Friday, February 13, 2004

Beyond Belief Barry Carter writes: Imagine telling a person from the Agriculture Age that one day their children will no longer be taught at home. Their children will go off to a building where the parents have never visited and be taught and disciplined by people that the parents have never met. They will be grouped with hundreds of other children in one building. The father and mother will no longer work at home with their family. The mother and father will work inside of separate buildings many miles apart. They will have so little control over their work that they will have to request permission for a drink of water or to relieve themselves. Since both parents will work outside the home, the grandparents will be warehoused in a building with dozens of others and taken care of by people who don't know or love them. The parents and children will be away from home all day doing different things in different places and controlled by people who have little stake in their long-term well-being. Upon hearing this, a person from the Agricultural Age would probably conclude that this new world would be anti-family; he would be right. Centralized wealth creation produced anti-family institutions. It was the bureaucratization of the family. The "division of life" of the Industrial Age sent different family members to different "non-passionate" bureaus of society to have their needs met. This division of life, however, no longer works as our poor school statistics, along with problems in work and society, reflect.  (02/13/04) Sea Lion Populations in Free Fall BBC Environment -- Scientists believe they are closer to understanding why the populations of Steller sea lions and other mammals have collapsed in the north Pacific. The sea lions have seen their numbers fall by more than 80% since the 1970s. The North Pacific Universities Marine Mammal Consortium says the animals appear to have switched to eating fish with a very much lower fat content. This means the sea lions cannot build up sufficient blubber to survive and breed in their cold environment. "In 1977, there was knife-edge change - it cut right through the ecosystem," the consortium's director Dr Andrew Trites told the BBC. "It not only affected the seals and sea lions, it also affected the shrimps, the crabs, the salmon - a whole suite of species flipped overnight in their abundances." Steller sea lions are found from Japan through Russia, Alaska, British Columbia and down to California. ... A number of factors may have caused the switch in diet. Overexploitation could have impacted fish stocks; global warming may have played a role, too. But entirely natural phenomena that affect the ocean climate could also be responsible for changing the quantities of available fish. "So many changes that have occurred in the world to the abundances of animals are related to human activities," said Dr Trites. "This is a case where humans may not be involved - but we need absolute proof. "We need to approach this in many different ways. One is to work with captive animals, another is to do our studies and observations in the wild. We can also work in the labs using models to reconstruct the ecosystems." (02/13/04) NASA's Twin Rovers Deliver the Goods BBC Science -- The US space agency's robotic Mars explorer Spirit has sent back vital new information on the Martian atmosphere. The data could help scientists plan safer entry, descent and landing stages for future Mars missions, particularly if those missions are to be manned. Temperatures show huge fluctuations of up to several degrees in a minute. "The rovers are giving us good profiles of the temperature structure of the atmosphere," mission scientist Don Banfield told a news conference. "We didn't have very good data on the atmosphere prior to this." Temperature measurements were taken using the Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-Tes). "This is a new way to use the instrument that we hadn't thought about until we got to the surface," Dr Banfield explained to journalists in Pasadena, US. "We realised that what we could is stare up at the sky and take a spectrum every two seconds and from that spectrum get a temperature profile every two seconds. Mini-Tes was originally designed to look down at the minerals, but it can also look 30 degrees above the rover deck, or even a little bit higher." ... Meanwhile, Spirit's twin Opportunity sent back more pictures of the strange round soil grains that seem to be falling from the rocky outcrop that sticks out of the rim of the crater where it landed. Opportunity is continuing to map out a outcrop of intriguing layered rocks sticking out of the rim of the crater where it has landed. The rover had run into trouble driving up the rim of the crater. But engineers studied the problem on Earth using dry sand and learned that they needed to set the controls to overshoot their target while going uphill, while undercompensating when going down. (02/13/04) Sea Turtles Disappearing BBC Environment -- Longline fishing is taking a terrible toll on sea turtles in the Pacific. Loggerhead and leatherback turtles have an annual 40-60% chance of meeting a longline hook, and thousands are dying as a result, Dr Larry Crowder says. The Duke University researcher told a Seattle conference that urgent action was needed to prevent these creatures from disappearing from the ocean. The US marine ecologist says tracking technology reveals that turtles use the same areas as fisheries vessels. Dr Crowder made his comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here in Washington State. He says the impact of longlines on turtle populations has emerged from research he and colleagues have just submitted for publication in the journal Ecology Letters. Although turtles clearly lose large numbers because of habitat loss, egg poaching and predation at their nesting sites, he says the idea that so many are also being killed at sea in fishing gear is quite shocking. "In the year 2000, longline fishermen from 40 nations set at least 1.4 billion hooks on longlines that average about 40 miles long," he said. "That's 3.8m hooks per night that are set globally." Although not every encounter with a hook resulted in death, the losses are nevertheless substantial. The latest estimate suggests that globally loggerheads (Caretta caretta) are being killed at a rate of about a quarter of a million a year. In leatherbacks (Dermochelys coricea), the number is about 600,000. In the Pacific, where the animals are critically endangered, these losses are especially serious. (02/13/04) Human Population Must Fall BBC Environment -- As the world's reserves of oil and gas run out over the coming decades, the birth-rates of societies are likely to fall considerably, a US scientist says. According to some estimates, the global population may rise from its current 6.3 billion today to almost 9bn by 2050. But Virginia Abernethy told a Seattle meeting that the loss of fossil fuels would hit world economies very hard. "Economic hardship discourages people from marrying young and from having closely spaced children," she said. The anthropologist and professor emerita of psychiatry from Vanderbilt University was speaking here in Washington State at the annual gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The availability of energy has been a major factor in population growth," said Professor Abernethy. "In the modern context, energy use per capita affects economic activity. So a prolonged decline in energy use per capita will tend to depress the economy which, in turn, will cause a decline in the fertility rate." Abernethy said fossil fuels had become fundamental to the continued economic growth and improving standards of living which many societies had witnessed in recent decades. Not only does petroleum provide the fuel that powers modern vehicles and the natural gas that people use for home heating and cooking, but petroleum products are also the source for hundreds of industrial and agricultural products, including fertilisers, pesticides and plastics. This meant that petroleum could not be easily replaced by other fuels and feed stocks, the professor argued. "Without ample supplies of energy, we lose our agricultural capacity," she said. "If the price of fossil fuels goes up, pesticides and fertilisers will become more expensive and that will discourage farmers from using these inputs. Yields will go down and the price of food will go up and that in turn is perceived as quite an economic hardship." ... "In the US, we saw a huge effect from higher energy prices after the 1974 Opec energy embargo, which caused a fairly severe recession, and that was followed by quite sharp declines in the fertility rates of American whites and blacks." The effects of the coming changes were already being seen, said the professor. The average number of births per woman over a lifetime was now 2.3 and falling, she added. (02/13/04) 6:05:31 AM

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