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POPSIs a zero-carbon city on the horizon? As part of their Masdar Initiative (masdar meaning "the source" in Arabic), an effort to further the research and implementation of sustainable construction, the Abu Dhabi government will build this city on a nearby 2.3 square-mile site (six square kilometers), adjacent to its international airport at an estimated cost of $22 billion. It projected the city will eventually be able to sustain 50,000 residents and more than 1,000 businesses. It broke ground in construction of the city and hopes to complete the project by 2016.
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POPSHumans are endangered while ignorant of truth and reality. There are a number of links,which are to different fields. Some information be fact, some can be philosophical, or speculative, but it will modify any opinion. Any fact doubted should be verified but these days people are learning to do that as a matter of course. If we're going to get out of this hole, we n eed a bigger ladder.
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POPSSocial Networking for Zebras Ecologists have turned to computer scientists to develop dynamic graphs of social behavior among Zebra populations, revealing why some are thriving while others are endangered: The difference showed that the Grevy's zebras tended to hang out in cliques, whereas the onagers spent time with different buddies on different days. The methods developed turn out to applicable to human networks, too: In the meantime, Berger-Wolf is testing her methods on other datasets, including the records of e-mails exchanged at Enron that became available after they were subpoenaed. She has found some surprising connections between the two kinds of networks. "We can see that our method to detect when a lion was in the area of zebras detects very well when the subpoena was issued at Enron," she says. When faced with a lion, the zebras flee and follow one lead zebra. Similarly, after the subpoena was issued, e-mail traffic to the lawyers increased dramatically.
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POPSHumanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution If we recognize humanity is an integral part of the planet and begin working for a healthy Earth, then planetary evolution could move forward to some unknown future. On the other hand, Langmuir said, if we continue to view the Earth as something that is separate, that we merely use, then the resulting practices could damage the environment enough to stall planetary evolution, even causing it to fall back to a level where it supports just microscopic life. “The story of the Earth is our story. We are intimately connected in every fiber of our being, in every breath we take. We’re inseparable from the Earth,” Langmuir said.
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POPSWhat is the worst environmental disaster in history? Despite the relatively small amount of oil released, several factors contributed to the spill's severity: timing, location, abundance of wildlife and substandard cleanup efforts. In comparison, one of the largest oil spills in history, the rupture of an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico that released 140 million gallons (3.3 million barrels) of oil, caused relatively little damage because it happened in the open sea where currents and winds contained it until it disintegrated.
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POPSA dash of lime -- a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven is the brains behind the plan to resurrect the lime process. He argues that it could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost 'stranded' energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit – like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts – and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.
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POPSSingle Species Ecosystem Gives Hope For Life on Other Planets Scientists extracted all of the DNA present within 5,600 liters of fluid from a fracture deep within the mine. Expecting to find a mix of species within the fluid, the researchers were surprised to find that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory. A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. But this little bacteria has been happily living on its own and seems to have all of the genetic machinery to enable it to survive independently. Since it is the only species in the ecosystem, it must extract everything it needs from an otherwise dead environment.
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