Climate Shift Causes Problems In China And Tibet


Record temperatures and severe drought in China

The worst drought in 60 years that has left millions of people in Yunnan province lacking drinking water has also fueled forest fires and threatened local energy supplies.

A local official said late Sunday the drought has inflicted a direct agricultural economic loss of 6.5 billion yuan ($952 million) in Yunnan.

The province has earmarked 389 million yuan ($57 million) for drought relief, said Zhou Yunlong, head of the provincial water resources bureau.

If the folks behind the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were crafty, they would have latched on to the upcoming movie, "The Crazies," for some free publicity.¹ Although that's probably not quite the image they want to convey, so maybe it was a shrewd non-move after all. Well played, American Psychiatric Association.

The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the latest addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory (eso0949), has captured a dramatic new image of the Orion Nebula. The New telescope is the largest survey telescope in the world and is dedicated to mapping the sky at infrared wavelengths.

Contradictions and puzzles surround Prototaxites, organisms that existed during the Late Silurian to Late Devonian periods-- approximately 420-370 million years ago (ma). The existing fossils resemble tree trunks, yet they are from a time before trees existed. The stable carbon isotope values are similar to those of fungi, but the fossils do not display structures usually found in fungi. Plant-like polymers have been found in the fossils, but nutritional evidence supports heterotrophy, which is not commonly found in plants.

Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, information on the causative link between brain activity and spirituality is lacking. Neuroimaging studies have associated activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but researchers have been unable to establish a causative relationship between such a network and spirituality.

In order to establish that relationship, researchers studied the personality trait self-transcendence (ST), which is thought to be a measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors, in patients before and after surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Researchers have isolated an independent processing channel of synapses inside the brain's auditory cortex that deals specifically with shutting off sound processing at appropriate times. The discovery, detailed this week in Neuron, challenges a long-held assumption that the signaling of a sound's appearance and its subsequent disappearance are both handled by the same pathway.

The new finding could lead to new, distinctly targeted therapies such as improved hearing devices, said Michael Wehr, a professor of psychology and member of the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience.

An international team of climate scientists say they have developed a new approach to modeling the earth's climate that will improve the accuracy of future models utilized by the IPCC and provide the framework for thousands of individual scientific studies on climate impacts and adaptation, and changes in the way societies generate and use energy.

Previous scenarios used by the IPCC usually assumed that no one would try to reduce climate change. Today, policymakers and researchers are interested in exploring ways to limit changes. Understanding the impacts and interactions of activities such as increasing energy efficiency and conservation, developing new renewable fuels to replace fossil-based fuels, and regulating how land is used are crucial to better decision-making.

There is an apocryphal story about a graduate mathematics student at the University of Virginia studying the properties of certain mathematical objects. In his fifth year some killjoy bastard elsewhere published a paper proving that there are no such mathematical objects. He dropped out of the program, and I never did hear where he is today. He's probably making my cappuccino right now.

If you feel like you have an achy breaky heart, you may not be imagining things. "Broken hearts" are indeed real, although in the medical community they go by the much less lyrical name of stress (tako-tsubo) cardiomyopathy.

A recent article in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology described stress (tako-tsubo) cardiomyopathy as "a rapidly reversible form of acute heart failure reported to be triggered by stressful events and associated with a distinctive left ventricular (LV) contraction pattern." Oooh, romantic. Shakespeare couldn't have written it better.

The authors of a new study published in Human Communication Research say that the media is losing some its ability to sway viewers on important social issues. Specifically, the study shows that the 'OC', a crummy drama series about teens and their turbulent lives in southern California, may be more effective in persuading young women to use birth control than a news-format program on the same issue.

The results show the power that narratives like TV shows can have in influencing people, said Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.