Vashon Cooperative Exploration and Learning Group

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

In Youngstown, it takes a village to shrink a city

June 20, 2011

In May as part of our “Shrinking Cities” series, the Blueprint America team traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, where a grand experiment in urban renewal is underway.

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams is leading a closely watched effort to “shrink” this blighted rustbelt city back to health.

Over half a century ago, Youngstown was a steel town and at its peak was home to nearly 170,000 people. Most lived in tidy middle class homes. But in the late 1970s the steel mills started shutting down. And in a story all too common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, Youngstown fell into a slow, steady economic decline.

Today, fewer than 60,000 people live amid the ruins of closed factories and abandoned homes. On some streets, more homes are vacant than occupied. The tax base has been decimated. Still, Mayor Williams has rallied a surprising amount of local support for his plan to remake Youngstown into a place worth staying in.

Mayor Williams told us that he needs residents... who are in Youngstown for the long haul — because living in a shrinking city isn’t for the fainthearted. And, in the last five years alone, the number of volunteer and nonprofit development groups in Youngstown is growing — up from 19 a few years ago to over 50 today.

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Can a city that has lost so much really recover?

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It’s a slow process. Youngstown didn’t lose more than 60 percent of its population overnight. It could take years, even decades, to rebuild. It will also take more than a mayor and his plan. To use a turn of phrase, it will take a village.

In Youngstown, a house now abandoned was a home

New Closeup of Saturn’s Largest Moons

By Lisa Grossman

This beautiful new image, captured June 16 by NASA’s Cassini orbiter, highlights the stark differences between Saturn’s two largest moons.

Rhea, the grey rock in the foreground, is a cratered, icy world about 950 miles wide. By contrast, Titan, the hazy yellow behemoth in the background, is Saturn’s largest moon at 3,200 miles across.

Despite their differences in size and composition, both have the potential to host complex chemistry, and even the precursors for life. Rhea has a tenuous, oxygen-rich atmosphere created by charged particles from Saturn’s magnetic field striking and splitting apart water molecules. Titan has lakes and rivers of liquid methane and ethane, a thick hydrocarbon atmosphere, and may have a subsurface ocean, making it one of the best hopes for extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

The vast majority of planets discovered around other stars have been gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter that probably aren’t well suited to life. But if those planets have moons that can support their own ecosystems, the galaxy might be full of potential for life. Recent research suggests that current surveys should be able to detect potentially habitable moons by their gravitational tugs on their host planets. Even if Rhea and Titan turn out to be lifeless, studying them can give astronomers an idea of what to expect on exo-moons.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Color composite by Jason Major.

3 of the 6 most disturbingly evil birds

By: Monte Richard

"Your penguin roundup"

by Karen Brazell

June 21, 2011

A young Antarctic Emperor penguin walks along Peka Peka Beach in New Zealand after it got lost while hunting for food Monday. Photo: AP/Richard Gill, Department of Conservation

If you feel like you haven’t gotten enough penguins in your life after taking the kids to see “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” this weekend, you are in luck, because there are a few more waddlers in the news today.

Straight out of “Happy Feet,” yet another penguin movie, comes the tale of the young Emperor penguin that showed up on a New Zealand beach Monday night. Conservation experts think the 10-month-old, 32-inch-tall penguin simply got lost while searching for food. Since Emperor penguins can spend months out at sea, and this little fellow seems well fed with plenty of body fat, officials are taking a hand-off approach and feel the bird will return to sea to feed and eventually make its way back home to the Antarctic. The last time a wayward penguin showed up in the South Pacific country was 44 years ago.

Perhaps the bird got disoriented because of the unexpected shutdown of the Disney website Club Penguin. Yesterday, many of the 12 million members of the children’s game-playing website were greeted by a generic domain renewal page. The cause of the problem was simple; Disney forgot to renew the domain name before the June 13 expiration date. The site was back online today, and the domain renewed through 2021.

Still need more birds? We’ve featured penguins in the news before:

Little penguin, big drama

The lost colony

Penguins in peril

A Solstice Approaches, Unnoticed

by James Carroll

ONCE, HUMANS were intimate with the cycles of nature, and never more than on the summer solstice. Vestiges of such awareness survive in White Nights and Midnight Sun festivals in far northern climes, and in neo-pagan adaptations of Midsummer celebrations, but contemporary people take little notice of the sun reaching its far point on the horizon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, the official start of the summer season, the fullest of light — yet we are apt to miss this phenomenon of Earth’s axial tilt, as we miss so much of what the natural world does in our surrounds.

In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before — earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur — as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”

To our ancestors in the deep past, that attention to nature was, well, natural. They made the evolutionary leap into human consciousness through close observation, among other things, of what heavenly bodies do in the sky. In a cosmos over which they had no control, paying attention to patterns of heat and cold, light and dark, rain and drought was a matter of survival. The invention of agriculture depended on awareness of seasons, so that times of planting and harvesting, herding and grazing, could be depended upon. Movements of the sun and moon were seen to have both influences on, and counterparts in, individual human experience — from mood swings to menstruation to aging. Astrology opened into astronomy, calculation into mathematics, scrutiny into science. Definitions of the calendar were essential to culture. The solstice was a marker of all this.

But this habit of regard for nature was essential also to the transition into modernity. Contemplation of the sun was nothing less than the incubator of our age. Copernicus and Galileo, after all, ushered humans into the breakthrough of testable knowledge by means of their study — one theorizing, the other experimenting — of Earth’s place in the solar system. The solstice, previously perceived as the sun’s standing still for a moment before reversing course on the horizon, would never be understood that way again. Heliocentrism initiated the maturing of science, which eventually would demonstrate that seasonal rhythms not only produce global dynamics of climate but also hormonal changes — daily, weekly, monthly — within the individual human body, each person biologically synchronized to the cosmic clock. Because of science, we were able to grasp the age of the earth — to know that there have been more than 4 billion summer solstices. Humans awakened to the full complexity of the universe.

Ironically, the accompanying social revolution of industrialization led to illusions of human mastery over nature, and ultimately to detached indifference toward it. Contemporary technological civilization became blinded to key phenomena of the living world, much as the night sky is blotted out by the artificial light of cities. Most recently, the cycles of time have given way to the eternal present of the computer screen — detachment squared. As humans came to know so much, we lost our grip on the knowledge with which we became human: our familiarity with the physical universe we live in. Imagining that we no longer needed nature, we ourselves became the great threat to nature. As our sense of the complexities of life quickened and deepened, our destructiveness of life also quickened and deepened. Through ambitions of unlimited growth, consumption, competitive manufacture, and self-expanding technology, we humans have become a mechanism of extinction. When we stopped noticing Earth, we began to destroy it.

Intimate awareness of nature and its cycles, as we saw, was an ancient mode of survival. But survival is at issue again. Noticing the length of light now, reveling in the sun’s achievement, rejoicing in Earth’s perfect balance, honoring the summer solstice — loving it: This is how we became human, and it is how we stay human.

"The Devastating Effects of GMOs on the Future of Soil"

The Devastating Effects of GMOs on the Future of Soil

Written by Dr. Gregory Damato

A recent study was conducted in Vidharbha, India to determine the effect of Bt (Bacillius thuringiensis) cotton on the microbial population of various soil micro-organisms. The results indicated a significant decline in total microbial biomass in the Bt soil. If current trends continue, the researcher estimated that 6.7 million hectares of planted Bt transgenic crops in India were in danger of becoming sterile and unable to grown anything within the next 10 years.

Monsanto's transgenic or genetically modified (GM) cotton is pervasive in India and is created using an insertion of three genes with only the soil bacteria, Bt, being used as a pesticide. Bt is a bacterium used for the biological control of alfalfa and redhumped caterpillars, cabbage looper and omnivorous and fruit tree leaf roller and is toxic to many types of moths and butterfly larvae. After two to three days of feeding on the Bt, the insects die.

Only recently, however, have researchers begun to study the deleterious effects of this unnaturally inserted bacteria on the viability of soil micro-organisms. A study conducted in December of 2008 examined soil micro-organisms from GM Bt-cotton on 25 different plots that had been planted for three years as well as non-GM cotton in Vidharbha. Vidharbha has been in the media recently due to the large increases in farmer suicides attributed to the devastating losses and economic turmoil linked to GMOs.

Bt-Cotton Effects on Micro-Organisms and Soil Enzymes

The researchers found significant microflora disturbances; specifically, a 17 percent decrease in actinomycetes and a 14 percent reduction in beneficial bacteria in the Bt-cotton soil as compare to the control (non Bt-cotton soil). Actinomycetes are necessary for breaking down cellulose and humus and mineralizing and immobilizing nutrients. Without this vital breakdown, the soil begins to die which increases the probability of disease in the plant and decreases the overall vital nutrients of the soil.

Soil enzymes (i.e., dehydrogenase, nitrogenase and acid phosphatase) were found to be significantly reduced in the Bt-cotton soil as compared to the non Bt-cotton soil. Specifically, the researcher found a significant reduction of 10.3 percent in dehydrogenase, a 22.6 percent decrease in nitrogenase and a 26.6 percent decrease in acid phosphatase. Soil enzymes, which make nutrients available to plants, are an integral and necessary component of soil metabolism. For example, nitrogenase balances and regulates nitrogen within the soil.

According to the researcher, "At this rate, in a decade of planting with GM cotton, or any GM crop with Bt genes in it, could lead to total destruction of soil organisms, leaving dead soil unable to produce food".

Clearly, when mankind begins to destroy nature by means of transgenic modification, the ripple effect disrupts the thousands of millennia old delicate symbiotic balance among micro-organisms, plants and humans. If this mindless and greed-driven control of the food chain does not stop, we have no one to blame but ourselves. It is our fellow man eroding the ecological fabric of nature right before our eyes, and therefore it is only man that has the capability to stop it.

Can humans "Sense" the Earth's Magnetic Field?

'For migratory birds and sea turtles, the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field is crucial to navigating the long-distance voyages these animals undertake during migration. Humans, however, are widely assumed not to have an innate magnetic sense.

But new research by faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that a protein expressed in the human retina can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila, reopening an area of sensory biology in humans for further exploration.

In many migratory animals, the light-sensitive chemical reactions involving the flavoprotein cryptochrome (CRY) are thought to play an important role in the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field. In the case of Drosophila, previous studies from the Reppert laboratory have shown that the cryptochrome protein found in these flies can function as a light-dependent magnetic sensor.

To test whether the human cryptochrome 2 protein (hCRY2) has a similar magnetic sensory ability, Steven Reppert, MD, the Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience and chair and professor of neurobiology and colleagues created a transgenic Drosophila model lacking its native cryptochrome protein but expressing hCRY2 instead. Using a behavioral system Reppert's group previously developed, they showed that these transgenic flies were able to sense and respond to an electric-coil-generated magnetic field and do so in a light-dependent manner.

These findings demonstrate that hCRY2 has the molecular capability to function in a magnetic sensing system and may pave the way for further investigation into human magnetoreception.

"Additional research on magneto sensitivity in humans at the behavioral level, with particular emphasis on the influence of magnetic field on visual function, rather than non-visual navigation, would be informative," wrote Reppert and his colleagues in the study.'

The Daily Galaxy via reppertlab.org and University of Massachusetts Medical School