I enjoyed seeing them, thanks! All clicked!
ehBeth wrote:I headed out to dance class in the storm - classes were cancelled.
There were some adventures on my way back to the subway to catch a bus home. snow snow snow
Here's a little slideshow of photos from the bus on my ride home (and a couple of photos of Cleo braving the drifts in the backyard)
December 16 2007 snowstorm ... click
Nice ones, ehBeth. Will go click. Will take rain, snow, sleet or ice.
Super funny, ehBeth. Will send to pals.
Hi all, Creaked for a tree -
Stradee,
I heard that N. California had turned over to a ton of wet snow.
sue, there is snow at higher elevations. A good freeze and weather, skiiers will be heading out for Tahoe! yaaayyy
Dan, Folsom Lake looked like a pond a few days ago. If the rains continue for more than a few days...
You and your 300 friends have supported 2,837,496.2 square feet!
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1 aktbird57 1585 65.138 acres
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The Biggest Global Warming Crime in History
The Canadian wilderness is set to be invaded by BP in an oil exploration project dubbed 'the biggest global warming crime' in history.
http://www.alternet.org/story/70299/
I think Alternet is one of the best sites on the net.
That's sad Amigo. I understand most of the Canadian oil is "oil sand" - I can't imagine what the landscape will look like.
Remember Bush's daughter visiting Paraguay last year? She secretly bought two thousand acres for her daddy - the prez. Today, I saw a news reports that Paraguay is standing on one of the last huge oil reserves. There should be a law.
Even a law won't stop those with weak to non-existent morality.
You and your 300 friends have supported 2,837,870.8 square feet!
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1 aktbird57 1586 65.145 acres
danon5 wrote:That's sad Amigo. I understand most of the Canadian oil is "oil sand" - I can't imagine what the landscape will look like.
Remember Bush's daughter visiting Paraguay last year? She secretly bought two thousand acres for her daddy - the prez. Today, I saw a news reports that Paraguay is standing on one of the last huge oil reserves. There should be a law.
Maybe they will get enough bad press to mobilize the new green movement thats going on to stop it. Regular house wives are becoming activist. It's becoming trendy in California.
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http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read/118791
"quadruple global-warming gases."
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Click
EPA Chief Denies Calif. Limit on Auto Emissions
Rules Would Target Greenhouse Gases
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 20, 2007; A01
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson yesterday denied California's petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, overruling the unanimous recommendation of the agency's legal and technical staffs.
The decision set in motion a legal battle that EPA's lawyers expect to lose and demonstrated the Bush administration's determination to oppose any mandatory measures specifically targeted at curbing global warming pollution. A total of 18 states, representing 45 percent of the nation's auto market, have either adopted or pledged to implement California's proposed tailpipe emissions rules, which seek to cut vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016.
Now this is well written:
The Circle of Life, Squarely Underfoot
By Adrian Higgins
Thursday, December 20, 2007; H01
That last leaf falls from the now-naked tree and the gardener's heart sinks. Winter is here.
But for the creatures of the underworld, as biologist James B. Nardi calls them, the leaf arrives like the fatted calf. As it settles on the soil surface, organisms that can be seen by us, such as wood lice, and those that cannot, such as bacteria, set into motion a hidden, primal banquet featuring hordes of revelers and many courses.
First, woodlice, millipedes and critters called springtails eat little holes in the leaf, providing openings for hungry bacteria and fungal threads. Their feeding, in turn, makes the leaf carcass more palatable to the larvae of crane flies and midges. Next to feast are fly maggots. Then snails, mites, crickets, earwigs and something called a bristletail have their fill. The countless jaw marks now provide a foothold for more bacteria. As they hasten the rot, mites, springtails and tiny worms called potworms finish off the meal. Almost. The remaining leaf skeleton, the least-digestible element of the structure, is pulled downward by earthworms, which use bacteria in their gut to complete the leaf's transformation into the humus that gives soil its dark richness and life. And what life.
Nardi, a scientist at the University of Illinois, writes in his newly published book, "Life in the Soil," that a square meter of healthy garden soil is home to 10 trillion bacteria, 10 billion protozoa, 5 million nematodes, 100,000 mites, 50,000 springtails, 10,000 creatures called rotifers and tardigrades, 5,000 insects and arachnids, 3,000 worms and 100 snails and slugs. Throw in the occasional mammal such as a chipmunk or a mole, and a salamander or two, and you get the idea that you don't have to travel to the Brazilian rain forest to luxuriate in the biodiversity at our feet.
Thin leaves that have a higher nitrogen content, such as an elm tree's, will break down in a year. Maple leaves, with more carbon, rot in two years. Oak and beech, tougher and with a greater ratio of carbon to nitrogen, take roughly three years to decay. But the gardener can vastly accelerate that process by chopping up the leaves, giving a far greater surface area to the microbes.
For really speedy decay, you can start a compost pile, where the correct ratio of brown to green matter, constant moisture and a certain mass of material soon will invite the sugar fungi. They secrete antibiotics to ward off rival fungi and bacteria, and they survive the high heat generated by their own metabolism: as much as 165 degrees in the heart of a new compost pile.
Nardi writes that "the billions upon billions of soil bacteria exert an extraordinary influence on the health of the earth." For example, if you were to measure the metabolic activity of bacteria in the top six inches of an acre of fertile soil, he writes, you would find that it exceeds the metabolic energy of 50,000 people.
What is even more amazing, I'd say, is that we as a species have been largely ignorant of this universe for so long. Nardi quotes Leonardo da Vinci as saying that "we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot." Given the expansion of our scientific knowledge of space since those words were uttered, and our indifference to soil life through global addiction to synthetic and harmful fertilizers over the past century, you could argue that that rift has grown wider.
Organic gardeners and farmers have always felt intuitively that you ignore the soil at your peril, but not until the recent past has the scientific basis for that become more broadly understood beyond the realm of soil scientists and microbiologists. We know now that long-lived trees and shrubs rely heavily on beneficial fungi and bacteria, which essentially extend the size of the root zone immeasurably.
In support of that, I recall a professional gardener at an arboretum telling me years ago that beech trees don't show meaningful top growth for seven years after planting, for it is during that period that beech-specific fungi are growing in the root zone.
Nardi explains that phenomenon in detail. I'd say that his book, which is published by the University of Chicago Press and costs $25, is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of this world and how to protect it.
As he points out, organic matter not only improves the structure of the soil, it also makes nutrients available to plants that otherwise would be chemically locked. It also feeds this vast world of vertebrates, insects and microbes.
It is ironic that the growth and health of plants are dependent on decay, but perhaps it isn't so much an oddity as the natural order of life on our planet.
But decay can run its course, with disastrous consequences for the soil world. "Over time," Nardi writes, "soil that loses more plant and animal material than it gains eventually loses its crumbs, its structure, its pores, and its air spaces." In warm climates such as ours, the rate of decay is far greater than in cooler ones. Once temperatures exceed 80 degrees, nature alone cannot replenish the amount of material consumed. So think of these microbes as workers in the factory, and you're the boss, and you have to keep the raw materials coming. Crank up that compost pile.
Nardi gives instructions in compost making, but so do a lot of other authors. More valuably, perhaps, he shows you how to capture some of these mysterious creatures and how to observe them. There might still be time to order (if not obtain) a simple microscope for Christmas. Dig up a small piece of beech or oak root and see for yourself what few others have observed: stubby little feeder roots joined by necklaces of beneficial root fungi.
It is surely as thrilling as seeing the rings of Saturn.
WOW[/color][/size]
Jet From Supermassive Black Hole Seen Blasting Neighboring Galaxy
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 18, 2007; A03
A jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting another galaxy nearby -- an act of galactic violence that astronomers said yesterday they have never seen before.
Using images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other sources, scientists said the extremely intense jet from the larger galaxy can be seen shooting across 20,000 light-years of space and plowing into the outer gas and dust of the smaller one.
The smaller galaxy is being transformed by the radiation and the jet is being bent before shooting millions of light-years farther in a new direction.
"What we've identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire," said Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He said any planets orbiting the stars of the smaller galaxy would be dramatically affected, and any life forms would likely die as the jet's radiation transformed the planets' atmosphere.
Black holes are generally thought of as mysterious cosmic phenomena that swallow matter, but the supermassive ones that occur at the center of many -- possibly all -- galaxies also set loose tremendous bursts of energy as matter swirls around the disk of material that circles the black hole but does not make it in.
That energy, often in the form of highly charged gamma rays and X-rays, shoots out in powerful jets that can be millions of light-years long and 1,000 light-years wide.
Scientists are just beginning to understand these jets, which not only transform matter in their path but also help produce "stellar nurseries," where new stars are formed.
Evans's collaborator, Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in England, said the collision they have identified began no more than 1 million years ago and could continue for 10 million to 100 million more years. Hardcastle called the collision a great opportunity to learn more about the jets.
"We see jets all over the universe, but we're still struggling to understand some of their basic properties," he said. "This system . . . gives us a chance to learn how they're affected when they slam into something -- like a galaxy -- and what they do after that."
The two galaxies are more than 1.4 billion light-years away from the Milky Way galaxy (a light-year equals about 6 trillion miles). But they are close to each other in cosmic terms -- about as far as the distance from Earth to the center of the Milky Way. That the two appear to be moving toward a merger may have played a role in creating such a powerful jet from the larger galaxy's central black hole.
The researchers said that the collision would have no effect on Earth, but the process is one that could play out in our galaxy a billion years into the future.
The galaxy Andromeda is the closest to the Milky Way, and the two are gradually coming closer to each other. In time, astronomers say, the two will merge, and the process may cause the dormant central black holes in either the Milky Way or Andromeda to become active and begin sending out similarly powerful jets.
If a jet were to hit Earth, Evans said, it would destroy the ozone layer and collapse the magnetosphere that blankets the planet and protects it from harmful solar particles. Without the ozone layer and magnetosphere, he said, much of life on Earth would end.
"This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling," Evans said.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said the discovery illustrates how researchers can now observe astronomical phenomena using many different tools and understand how they behave at many different points along the electromagnetic spectrum. Only when scientists measure a galaxy at all different wavelengths, he said, "can you really understand what's going on."
In making their discovery, the researchers used data from three orbiting instruments -- the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope -- as well as ground-based observatories including the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico and Britain's Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network. The Astrophysical Journal will publish the results next year.
Morning - although it's afternoon for me now.
Amigo, I forgot about the ice melt in the Arctic - everyones fighting over rights to the offshore oil.
sumac, nice articles.
