’s energy balance to offset human-driven climate change strikes many as dangerous hubris,” they wrote.

“Many scientists have argued against research on solar radiation management, saying that developing the capability to perform such tasks will reduce the political will to lower greenhouse gas emissions. We think that the risks of not doing research outweigh the risks of doing it.”

They said the cost of solar radiation management was 100 times lower than the price tag for cutting emissions to achieve the same effect, raising the risk that small groups of nations or even rogue states could act alone…

[continues in the Telegraph]

Professor Michel Mayor, the scientist who led the team that identified the first extrasolar planet in 1995, believes a planet similar in size and composition to Earth will soon be found.

Prof Mayor, of Geneva University, said that the prospect of finding a planet habitable for humans had come a step closer through rapid technological advances allowing observation of planets outside the solar system.

Addressing a Royal Society conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, he said: “The search for twins of Earth is motivated by the ultimate prospect of finding sites with favourable conditions for the development of life.
“We’ve entered a new phase in this search.”

More than 400 extroplanets have been discovered over the past 15 years, he added.

However, it is doubtful that any of these could be inhabited by humans because they are too large, Prof Mayor told the audience, which included representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Large planets are likely to have very active tectonic plates, making for a highly turbulent environment. To date, the smallest exoplanet found is 1.7 times the mass of the Earth.

Another key factor is finding a planet which is the right distance from the star it orbits so that its climate is temperate enough…

[continues in the Telegraph]

Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre (CNRS / ENS Lyon / Université Claude Bernard) suggests that water was not part of the Earth’s initial inventory but stems from the turbulence caused in the outer Solar System by giant planets. Ice-covered asteroids thus reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets.

The Earth’s water could therefore be extraterrestrial, have arrived late in its accretion history, and its presence could have facilitated plate tectonics even before life appeared. The conclusions of the study carried out by Albarède feature in an article published on the 29 October 2009 in the journal Nature.

Space agencies have got the message: wherever there is life there has to be water. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was bequeathed with sufficient water for oceans to form and for life to find favorable niches in the seas and on the continents resulting from plate tectonics. In comparison, the Moon and Mercury are dry, mortally cold deserts, Mars dried up very quickly and the surface of Venus is a burning inferno…

[continues in Science Daily]