Josh Fox’s “Gasland”-A Timely Warning About Our Policies

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Guest Post by Alexis Bonari

While preserving the natural beauty of the planet and preserving animal life for future generations should be reason enough to encourage planet-friendly policies, the human cost is also prohibitive. In this timely documentary and 2010 Sundance Film Festival award winner entitled Gasland (http://gaslandthemovie.com/), Josh Fox exposes the human cost of current United States gas drilling standards. After being offered a significant sum to allow a gas company to drill on his parents’ nineteen acres of land, he sets out on a mission to record the effect of drilling across America’s heartland. A man on a mission. As he travels, he finds that natural gas is leaking up through the ground and contaminating ground water. Fumes are affecting local wildlife populations, and many small lakes and rivers are losing massive numbers of fish and frogs. A new standard in documentaries.What sets Gasland apart from other similar documentaries is the candor with which Fox handles his side of the debate. He lets the plight of the people living near the gas wells speak for itself. Rarely does he make any sort of judgment call concerning how right or wrong our current drilling policies are. Tap water that can be ignited and a plethora of health problems are only a few of the side effects of drilling. The human cost.People living near the wells feel like they’ve been lied to. The companies won’t leave the land they’ve leased and the government won’t insist on more eco-friendly drilling standards.Gas companies = no comment .Throughout his journey, Fox attempts to solicit any sort of statement from the gas companies. True to form, they ignore all of his attempts to contact them.Although it is important to highlight the positive steps humans are taking to preserve our environment, it’s also crucial to point out local examples of failure to do so. Unless the costs to everyone involved are obvious, these unsafe practices will surely continue.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

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What’s the Point Visiting an Asteroid at Exorbitant Cost

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Recently, President Obama spoke at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to announce his new proposed direction for the US space agency: skip the moon, send man to a near-Earth asteroid (NEO) by the mid 2020’s and use this new technological know-how to get humans to our ultimate goal — Mars.

Why should we, as a race, support human spaceflight? This is one of the key questions hanging over the world’s space agencies in these hard economic times. It turns out that one answer is very simple: to protect Earth from civilization-ending asteroid impacts.But this is not so simple. Is this cos effective?

read here and Comment

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Fossilised cell blobs could be oldest multicellular life

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Until now, the 1.9 billion year old Grypania fossils, found in Michigan, were widely seen as the first clusters of organised and communicating cells. However, the new fossils , 2.1 billion years old, from Gabon, west Africa, may replace them.The 250 or so irregular blobs, up to 12 centimetres in length, have scalloped edges, suggesting an organised and growing colony of coordinated cells.

It is thought likely they emerged at this time to take advantage of a rise in atmospheric oxygen, which began around 200 million years earlier.

full story at New Scientist

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Birth of the Milky Way

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

For the first time, a team of astronomers has succeeded in investigating the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way. The scientists, from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University and the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, deduce that the early Galaxy went from smooth to clumpy in just a few hundred million years.The team publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Led by Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa, the researchers looked at the spherical groups of stars (globular clusters) that lie in the halo of the Milky Way, outside the more familiar spiral arms where the Sun is found. They each contain hundreds of thousands of stars and are thought to have formed at the same time as the ‘proto-Galaxy’ that eventually evolved into the Galaxy we see today.

read here

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