Global Warming Threatens China-Tibet Railroad

Abraham Lustgarten writes:

Building a railway across the unstable soil of the Tibetan Plateau was an improbable endeavor from the start, but an army of Chinese government engineers did it anyway.

Now, with the frozen soil disturbed by the process of laying down the rail and a warming climate on the plateau, some scientists question whether the $4-billion rail line will survive as is or require major reconstruction.

Three years after the railway opened in 2006, international research shows that the Tibetan territories are among the fastest warming, and fastest melting, on the planet. The research into the fate of glaciers and the permafrost soils—done by the United Nations, China's scientific agencies, and several independent scientists—is not focused on the railway. But the work raises concerns that the warming ground could lead to a buckling of the railway.

link: Will Global Warming Melt the Permafrost Supporting the China-Tibet Railway?: Scientific American

Wonders of the World Competiton: Whaddaya Got?

THE Great Barrier Reef and Uluru have made the final round in a global contest to select the new Seven Wonders of Nature.

The Australian natural landmarks were selected from a shortlist of 77 top spots around the world to be among the 28 finalists in the New7Wonders of Nature competition.

Only 21 finalists were expected to be announced, but the number was higher because of high levels of participation.

There were originally 441 nominees from 222 countries when the campaign began, with the entrants whittled down by public voting.

The contest now proceeds to the final round of voting, with an announcement due in mid-2011.

link: Uluru, Great Barrier Reef in line for Seven Wonders | News.com.au Top stories | News.com.au

Moroccan Immigrants Most Unhappy in Holland

Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands are the least happy of any Moroccan immigrants in Europe and their children are even more dissatisfied, the NRC reports on Monday.

The paper says a survey by an organisation called the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad concludes that the relationship between society as a whole and second generation Moroccan immigrants is 'significantly more tense' than in other countries.

The researchers looked at the position of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

In Europe as a whole, 50% of immigrants and their children said they felt rejected by society but in the Netherlands almost two-third said they were sidelined.

The survey also showed that while second generation immigrants are less likely to attend mosques than their parents, in the Netherlands children are more likely than their parents to actively practice religion (...)

link: Moroccans in Holland are most unhappy | EuropeNews

Genome Payola: Wolfman Gene Plays Double Helix

The Daily Galaxy writes:

"I can hear DNA on the internet." No, it's not Philip K. Dick's facebook status: it's what you could say too, listening to the broadcast of an entire human genome online. A project that's already started, and is going on right now.

The fantastic folk over at DNA-Rainbow have rendered the entire DNA code in audio form and are livestreaming it from their site 24/7. It's not a sound file or a download, it's a live broadcast (thinking about it, probably the "livest" thing ever to be broadcast) of a computer reading out the code, and at three characters per second it will take twenty three and a half years to complete. It will run all the time until 2032. That's how much information is carried in almost every cell in your body.

Katrin and Jens Bierkandt are the embodiment of cutting-edge - a biotechnologist and an internet developer, their powers combined to communicate the advances of science to the masses of the public. Their previous project, the DNA-Rainbow, rendered the entire thing as a four-color picture the public could see patterns in. (Well, five colors when you count the grey for bits we don't have info for yet - exactly the sort of information anyone can gain from these projects).

We're just waiting for someone to stick a drum and bass line on the broadcast. You've got the heart of a total techno hit right there, and the fact that it's driven by pure science and internet-juice just makes it that much more awesome.

link: DNA Radio -Now Broadcasting Live

Numerical Dreaming

Ptak writes:

Thinking big thoughts in dreams is generally not a common thing, as anyone who has read their own semi-conscious half-awake memory notes of a dream-based inspiration could attest. But it does happen: Paul McCartney1 dreamed the song Yesterday, Gandhi dreamed the source of non-violent resistance, Elias Howe dreamed of the construction of the first sewing machine, and Mary Shelley the creation of her novel Frankenstein... For good or for ill, William Blake was evidently deeply influenced by his own dreams; on the other hand, Rene Magritte was deeply influenced by dreams but didn’t use any of his own for his paintings. Otto Loewi turned an old problem into not one in a dream, finding a solution to the prickish problem of whether nerve impulses were chemical or electrical (and resulting in the Nobel for medicine in 1935); the fabulous discovery of the benzene ring came to August Kekule in a dream as well.

Artists have been representing people in dreams and dreamscapes for many centuries: Durer depicted a dream in a 1525 watercolor, for example, and thousands of artists have depicted famous biblical dreams (Joseph of Pharo) for long expanses of time.

What struck me, though, in this illustration found on the other side of the page of the Illustrirte Zeitung2 (for August 1932) that I used for yesterday’s post about damming Gibraltar and Shakespeare’s memories, was the depiction of someone dreaming mathematical thoughts…or at the very least, dreaming numbers. People have undoubtedly dreamed much in mathematics, but I can not recall seeing illustrations of these dreams.

link: Ptak Science Books: Dreams of Mathematics

O Arizona: Guns Legal in Bars And -- Dog Parks?

A woman pulled out a gun when a dog started to smell her dog while they were at a Surprise dog park on Friday, officials said.

At the park near 14600 block of West Paradise Lane the woman pulled out the gun and pointed it at the male owner as well as the dog. The woman told him to get his dog away, said Sgt. Mark Ortega, police spokesman.

The man pulled his dog away and left. No one was injured, Ortega said. The man was not able to provide a description of the woman to police.

link: Surprise police: Woman pulls gun over dog park incident

Facebook Has the Most Pie, but Twitter is Hungry

Mark Zuckerberg says people use Facebook "to stay updated on what's happening around them and share with the people in their lives."

Turns out it's true. According to AddToAny, a company that provides Web publishers tools to let their users share content, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service -- including, to our surprise, email.

But watch out, Facebook. As a means of sharing content, Twitter is already about half as popular with only about one-tenth as many users.

link: CHART OF THE DAY: How People Share Content On The Web

Local Food Resource

LocalHarvest is a comprehensive one-stop resource for finding locally grown food in the continental U.S. The site provides a customizable search feature on its homepage, and a simple zip code input provided me with a description and link to my closest Community Supported Agriculture option. Other search options include farmer’s markets, restaurants that serve food made with organic ingredients and grocery co-ops.

link: Cool Tools: LocalHarvest