Traditional Secrets To Keeping Cool—investigating Okinawan Textiles

Greenland is Melting Away

This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change.

 By NYTimes: Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins                                    

On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet. [bold/itals mine]

“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Dire report by three excellent Times journalists covering a team of researchers camped out on the icesheets of Greenland. The conclusion is that glaciers and land ice are melting at rates far higher than scientists anticipated, or that climate models have shown. This means that sea levels are rising faster than projected, and many coastal communities are in grave danger.

The economic impacts are incalculable.

The Scripps CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii have shown that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm). Because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, some scientists say for millennia, our global fever has reached the point that no one alive today, and those that follow us, will ever know a world below 400 ppm again.

This week will be the last time anyone alive experiences a CO2 level below 400 ppm. (Saturday Nov 21, 2015)

Amazing Maps of the World

700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative

Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.

The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Read more.

Three quarters of Britain’s juniper is found in Scotland, where it’s important not only to local gin production but also to wildlife, such as the juniper shield bug. Plantlife Scotland has published a free guide to help both professional and amateur botanists and horticulturalists identify, survey and protect the plants. Anyone can participate in the group’s survey and guardianship project.

(via Protect British juniper or risk losing gin’s distinctive flavour (Wired UK))

Game for climate adaptation

MIT-led project shows a new method to help communities manage climate risks.

The New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP) got local citizens and officials in four coastal towns to engage in role-playing games about climate change tailored to their communities, while conducting local polling about attitudes and knowledge about climate risks. In so doing, the project helped the towns reach new conclusions about local initiatives to address the threats posed by climate change— which in coastal communities may include rising sea levels and increased storm surges that can lead to flooding.

“One hour of conversation can completely alter people’s sense [and show] that this is a problem they can work on locally,” says Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor in Urban Studies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), who led the project and has now co-authored a new book detailing its results. “There are a bunch of things local governments can do, and people can do for themselves — that communities can do.”

The findings stem from years of research and organizing in four places: Wells, Maine; Dover, New Hampshire; Barnstable, Massachusetts; and Cranston, Rhode Island. The new book on the effort, “Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities,” has just been released by the academic publisher Anthem Press.

Among the many findings of the project is that residents of these coastal communities were typically far more concerned about the consequences of climate change than local politicians realized.

A Smart Menstrual Cup That Tracks Your Period And Makes Sure You’re Healthy http://ift.tt/1Ltl8JD

Paint job transforms walls into sensors, interactive surfaces

Smart walls react to human touch, sense activity in room

Walls are what they are – big, dull dividers. With a few applications of conductive paint and some electronics, however, walls can become smart infrastructure that sense human touch, and detect things like gestures and when appliances are used.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research found that they could transform dumb walls into smart walls at relatively low cost – about $20 per square meter – using simple tools and techniques, such as a paint roller.

These new capabilities might enable users to place or move light switches or other controls anywhere on a wall that’s most convenient, or to control videogames by using gestures. By monitoring activity in the room, this system could adjust light levels when a TV is turned on or alert a user in another location when a laundry machine or electric kettle turns off.

“Walls are usually the largest surface area in a room, yet we don’t make much use of them other than to separate spaces, and perhaps hold up pictures and shelves,” said Chris Harrison, assistant professor in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “As the internet of things and ubiquitous computing become reality, it is tempting to think that walls can become active parts of our living and work environments.”

Read more.

Computer Model to Help Manage Hydropower in Kenya

This is in our computer lab in the library