Maps of various things

These are  really neat.

 

This map shows what is on the other side of the world from where you are standing.  For the most part it will probably be water.

This map shows the world divided into 7 sections (each with a distinct color) with each section containing 1 billion people.

This map shows the most photographed places in the world.

This map shows the longest straight line you can sail.  It goes from Pakistan all the way to Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia for a total of 20,000 miles.

This map shows the countries that heavily restricted Internet access in 2013.

This map shows the countries (in blue) where people drive on the left side of the road.

This map shows how much space the United States would occupy on the moon.

This map shows countries (in white) that England has never invaded.  There are only 22 of them.

This map shows (in white) where 98 percent of Australia’s population lives.

This map shows (in red, orange, and yellow) the world’s largest donors of foreign aid with red being the biggest donor.

This map shows (in blue) places where Google street view is available.

This map highlights the countries (in red and orange) with the most skyscrapers.

This is a map of the highest paid public employees in the United States.

This is a map of the all the rivers in the United States.

This is a map of 19th century shipping lanes that outlines the continents.

These are all the rivers that feed into the Mississippi River.

The line in this map shows all of the world’s Internet connections in 1969.

It may not come as a surprise but more people live inside the circle than outside of it.

Apparently you can’t get Big Macs everywhere.  This map shows (in red) the countries that have McDonalds.

And this map shows all the places where you can get eaten by a Great White shark!

And this is what the world would look like if all the countries with coast lines sank.

Germany’s 10 Huge Lessons About Solar Energy

Check this out from Germany who have embraced solar energy. Why can’t we? This is a must read. Click here for the full article or read an excerpt below.

 

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/02/11/germanys-10-huge-lessons-about-solar-energy/

 

Electricity suppliers get their electricity on the grid through a bidding process. The suppliers that can sell their electricity to the grid for cheapest win. Because the costs of solar and wind power plants are essentially just in the process of building them (the fuel costs are $0 and the maintenance costs are negligible), they can outbid pretty much every other source of power. As a result, 1) they win the bids when they produce electricity; 2) they drive down the price of wholesale electricity.

Because solar power is often produced when electricity demand is the greatest (and electricity is, thus, the least available and most expensive), it brings down the price of electricity even more than wind.

 

 

A CANADIAN NOBEL WINNER TALKS CLIMATE CHANGE, FLOODPLAINS AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO ALL OF US TODAY

This was interesting to listen to. I guess the tropical rainfalls are causing more fertilizer to runoff into the lakes and cause cyanobacteria blooms which kill our lakes and severely impact our drinking water. I can’t imagine where rainfall is going to end up (monsoons?) if the scientists are correct about temperature warming. Click here to hear the entire interview and the full transcription or read an excerpt below.

 

Jim Bruce – Well what we’re finding is that both for water quantities and water quality the changing climate which IPCC says is going to continue and get worse is having pretty serious effects, particularly as the atmosphere warms. We get more water vapour or what engineers like to call precipitable water in the atmosphere by 7% per every degree Celsius of warming and this means not that were getting more rainfall but that whenever the atmosphere gets organized to rain it rains more heavily so it doesn’t just rain, It pours and this means we’re getting more surface runoff events in the summer and in the off snow melt season. 

Bob Brouse – When you talk about the hard precipitation these are what we all see on the lead on the news. These are these fierce storms that we’re speaking of. Is that the case? 

Jim Bruce – Yes indeed and it is resulting in things like the big Toronto flood last year and the big flood in Calgary in June of last year. 

Bob Brouse – And according to you this is because there is more water vapour in the air that wasn’t there before? What was the case before? I don’t even know how to put this. What was the case before? 

Jim Bruce – Well, as I say, as the atmosphere warms it is able to hold more water vapour. It holds more water vapour to the tune of 7% for every 1 degree Celsius of warming. 

Bob Brouse – Wow. So if the atmosphere gets 1 degree warmer globally it could hold 7% more water than it used to. That is what you are saying? 

Jim Bruce – Yes. 

Bob Brouse – That is amazing Jim. So the practical reality of this to cities around the world, I guess, is they have to deal and cope with more extreme weather. Besides that, is this more or less predictable? Like for instance, I know Milwaukee has been doing tremendous rainwater mitigation, trying to trap it and get it off the wastewater systems. Is this what you’re seeing around the world? 

Jim Bruce – We’re not seeing as much good work as we are seeing in Milwaukee and a few other places but there needs to be a great deal of effort. I should say when we get those runoff events with the heavy rains, the runoff picks up lots of phosphorous and other contaminants from agricultural areas and also from cities and urban areas so when we look at the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is seriously back-sliding back in its eutrophic state and that’s because it’s getting more polluted runoff in these heavy rain events and there is apparently more phosphorous on the land and on the urban areas that gets into the runoff and into the lakes and is destroying the improvement that was made in Lake Erie back in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Huge Antarctic ice sheet collapsing

Is this a sign of the Tipping Point? Click here to read the full article or an excerpt below.

 

“It’s bad news. It’s a game changer,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasn’t part of either study. “We thought we had a while to wait and see. We’ve started down a process that we always said was the biggest worry and biggest risk from West Antarctica.”

The Rignot study sees eventually 1.2 meters of sea level rise from the melt. But it could trigger neighboring ice sheet loss that could mean a total of 3 to 3.7 metresof sea level rise, the study in Science said, and Rignot agreed.

The recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don’t include melt from West Antarctic or Greenland in their projections and this would mean far more sea level rise, said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. That means sea level rise by the year 2100 is likely to be about three feet, he said.

 

Early warning of climate tipping points

Interesting document with graphics. Click here for the entire article and please share; I`m sure someone could definitely use this information. Thanks.

Cyanobacteria: Washington state the center of climate change solutions

I am really not sure about this technology given that we don’t know a whole lot about what it is capable of. Click here for the full article or read an excerpt from their website.

 

Our synthetic and systems biology approach has led to several game-changing breakthroughs. We’ve engineered strains of cyanobacteria that can both produce high levels of lipids (oils) internally or secrete them externally. We’ve developed tools and the capability to genetically engineer multiple species of cyanobacteria. We’ve profiled the expression and metabolite patterns of multiple strains of cyanobacteria which allow us to unlock regulatory bottlenecks and identify new pathway opportunities.

 

 

Cyanobacteria Fossil: Stromatolites a window into Earth’s history

I think scientists will now be able to use these fossils to study how global warming will impact our world.

I disagree that tides, temperature and sunlight are the only things that control the growth of cyanobacteria because the bacteria have been found in pristine mountain lakes in Switzerland. This 2012 thesis supports my opinion where it states:

“… climate change may increase eutrophication in many water bodies due to
complex interactions with increased amounts of rainfall and snowfall, changes in water
temperature, alterations of mixed layer depth, and changes in species composition to
favor cyanobacteria (Dokulil et al., 2009). Eutrophication remains a challenge to manage
because of the complex interactions of factors that can drive its occurrence in lakes, and
different lakes may have different sensitivities to different factors.”

Click here to read the full article or an excerpt below.

Fossils offer a glimpse of what organisms have lived on Earth, such as woolly mammoths and Tyrannosaurus rex, and most don’t exist today. Some fossils resemble modern-day counterparts, such as ferns and petrified wood, and others have living examples, such as stromatolites.

Stromatolites are structures created by cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae). The internal structure resembles a cabbage while the outside can look mushroom-shaped, loaf-shaped or cauliflower-shaped.

Cyanobacteria create stromatolites by growing in layers in shallow marine water. Cyanobacteria grow in mats with nearly three billion cyanobacteria covering one square meter. As sediment is deposited over the cyanobacteria from tides and wave action, the cyanobacteria grow up through the sediment. Layers of sediment then alternate with layers of cyanobacteria.

If you’ve noticed the rocks around the base of the Kootenai River swinging bridge, they look like cream and black cabbages sliced open–these are fossilized stromatolites. The black layers are carbon-rich layers from when there was little deposition of sediment and the creamy layers are from periods of higher deposition.

Stromatolites grow slowly, so slowly that it can take 100 years for five centimeters of growth or 2,000 years for a stromatolite to reach one-meter high.

When living stromatolites were discovered in 1956 by scientists in Shark Bay, Australia, they were the first ever recorded examples of a structure previously only found as a fossil in ancient rock.

Stromatolites are one of the oldest fossils on Earth. Worldwide, the oldest fossilized stromatolites are found in South Africa and date back 3.2 billion years. The stromatolites around the Kootenai bridge are part of the Belt formation, a Precambrian sedimentary formation dated between 600 million and 800 million years old.

Stromatolites and the cyanobacteria that created them played a crucial role in shaping the atmosphere of Earth. Like all green plants, cyanobacteria absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use the carbon to build tissue and then release the oxygen.

During the Precambrian, the atmosphere contained very little oxygen. With the growth of stromatolites and the spread of cyanobacteria around the Earth, the atmosphere became more oxygen-rich and less carbon-rich.

The harsh conditions of the Precambrian, with its carbon-rich atmosphere, hot temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation set the stage for cyanobacteria to thrive at that time since little else could.
Living stromatolites are found in three places on Earth today: Shark Bay and two places in the Bahamas. Cyanobacteria thrive in Shark Bay because the water is twice as salty as normal seawater due to the restricted flow of the bay. In the Bahamas, stromatolites are found in sub-tidal channels where the currents are very strong and few animals can survive.

Burrowing and grazing marine animals are the demise of stromatolites because they destroy the layers. Therefore, as marine animals populated the oceans, the range of stromatolites decreased to places that were too hostile for animals to survive.

While there may only be a few places on Earth to view living stromatolites, those places offer an opportunity to study a living example of a fossil and determine what affects growth. Scientists have determined tides, temperature and sunlight control the growth of cyanobacteria. So not only do scientists have insight into the conditions on Earth three billion years ago but living stromatolites are keeping a diary of the current conditions on Earth.

What is Causing Iran’s Spike in MS Cases?

I don’t like to talk about this matter much mainly because I am a woman but I disagree with it just for health reasons. Women wearing these covers are vitamin D deficient. Click here to learn more and please share. Thanks.

Cyanobacteria: US scientist Craig Venter aims to make living copies of Martian life

I’m not sure this is a good idea. I think this is like introducing a species into a new environment. What happens if it thrives? Won’t that contaminate all future experiments regarding life on that planet? Click here to read the entire article and feel free to comment below with your thoughts.

On a sun-blasted tract of sand 22 kilometres south of Baker, California, molecular biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter is field-testing a technology he says will revolutionise the search for extraterrestrial life.

Not only does Venter say his invention will detect and decode DNA hiding in otherworldly soil or water samples – proving once and for all that we are not alone in the universe – it will also beam the information back to earth and allow scientists to reconstruct living copies in a biosafety facility.

“We can recreate the Martians in a P-4 spacesuit lab, if necessary,” the 67-year-old says matter-of-factly as he relaxes with his poodle, Darwin, in a luxury camper.

It may sound outrageous, but Venter’s concept of biological teleportation has captured the attention of scientists at the US space agency Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley.

Six Ames emissaries are on hand to assist in the field test.

The prospect of building a device that could land on Mars, or one of Saturn’s moons, and analyse samples without having to return to earth would save billions of dollars.

It would also eliminate the potential risks of bringing home alien pathogens, said Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden.

“The next mission to Mars will be in 2020,” Worden said. “That mission may well have this (technology) on it.”

The unforgiving Mojave Desert, with its shifting sand dunes and rugged fields of basalt, has long played the role of stand-in at Mars exploration rehearsals.

Such was the case when a team from Nasa and the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego and Rockville, Maryland, trudged through the desert last weekend, flipping over rocks in search of a bacteria with “super powers”, as Ames planetary scientist Chris McKay put it.

Highly resistant to radiation and extreme temperatures, the cyanobacteria called Chroococcidiopsis is a green crud that covers the bottom of translucent quartz rocks. Among other attributes, it refuses to die when deprived of air and water.

Scientists say it’s the sort of extremeophile that may be hiding out on other worlds and plan to use it in their terrestrial test run. “We’re in love with this organism,” McKay said. “It’s the closest thing we have to Martians.”

The game plan was to collect samples of the bacteria, prepare them for analysis and then load them into a genetic sequencer to determine the unique order of four repeating nucleotides, or chemical “letters”, in the bacteria’s genome.

Once that’s accomplished, the cyanobacteria’s DNA sequence will be downloaded by scientists at Venter’s for-profit company, Synthetic Genomics.

If it’s ever used on Mars, the technology is going to have to be roboticised and shrunk to a fraction of its current volume.

“It needs to be the size of a shoe box,” McKay says.

In 2007, Venter successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another.

Three years later, he announced he had built a DNA sequence in the lab and “booted it up” within a single cell of bacteria.

This cell went on to reproduce a colony of cells that bore the same lab-formulated DNA.

When he told of the feat in the journal Science, Venter said his team had created “synthetic life”.

While the desert field experiment was a test for the unit that hypothetically would travel to Mars to send back data, Venter said a prototype of the receiving technology exists as well.

That device, which downloads the DNA sequence and prints out the corresponding nucleic acids, will be available for sale next year.

Cyanobacteria: Beating Mother Nature at her own game

Cyanobacteria aren’t all bad but experts feel extreme caution should be used due to statements made at the 6th International Conference on Toxic Cyanobacteria in 2004 where they stated: “Substantial gaps remain in the understanding and recognition of the hazards and risks presented by cyanobacterial cells and their toxins.” Click here to read the entire article or an excerpt below.

…

The discovery was made after a team of Australian scientists came upon a new form of chlorophyll, the green plant pigment that absorbs the solar energy needed to synthesise carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water.
The team leader, Sydney University biologist Min Chen, says scientists previously knew of only four chemically distinct types of chlorophyll. The fifth, labelled chlorophyll f, uses long-wavelength light – which has a lower energy content per photon of light than any other known type.

In contrast with animals, plants, algae and some bacteria obtain their sustenance not directly from food but by absorbing energy from the sun’s rays, a process called photosynthesis. Using a complicated metabolic pathway, the sunlight is used to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose, an energy-rich sugar that powers plants and helps them grow and reproduce.

Photosynthesis occurs in the leaves of plants, inside minuscule structures called chloroplasts, which contain the crucial molecule chlorophyll that absorbs sunlight shining on the leaves. In addition to producing glucose, photosynthesis also gives off oxygen, which is released as a form of waste product through the plants’ pores.

Until recently, photosynthesis was believed to occur at wavelengths of between 400 and 700 nanometres, mainly because chlorophyll was thought to be limited to absorbing light in this range.

This long-held belief, described in earlier textbooks, was overturned in 1996 when scientists found a cyanobacterium, a form of photosynthetic bacteria, better known as blue-green algae, found in fresh and salt water, containing a modified chlorophyll molecule, named chlorophyll d. It could photosynthesise using light just outside the 400-700-nanometre range – at a wavelength of 710 nanometres, the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The finding perplexed scientists who struggled to understand how chlorophyll d was able to muster sufficient energy from infrared light for photosynthesis to take place.

Now the rules of photosynthesis need to be rewritten again, says Dr Chen, with the newly discovered chlorophyll f that uses light with lower photon energy at a wavelength of 730 nanometres – less than any other known type of green pigment.
“It seems that minor changes to the molecular structure of chlorophyll allow photosynthetic organisms to survive in almost any environment,” she explains.

Serendipity
Chlorophyll f was discovered by accident within stromatolites collected from Western Australia’s Shark Bay. These rock-like structures are built by photosynthetic microbes in the form of single-celled cyanobacteria.

The new chlorophyll allows cyanobacteria to photosynthesise using low-energy infrared sunlight.

“Finding the new chlorophyll was totally unexpected – it was one of those serendipitous moments of scientific discovery,” recounts Dr Chen, who was searching for chlorophyll d, which she knew could be found in cyanobacteria living under low-light conditions. “I thought stromatolites would be a good place to look, since the bacteria in the middle of the structures don’t get as much light as those on the edge.”

After obtaining a sample of stromatolite, Dr Chen searched for chlorophyll d by culturing the sample in infrared light. This ensured that only cyanobacteria with chlorophylls able to absorb and use infrared light could survive.

High-tech analyses of the cultured sample performed six months later revealed trace amounts of not just chlorophyll d, but also the new pigment – chlorophyll f.

An interdisciplinary team – including Sydney University’s Dr Martin Schliep and Dr Zhengli Cai, Macquarie University’s Associate Professor Robert Willows, University of New South Wales’ Professor Brett Neilan and Munich University’s Professor Hugo Scheer – characterised the absorption properties and chemical structure of chlorophyll f.

Testing its absorption spectrum revealed that chlorophyll-f could absorb much longer wavelengths of light than any other known type – 10 nanometres longer than chlorophyll-d and more than 40 nanometres longer than chlorophyll-a.

The sophisticated technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to determine the new pigment’s chemical structure, with details published in the journal Organic Letters.

Results indicated that most chlorophyll varieties exhibit remarkably similar chemical structures. Yet the minuscule nuances enable them to function in starkly different sorts of light environments.

The discovery has completely overturned the traditional notion that photosynthesis needs high-energy light, Dr Chen says. “It’s amazing that this new molecule, with a simple change to its chemical structure, can absorb extremely low-energy light. This means photosynthetic organisms can use a much larger portion of the solar spectrum than previously thought and that the efficiency of photosynthesis is much greater than we imagined.”

Applications
Chlorophyll f’s ability to absorb infrared light is expected to have numerous applications in industries such as plant biotechnology and bio-energy. It could also be used to help make solar panels more efficient by allowing them to convert a higher proportion of light into electricity.

Chlorophyll is very efficient at absorbing light, says Wei-Hua Wang of Taiwan’s Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica. He is working on a transistor coated with chlorophyll that increases the efficiency of switches in electronic components.
“Chlorophyll is remarkably stable and abundant,” Dr Wang explains.

“This is the first time that a biomaterial such as chlorophyll has been used as a photosensitiser for a graphene-based phototransistor. The fact that the performance of the device is comparable to other systems is impressive and shows a promising future.”

Next up
For Dr Chen and her team, the next challenge is to work out how the new chlorophyll works in the process of photosynthesis.

“Is its job to capture additional red light and pass it on to another form of chlorophyll, such as chlorophyll a?” she asks. “Or is it the only chlorophyll responsible for photosynthesis in cyanobacteria? And if it is, we will need to understand how this molecule can get enough energy from infrared light to make oxygen from water.”

The discovery, she believes, will transform scientists’ understanding of plant life: “It opens our mind to the many ways that organisms adapt to survive.”

Links
Learn more about the world of photosynthesis at: http://photosynthesisforkids.com/

Get to grips with the intricacies of chlorophyll at: http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/plant-terms/chlorophyll-info.htm

Indulge in some light work at: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec04.html

Read the papers: “A Red-Shifted Chlorophyll” published in the US journal Science at: sciencemag.org/content/329/5997/1318.short

“Spectra Expansion and Antenna Reduction Can Enhance Photosynthesis for Energy Product,” published in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology at sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367593113000562

“Expanding the Solar Spectrum Used by Photosynthesis” published in Trends in Plant Science at: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138511000598

Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 1pm, watch the IMAX Melbourne Museum movie The Earth Wins, exploring the delicate balance between humanity and the Earth. Details: imaxmelbourne.com.au/movie/the-earth-wins/education

VCAA links
AusVELS Science: Biological sciences: http://ausvels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Science/Curriculum/F-10

Science: http://ausvels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Science/Curriculum/F-10 (in particular, “Science as a Human Endeavour” strand, levels 5-10)