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?

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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

Posted in BIODIVERSITY | Leave a comment

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.

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Intelligent Technologies Hold Key To Greener Buildings

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

The Deutsche Bank LEED Platinum Towers in Frankfurt

A new debate is a brewing in green-building circles as architects, engineers and designers consider what it means to incorporate intelligent-building elements into sustainable, “green” structures.

Since taking off in the early 2000s, the green building movement has made great progress. By 2013, LEED-registered projects are forecasted to make up 20 to 25 percent of all new building projects in the United States. And momentum is also building in existing facilities, where green retrofits are expected to comprise 30 percent of all commercial projects by 2014.

But these projects can and should be greener. What the worl  needs is better integration between the green , sustainable and intelligent schools of thought to move sustainable buildings to the next level.

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Posted in Urban Studies | Leave a comment