BBC Geographic Sciences — The most complete terrain map of the Earth’s surface has been published. The data, comprising 1.3 million images, come from a collaboration between the US space agency Nasa and the Japanese trade ministry.

The images were taken by Japan’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite.

The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth’s surface, and will be free to download and use.

The Terra satellite, dedicated to Earth monitoring missions, has shed light on issues ranging from algal blooms to volcano eruptions.

For the Aster measurements, local elevation was mapped with each point just 30m apart.

“This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world,” said Woody Turner, Nasa programme scientist on the Aster mission. (06/30/09)

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BBC Weather Science — A heat wave is sweeping the country and rains are delayed in many parts. Rains usually last from June to September. “It [the monsoon] is late,” federal minister Prithviraj Chavan told reporters. North-west India appeared to be worst affected by the slow rains with only 81% rains forecast.

Monsoon rains are critical to India’s farm prospects, which account for a sixth of economic output. Up to 70% of Indians are dependent on farm incomes, and about 60% of India’s farms depend on rains. Irrigation networks are dismissed by critics as inadequate. The summer rains are crucial to crops such as rice, soybean, sugarcane and cotton. …

“Praying for rain, bracing for worst” headlined the Hindustan Times on its front page on Wednesday. The newspaper said that in at least eight states, monsoon rains so far had been 60 to 90% below normal.

“There is concern but no worry as yet. There is still time,” Farm Secretary T. Nanda Kumar told the newspaper. One analyst said delay in the rains in some parts of India could hit economic growth.

“Delay in monsoon will play the spoilsport and may hit GDP by at least 1 to 1.5 percentage points,” stockbroker VK Sharma, told the Reuters news agency. Economists agree that the delay will cause further stress in a country where food prices are already high. (06/25/09)

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BBC Archaeological Science — Scientists in Germany have published details of flutes dating back to the time that modern humans began colonising Europe, 35,000 years ago. The flutes are the oldest musical instruments found to date.

The researchers say in the journal Nature that music was widespread in pre-historic times. Music, they suggest, may have been one of a suite of behaviours displayed by our own species which helped give them an edge over the Neanderthals.

The team from Tubingen University have published details of three flutes found in the Hohle Fels cavern in southwest Germany. The cavern is already well known as a site for signs of early human efforts; in May, members of the same team unveiled a Hohle Fels find that could be the world’s oldest Venus figure.

The most well-preserved of the flutes is made from a vulture’s wing bone, measuring 20cm long with five finger holes and two “V”-shaped notches on one end of the instrument into which the researchers assume the player blew. The archaeologists also found fragments of two other flutes carved from ivory that they believe was taken from the tusks of mammoths. The find brings the total number of flutes discovered from this era to eight, four made from mammoth ivory and four made from bird bones.

According to Professor Nicholas Conard of Tubingen University, this suggests that the playing of music was common as far back as 40,000 years ago when modern humans spread across Europe. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that music was part of day-to-day life. Music was used in many kinds of social contexts: possibly religious, possibly recreational - much like we use music today in many kinds of settings.” …

Professor Chris Stringer, a human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum in London comments: “These flutes provide yet more evidence of the sophistication of the people that lived at that time and the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between them and Neanderthals. I think the occurrence of these flutes and animal and human figurines about 40,000 years ago implies that the traditions that produced them must go back even further in the evolutionary history of modern humans - perhaps even into Africa more than 50,000 years ago. (06/25/09)

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CommUnity of Minds — John Mauldin in his latest issue of Outside the Box writes: What are we to make of the prospects for recovery over the next decade? Not much, if we listen to Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton. He suggests that the developed world could be entering a lost decade, just like Japan after their crash. Let me quickly point out that I routinely disagree with Krugman on a large number of issues. And I usually know why I disagree and believe his policy suggestions are wrong.

That being said, it is always important to occasionally look at ideas and thinkers that we may not always agree with. Krugman certainly qualifies on that front for me. However, it must be admitted that he is a very smart man. Further, his thinking is important, because it somewhat reflects the thinking of that part of the establishment that is in charge of the Fed and the Treasury. And while we are not getting gloomy long-term forecasts from either the Fed or the Treasury, I find it remarkable that Krugman is less sanguine than his peers. And there is much (certainly not all!) within this interview that I find myself in surprising agreement with. This one made me think as I read and reread it.

If he is correct, the rosy recovery assumptions built into the already bloated budget projections are going to be far too optimistic, not just for the US, but throughout Europe as well. Krugman is interviewed very capably by Will Hutton, a veteran writer and economist for The Guardian. …

Will Hutton: You are warning that what happened to Japan could happen to the whole world. Japan’s GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992 — 17 lost years. You are saying that this is an ongoing risk, certainly for the North Atlantic economy — maybe the world economy.

Paul Krugman: Yes. It’s not that the risk of the Japan syndrome has receded very much. The risk of a full, all-out Great Depression — utter collapse of everything – – has receded a lot in the past few months. But this first year of crisis has been far worse than anything that happened in Japan during the last decade, so in some sense we already have much worse than anything the Japanese went through. The risk for long stagnation is really high.

WH: So what is the heart of your pessimism? The bust banking system? A critic would say: “Hold on, Paul Krugman. Japan is a special case. It had an overblown export sector that had become too large for an American market it had saturated. The yen was very, very overvalued. And this interacted with a credit crunch and bust banking system. Its policy response was consistently behind the curve. That’s not the story of the United States or the United Kingdom.”

PK: The thing about Japan, as with all of these cases, is how much people claim to know what happened, without having any evidence. What we do know is that recessions normally end everywhere because the monetary authority cuts interest rates a lot, and that gets things moving. And what we know in Japan was that eventually they cut their interest rates to zero and that wasn’t enough. And, so far, although we made the cuts faster than they did and cut them all the way to zero, it isn’t enough. We’ve hit that lower bound the same as they did. Now, everything after that is more or less speculation.

For example, were the problems with the Japanese banks the core problem? There are some stories about credit rationing, but they are not overwhelming. Certainly, when we look at the Japanese recovery, there was not a great surge of business investment. There was primarily a surge of exports. But was fixing the banks central to export growth? In their case, the problems had a lot to do with demography. That made them a natural capital exporter, from older savers, and also made it harder for them to have enough demand. They also had one hell of a bubble in the 1980s and the wreckage left behind by that bubble — in their case a highly leveraged corporate sector — was and is a drag on the economy.

The size of the shock to our systems is going to be much bigger than what happened to Japan in the 1990s. They never had a freefall in their economy — a period when GDP declined by 3%, 4%. It is by no means clear that the underlying differences in the structure of the situation are significant. What we do know is that the zero bound is real. We know that there are situations in which ordinary monetary policy loses all traction. And we know that we’re in one now. (06/17/09)

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Yes! Magazine — Ellen Brown writes: To put our new car company American Motors (formerly General Motors) to good use, we just need to own a bank. The federal government could create its own credit with its own government-owned lending facility, on the model of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation used by President Roosevelt to fund the New Deal. But instead of merely recycling borrowed money as Roosevelt did, the new facility could actually create credit on its books. Its capital base could be leveraged into many times that sum in loans, in the same way that private banks routinely create money (or “credit”) today. Assuming a reserve requirement of 10%, if the $300 billion or so that remains of the TARP money were deposited in the new bank, this money could be leveraged into $3 trillion in loans. If the money were counted as capital, at an 8% capital requirement it could
become $3.75 trillion in loans, or 12.5 times the original sum.

Indeed, it is the sovereign right of governments to create the national money supply, but few governments exercise that right today. The only money the U.S. government now issues are coins, which compose only about one ten-thousandth of the U.S. M3 money supply. The rest is created by private banking institutions when they make loans. This includes the privately-owned Federal Reserve, which creates Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) and lends them to the government and to commercial banks. Federal Reserve Notes compose only 3% of the money supply. All of the rest consists merely of credit created on the books of private banks.

Many authorities have attested that banks simply create the money they lend as accounting entries on their books. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas states on its website:

“Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here’s how it works: Most of a bank’s loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank Ö holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times.”

This was confirmed recently by President Obama himself. In a speech at Georgetown University on April 14, he said:

“[A]lthough there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks—‘where’s our bailout?’ they ask—the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.”

The money generated by banks through the multiplier effect comes at a heavy cost in interest. One advantage of a government-owned bank is that it could fund public projects interest-free or nearly interest-free, cutting production costs dramatically. Interest comprises as much as 77% of the cost of goods and services, such as public housing, that require large amounts of capital. The cost of interest is lower for labor-based services such as garbage collection, for which it makes up only about 12% of the cost. Averaging them all together, the overall cost of interest has been estimated to be about half the cost of everything we buy. If money for infrastructure development were issued interest-free, projects currently considered unsustainable because of the burden of interest could become not only self-sustaining but actually profitable for the government. (06/16/09)

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Cluster F%#k Nation — James Howard Kunstler writes: This week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine lead article was about California’s Proposed High-speed Rail Project.

The article began with a description of California’s current rail service between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A commission of nine-year-olds in a place like Germany could run a better system, of course. It’s never on schedule. The equipment breaks down incessantly. A substantial leg of the trip requires a transfer to a bus (along with everybody’s luggage) with no working toilet.  You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic competence.

The proposed solution to this is the most expensive public works program in the history of the world, at a time when both the state of California and the US federal government are effectively bankrupt.

By the way, I wouldn’t argue that California shouldn’t have high-speed rail. It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas….

It would have been nice, too, if the doltish George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never entered his walnut brain.

The sad truth is it’s too late now.  But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !). The tracks are still there, waiting to be fixed. …

The fact that it is not even considered by the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling their eyes.  But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too stupid to survive as an advanced society. (06/16/09)

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Transitional Culture — Rob Hopkins writes: We live at a fascinating point in history. The convergence of challenges, most particularly global warming and peak oil, have brought us to a point where we are profoundly challenged to act. We are surrounded by what poet Gary Snyder, in his classic poem For the Children called “The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics” and by individuals telling us that this means the end, that we have gone too far, that it is inevitable that life as we know it will collapse catastrophically and very soon.

Yet, at the same time, something very powerful is stirring and is taking root the world over. People are choosing life and are manifesting that in their lives and their communities. People are starting to see peak oil as the Great Opportunity, the chance to build the world they always dreamt of. As one man said during a group discussion at the end of a screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Clonakilty, “we’ve just seen that the end of the Oil Age will bring about the collapse of industrial society — bring it on!”

The scale of the challenge is huge, and the obstacles are plenty, but there is an emerging energy to succeed, a sense of quickening and an exhilaration in talking and listening to each other once again, to visioning what we want and then rolling up our sleeves and starting to co-create it. This is not a denial of the scale of the challenges we face, rather a practical and instinctual response to it. In towns and cities all over the world people are asking each other “what can we do about this?”

What fascinates me, and what I plan to explore in this website, is the emerging culture that underpins this work. We are communities, a society, a world in transition, and to do that we need a culture of transition, but also the tools for manifesting it. The term “transition culture” originated with Louise Rooney who formulated the term “Transition Design” to best describe the work she and Catherine Dunne have undertaken in trying to drive the Kinsale Energy Descent Action
Plan forward (above picture show, left to right, Louise Rooney, Catherine Dunne and myself). I love the term, and see the work I am doing as looking into a slightly different aspect of transitions, that of how one really roots it in a culture and creates a “culture of transition.” So, credit where credit’s due, collectively we see our various works as moving beyond “environmental,” “sustainable,” “eco” this or that. This is about transition to where we want to get to, how do we do it and what might it look like. …

As a first exploration of these ideas a new film has been created titled In Transition. It is now available for viewing, but just for the next 72 hours.  The version being screened is not the final version, it still has a sequence to add and some tidying up to do, but it is almost there. Please enjoy the sneak preview! (06/13/09)

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BBC Medical Science — Fergus Walsh reports: Do you want to avoid catching H1N1 swine flu? … You could find a remote, uninhabited island until a vaccine is created. I think that’s going a bit far. But the best defence is age.

So far, the over-65s has been the group least likely to catch the infection. This has led to me receiving cheery comments from retired people saying that it’s the first time in some while that they’ve felt glad to be old.

So why aren’t they falling ill? The likeliest explanation is that they have built up immunity over years of exposure to other H1N1 flu viruses. That might also help to explain why most other people get a mild infection.

But I’m still puzzled as to why 30- to 50-year-olds are suffering a disproportionate amount of severe illness. In fact, I’m a bit puzzled as to exactly which age groups - under the age of 65 - are most at risk of severe illness.

In her speech in Geneva yesterday, Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general, had this to say:
r

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BBC Rain Forest Science — Five years ago, few knew there was a forest here. Its discovery by the scientific community is down to a very 21st-Century research tool.

“I used Google Earth to locate all the mountains over 1,500m that were closest to Mount Mulanje in Southern Malawi,” Dr Julian Bayliss, head of the cross-border conservation project, told me. “Mount Mabu was selected through Google Earth as one of these sights.”

Dr Bayliss’s project, funded through a British scheme called the Darwin Initiative, looked for similarities between different patches of medium altitude rainforest. When images of Mount Mabu were analysed, it became clear that there was a large patch of dark green of which there was no official record. A quickly arranged visit to northern Mozambique confirmed what Dr Bayliss had suspected.

“It was at that stage I realised that we were dealing with what looks like the biggest rainforest in Southern Africa,” he said. Travelling with Dr Bayliss and a team of scientists on to Mabu, I saw what had so excited them. Unlike most of the forests in southern Africa there was no sign of any logging or burning having taken place. The 7,000 hectares of Mount Mabu are in pristine condition.

“This is an island of evergreen forest in a sea of savannah,” Professor Branch said. What that means is that the animals inside Mabu have had very little interaction with other groups of forest dwellers. …

That now translates into many of the species being new to science.

Declaring a new species is a process fraught with the fear of being proved wrong. But Mabu’s scientists are quietly confident that, in the last year, they have found more than 10 new species. “Whatever we see we pick up, and there’s a high probability that it’s going to be a new species,” Dr Bayliss said.

His own specific passion is butterflies. I watched his eclectic team, which included a 75-year-old enthusiast, as they scoured the forest canopy for new discoveries. They weren’t disappointed. Four new butterflies are set to be confirmed, with one of them likely to bear Dr Bayliss’s name. (06/12/09)

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BBC Space Science — Seven shuttle astronauts (photo to the right) will blast off from Florida on Saturday to join up with six colleagues already on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting platform has never before had so many individuals moving around it at the same time.

The Endeavour ship is scheduled to lift off at 0717 local time (1117 GMT). The flight-time to the ISS is just three days. The union some 350km above the planet will be a significant moment for the space station project as it nears the end of its construction phase.

The 13 spacefarers represent all the major station partners, with seven from the US, two each from Russia and Canada, and one each from Europe and Japan. Their ages range from 37 to 55; all but one are men.

Although 13 people have been in space at the same time once before, in 1995, they were not all in the same place.

“I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” said Endeavour commander Mark Polansky, a veteran of two prior spaceflights. “We know it’s going to be challenging with 13 people aboard.”

His ship is visiting the station to deliver the final components of Japan’s Kibo laboratory. During five spacewalks, an external platform will be added to the lab which will enable those experiments to be performed that require materials to be exposed to the harsh environment of space. Endeavour astronauts also have to fit equipment to the exterior of the platform such as batteries and a spare space-to-ground antenna.

In addition, Endeavour will deliver a new crew member (Tim Kopra) to the ISS and bring back another (Koichi Wakata) who has lived aboard the platform for more than three months.

Endeavour is making the 127th space shuttle flight, and the 29th to the station. Seven more flights to the station remain before the shuttles retire in 2010. (06/12/09)

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