http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.nature.com/news/we-must-set-planetary-boundaries-wisely-1.10694 As pressure on resources increases, pollution accumulates and humanity's impact on Earth escalates, global-scale governance of the environment is increasingly necessary. In June, the United Nations' Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, will grapple with these difficult political issues. Up for discussion is a relatively new scientific concept: planetary boundaries. Formulated in 2009 by Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and his colleagues, the concept is based on the idea that humanity flourished under the conditions on Earth in the 10,000 years leading up to the industrial revolution — the Holocene epoch. So, to maintain human… ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 09:39:50 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/we-must-set-planetary-boundaries-wisely-1.10694 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/16/god-new-physics-paul-davies-review1/god-and-the-new-physics-by-paul-davies-book-review-tim-radford-science-book-club-science-guardiancouk God and the New Physics : http://t.co/lgtqoV1H via @guardian ]]> Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:25:08 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/16/god-new-physics-paul-davies-review1/god-and-the-new-physics-by-paul-davies-book-review-tim-radford-science-book-club-science-guardiancouk http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/03/the-virus-planet-a-hidden-universe-that-would-reach-out-100-million-light-years-todays-most-popular.html/quotthe-virus-planetquot-a-hidden-universe-that-would-reach-out-100-million-light-years-todays-most-popular Virus Planet: "There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Earth... more stars than are in the Universe" http://t.co/CJEbqpZC ]]> Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:36:41 -0700 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/03/the-virus-planet-a-hidden-universe-that-would-reach-out-100-million-light-years-todays-most-popular.html/quotthe-virus-planetquot-a-hidden-universe-that-would-reach-out-100-million-light-years-todays-most-popular http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/208891 If an alien located on a planet 100 light years from here was to switch on a big, multi-frequency radio receiver, and record all the noises coming from outer space for the next hundred years, on all frequencies, how many soap operas, advertisements and new broadcasts would they pick up from Earth? Would a mass-market radio, similar to our Earthly equivalents, pick up anything? Over time, as the number of Earth transmissions increases exponentially, would the alien pick up a cacophony or a damp fizzle? We've all heard the cliché that since the first radio broadcast, the Earth has been… ]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:09:12 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/208891 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/9094411/The-Hobbit-who-helped-us-find-our-origins.html/the-hobbit-who-helped-us-find-our-origins-telegraph The Hobbit who helped us find our origins http://t.co/1KIDllGa ]]> Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:20:14 -0700 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/9094411/The-Hobbit-who-helped-us-find-our-origins.html/the-hobbit-who-helped-us-find-our-origins-telegraph http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-02-08-metzger-en.html The new political ecology is thus emerging from a call for greater humility toward the world and all the life forms it may hold, both literally and figuratively. Rather than contrasting mankind to nature and the rest of the world, this perspective consistently perceives humans as relays in a dynamic mélange of relations that can be more or less open, inclusive, and stable over time, but without any preordained knowledge about how these relations may develop or change. ]]> Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:09:31 -0700 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-02-08-metzger-en.html http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14345%2Cy.0%2Cno.%2Ccontent.true%2Cpage.1%2Ccss.print/issue.aspx/rereading-darwin-american-scientist The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.”) http://t.co/51DRe7oS #Darwin ]]> Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:06:23 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14345%2Cy.0%2Cno.%2Ccontent.true%2Cpage.1%2Ccss.print/issue.aspx/rereading-darwin-american-scientist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:21:33 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space

Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the earth that nobody particularly intended to leave anywhere. But much of what we’ve left in space is intentional. Some of it is symbolic artifacts intended for an audience of people here on Earth - the fallen astronaut, the American flag on the moon, a CD containing a list of over half a million people who wanted to send their names to a comet, courtesy of a NASA… ]]> Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:32:57 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this week to debate the validity and definition of the 'Anthropocene', a proposed new epoch characterized by human effects on the geological record.

"We are in the process of formalizing it," says Michael Ellis, head of the climate-change programme of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who coordinated the 11 May meeting. He and others hope that adopting the term will shift the thinking of policy-makers. "It… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 11:27:47 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate… ]]> Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:27:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which… ]]> Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:55:38 -0700 http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Thu, 03 Mar 2011 02:11:22 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible dodge to get their genetic payload inside the host cell. In an early, RNA-protein world, there would not be enzymes to degrade DNA, so a virus encoded by DNA would have a big survival advantage. This suggests a scenario in which a clever parasite brings along DNA plus the means of copying DNA-- a different parasite at least for bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes-- and hijacks the cell's existing interpretation equipment.… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:32:46 -0700 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” and includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” He coins the term because he wishes to emphasize the idea of technology as an overarching entity that constitutes the equivalent of an evolving “seventh kingdom of life,” one that “predated our humanness.” Indeed, the “root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom.” A bird’s nest and a wooden… ]]> Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:03:18 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082 It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.

An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.

Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.

"Many problems we… ]]> Sat, 08 Jan 2011 08:50:13 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082 http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans. The line that delineates the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or the other ocean would follow the equator if the earth was a perfect ellipsoid. However, due to the significant relief of both the continents and the ocean floor, the hypothetical global divide between the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or another ocean deviates from the equator significantly. Analogous to the well-known… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:51:00 -0700 http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.… ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5502 [1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will.… ]]> Sat, 15 May 2010 04:25:00 -0700 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5502 http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/06/manual-for-civilization/ We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of… ]]> Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:26:00 -0700 http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/06/manual-for-civilization/