The Automatic Earth — Ilargi writes: Tim Geithner and Christina Romer tried to paint another rosy economic picture in front of the House Appropriations Committee (”there’s progress, though it’s challenging”), but even their own fellow Democrats don’t buy into it anymore. American politics as a system has ceased to function, because the system has gone from representing people to representing money. And that is something that can only go well as long as the people have at least some of that money. Now that they’re increasingly shut out, the system shuts down; it’s inevitable. Which is why even rating agency Moody’s comes with an at first glance curious warning: even the credit raters now predict pitchforks.

We’ve seen tear gas in Athens recently, and that was just a little taste. As you may know, I’m spending some time in France right now, and it’s not hard to predict what will happen here if and when the government starts slashing salaries (as it must soon). The French simply won’t understand what’s happening, and mass protests will be the result, some peaceful, some violent. It’s every democratic politician’s ultimate conundrum: if you don’t tell people the truth, they’ll turn against you down the line; if you do tell them, they’ll turn against you right away. That makes it obvious to figure out which politicians actually do get elected. Where the government is left, it will swing right, and vice versa, in ever more extreme denominations.

And yet, it’s all just a prologue. There’s nothing easier for politicians than to play people against each other, in order to divert -negative- attention away from themselves. And so they will.

We have a baby boomer generation that has just about all the money that’s left in our societies. Their children, though, have nothing. Except for some hand-outs from their parents (I’m not talking individuals here). Unemployment among young people in many countries is downright scary, often in the 40%-50% range. No jobs, no money, no prospects. In times and places throughout history, this has brought populist dictators to the foreground, and pitchforks and torches into the streets, and there is no reason why it won’t now. Today’s political power is firmly in the hands of the 40-year and older crowd; they have elected incumbent politicians, and more importantly, they have the money and thus the power. The younger generation has no money and no power, but they also have nothing left to lose.

That is a dangerous combination, and how we deal with it will be what decides our futures. …

Most people are far too complacent when it comes to the consequences of a shrinking economic system. Many claim that we can easily downsize to smaller homes and smaller lives, since there’s so much we don’t really need anyway, that we will move in together and return to “good” conversations, growing our own tomatoes and all that. But that’s just not going to happen voluntarily, not on a large and wide scale. The human mind has no reverse. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel. We are built for one of two things: go forward or crash. It looks like there’s no forward left before a major crash happens first. It also looks like there’s not a whole lot of people who realize this. (03/17/10)

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BBC Technology — Engineers designing the world’s fastest car believe they now have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground. Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h).

Initial iterations of the car’s aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle’s rear. But the latest modeling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration, allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas.

“At Mach 1.3, we’ve close to zero lift which is where we wanted to be,” said John Piper, Bloodhound’s technical director. “Up until this point, we’ve had some big issues. We’ve had lift as high as 12 tonnes, and when you consider the car is six-and-a-half tonnes at its heaviest - that amount of lift is enough to make the car fly,” he told BBC News. “We’re very close now to fixing the exterior aero surface, which really opens the floodgates to the rest of the design work to really get going.”…

To claim the world land speed record, Bloodhound will have to better the mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997. It will be powered by a combination of a hybrid rocket and a jet engine from a Eurofighter-Typhoon.

Three who worked on Thrust are also engaged in the Bloodhound project, including driver Wing Cmdr Andy Green, project director Richard Noble and chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres.

They plan to mount their assault on the record in late 2011, driving across a dried up lakebed known as Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. (03/16/10)

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BBC Animal Science/Human Behavior — Governments need to crack down on illegal tiger trading if the big cats are to be saved, the UN has warned. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Doha, Qatar heard that tiger numbers are continuing to fall.

Organised crime rings are playing an increasing part in illegal trading of tiger parts, CITES says, as they are with bears, rhinos and elephants. …

Despite attempts to protect tigers, numbers have approximately halved over the last decade, with fewer than 3,200 remaining in the wild. The decline is seen across sub-species and in most range states. Many populations are small, and are threatened by deforestation as well as poaching.

“If we use tiger numbers as a performance indicator, then we must admit that we have failed miserably and that we are continuing to fail,” said CITES secretary-general Willem Wijnstekers. …

Although China and other East Asian countries are the principal consumers of tiger parts, exports travel much further afield.

Earlier this month, Operation Tram, co-ordinated by Interpol and including enforcement authorities in 18 countries, netted medicines containing wildlife products worth an estimated $10m. Tigers, bears and rhinos were among the animals used in making the medicines. (03/16/10)

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BBC Weather Science — It is a lovely day in Archer’s Wood, just south of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. The name, it is believed, comes from when the wood was chopped back at the side of Ermine Street, once a great Roman road, to ensure archers could not ambush travellers along the route.

The wood feels positively spring-like in the warm sunshine - the birds are singing. But look around the wood, and it is more like January than March. The trees are bare, and there are precious few signs of spring flowers.

The Woodland Trust says its researchers have uncovered “striking evidence” that common spring flowering plants are coming into bloom much later than would be expected. Its says its volunteers are reporting far fewer sightings of blossoming woodland plants.

We have had weeks of hard, white frosts and, despite the warmer weather, the soil in many parts of the country is still rock solid. So perhaps it is unsurprising that the plants that traditionally herald the beginning of spring are being rather tardy as well.

Researchers at the trust say the average UK flowering date of blackthorn is mid-March, and they would have expected around 1,000 sightings by now from their volunteers. So far, they have only received a handful of reports. “I was beginning to think there was a problem with our computer technology” says Kate Lewthwaite from the Trust. “But when you see so little evidence of spring on the ground, it makes sense.” (03/16/10)

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When solving problems you must examine your proposed solutions for: “What is seen, and what is Not seen.”

BBC Environmental Science — Fertilising the oceans with iron to absorb carbon dioxide could increase concentrations of a chemical that can kill marine mammals, a study has found. Iron stimulates growth of marine algae that absorb CO2 from the air, and has been touted as a “climate fix”. Now researchers have shown that the algae increase production of a nerve poison that can kill mammals and birds.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say this raises “serious concern” over the idea.

The toxin - domoic acid - first came to notice in the late 1980s as the cause of amnesiac shellfish poisoning. It is produced by algae of the genus Pseudonitzschia, with concentrations rising rapidly when the algae “bloom”. Now, its presence in seawater often requires the suspension of shellfishing operations, and is regularly implicated in deaths of animals such as sealions.

Domoic acid poisoning may also lie behind a 1961 incident in which flocks of seabirds appeared to attack the Californian town of Capitola - an event believed to have shaped Alfred Hitchcock’s interpretation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds in his 1963 thriller. …

Whether iron fertilisation ever will be deployed as a “climate fix” is unclear. The last major investigation - last year’s Lohafex expedition - found that despite depositing six tonnes of iron in the Southern Ocean, little extra CO2 was drawn from the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, one company - Climos - aims eventually to deploy the technique on a commercial basis. A Climos spokesman agreed that further research on domoic acid production was needed. (03/16/10)

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Fortune Magazine: World’s Most Admired Companies — Goldman Sachs rose to become the 8th most admired company in this year’s rankings. …

The public at large may still see Goldman as the poster child for the greed that sparked the financial crisis, but its reputation in the business world is stronger than ever: The company shot up 7 places from No. 15 last year.

The strongest financial services firm to emerge from the recession, Goldman paid back its $10 billion TARP loan with a 23% return to taxpayers in July, and has watched its stock rise 85% in the past year, and is currently trading around to $158 a share.

Responding to criticism over extravagant executive pay, last month the bank announced that as a bonus, CEO Lloyd Blankfein would collect 58,381 shares of restricted stock — valued at $9 million — but no cash. (03/04/10)

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Creators.com — Jim Hightower writes: In 2001, Goldman’s financial alchemists formulated a scheme to allow the Greek government to hide the extent of its rising debt from the public and the European Community’s budget overseers. Under this diabolical deal, Goldman funneled new capital from super-wealthy investors into the government’s coffers.

Fine. Not so fine, though, is that, in exchange, Greek officials secretly agreed that the investors would get 20 years’ worth of the annual revenue generated by such public assets as Greece’s airports. For its part, Goldman pocketed $300 million in fees paid by the country’s unwitting taxpayers.

The financial giant dubbed its airport scheme “Aeolus,” after the ancient Greek god of the wind — and, sure enough, any long-term financial benefit for Greece was soon gone with the wind. By hiding the fact that the government’s future revenues had been consigned to secret investors, Goldman bankers made the country’s balance sheet look much rosier than it was, allowing Greek officials to keep spending like there was no tomorrow.

Last month, however, tomorrow arrived. Greece’s crushing debt has exploded into a full-blown crisis, with its leaders disgraced and the country on the precipice of the unthinkable: the default of a sovereign nation.

So, who is getting punished for the finagling of Greek politicos and Goldman profiteers? The people, of course — just like here! Greeks now face deep wage cuts, rising taxes and the elimination of public services just so their government can pay off debts the people didn’t even know it had. Meanwhile, Greece’s financial conflagration is endangering the stability of Europe’s currency and causing financial systems worldwide (including ours) to wobble again. All of this to enrich a handful of global speculators.

Thanks, Goldman Sachs. (03/03/10)

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BBC Animal Science — Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental ‘odour map’ of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.

Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings.

Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food. When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.

Scientists knew the ant uses a sophisticated array of visual cues to find much of its way home. But Knaden’s team has now found that the insect does much more than that.

First, they placed four odours marked A, B, C and D around a barely visible nest entrance. They then tested the ants by removing and placing them in a remote location, without a nest entrance but with the same four odours.

The ants immediately headed to exactly where their nest should have been, confirming that they use the odours as olfactory landmarks. When the odours were mixed up, the ants became confused and unable to navigate their way home. “They had learned the olfactory scenery,” Dr Knaden told the BBC.

Ants with one antenna were also unable to navigate using more than one smell, confirming that the insects required two antennae, and an ability to smell in stereo, to find their way around. (03/02/10)

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BBC Anthropological Science — Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say. The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago. Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

“The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs,” explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France. “The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something. Perhaps they were trying to express the identity of the individual or the group,” he told BBC News.

Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution, and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world. Understanding when and where this behaviour first emerged is a key quest for scientists studying human origins.

Arguably the earliest examples of conceptual thought are the pieces of shell jewellery discovered at Skhul Cave in Israel and from Oued Djebbana in Algeria. These artefacts are 90,000-100,000 years old. (03/02/10)

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BBC Environmental Science — Consumers around the globe are not aware that they are “eating” rainforests, says Andrew Mitchell. In this week’s Green Room, he explains how many every-day purchases are driving the destruction of the vital tropical ecosystems.

When was the last time you had a “rainforest picnic”? Or even, perhaps, an “all-day Amazon breakfast”? Next time you are in a supermarket picking up a chicken sandwich for lunch, or fancy tucking in to a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage and bacon before setting off for work, spare a thought for the Amazon.

A new report by Forest Footprint Disclosure reveals for the first time how global business is driving rainforests to destruction in order to provide things for you and me to eat. … Consumers “eat” rainforests each day - in the form of beef-burgers, bacon and beauty products - but without knowing it. The delivery mechanism is a global supply chain with its feet in the forests and its hands in the till. Because of growing demand for beef, soy and palm oil, which are in much of what we consume, as well as timber and biofuels, rainforests are worth more cut down than standing up.

Governments, which claim to own 70% of them, create prosperity for their nations through this process, but poor forest communities need their forests for energy and food.

The report shows that the EU is the largest importer of soy in the world, much of it coming from Brazil. It also shows that after China, the EU is the biggest importer of palm oil in the world. Soy provides cheap food to fatten our pigs and chickens, while palm oil is in everything from cakes and cookies, to that fine moisturiser you gently rubbed into your cheeks this morning. I have become a bit of a bore in supermarkets, challenging my kids to hunt for soy lecithin or palm oil (often disguised as vegetable oil) on product labels. You should try it! The stuff is everywhere.

The gargantuan farms of Brazil’s Mato Grosso State can boast 50 combines abreast at harvest time, marching across monoculture prairies where once the most diverse ecosystem on Earth stood, albeit in some cases many years ago. (03/02/10)

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