Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/294124978?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, March 24, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Global nitrogen availability consistent for past 500 years, linked to carbon levels
Global nitrogen availability consistent for past 500 years, linked to carbon levels
Friday, March 22, 2013A Kansas State University research team has found that despite humans increasing nitrogen production through industrialization, nitrogen availability in many ecosystems has remained steady for the past 500 years. Their work appears in the journal Nature.
"People have been really interested in nitrogen in current times because it's a major pollutant," said Kendra McLauchlan, assistant professor of geography and director of the university's Paleoenvironmental Laboratory. "Humans are producing a lot more nitrogen than in the past for use as crop fertilizer, and there is concern because excess levels can cause damage. The mystery, though, is whether the biosphere is able to soak up this extra nitrogen and what that means for the future."
Nitrogen is a key component of the ecosystem and the largest regulator of plant growth. It determines how much food, fuel and fiber the land can produce. It also determines how much carbon dioxide plants remove from the atmosphere, and it interacts with several components of the climate system. Excessive amounts of nitrogen in ecosystems contribute to global warming and impairment of downstream ecosystems.
McLauchlan worked with Joseph Craine, research assistant professor in biology; Joseph Williams, postdoctoral research associate; and Elizabeth Jeffers, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford. The team published their findings, "Changes in global nitrogen cycling during the Holocene epoch," in the current issue of Nature.
In the study the team also looked at how nitrogen availability changed thousands of years ago.
Roughly 15,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm, melting many glaciers and ice sheets that covered the landscape. Researchers found that Earth experienced an 8,000-year long decline in nitrogen availability as temperatures rose and carbon and nitrogen became locked up in soils. According to researchers, how the nitrogen cycle responded to these ancient global changes in carbon dioxide could be a glimpse into the future.
"What happened in the past might be a dry run for Earth's future," Craine said. "By looking at what happened millennia ago, we can see what controlled and prevented changes in nitrogen availability. This helps us understand and predict how things will change in the future."
The team collected and analyzed data from the sediment records of 86 lakes scattered across six continents. The lakes were distributed between tropical and temperate zones. With the data, the team was able to compare past and present cycling in various regions.
Researchers found that once most of the glaciers and ice sheets had melted around 11,000 years ago, the Earth continued to experience a global decline in nitrogen that lasted another 4,000 years.
"That was one of the really surprising findings," Craine said. "As the world was getting warmer and experiencing higher carbon dioxide levels than it had in the past, just like we are currently experiencing, the ecosystems were starting to lock carbon in the soils and in plants, also like we are seeing today. That created a long decline in nitrogen availability, and it scrubbed nitrogen out of the atmosphere."
McLauchlan said the most surprising finding, however, was that although humans have nearly doubled the amount of nitrogen to the ecosystems, globally nitrogen levels have remained stable at most sites for the past 500 years.
One reason may be that plants are using more nitrogen than they previously have, keeping nitrogen levels consistent with those thousands of years ago even though humans continue to add carbon dioxide and nitrogen to the atmosphere, McLauchlan said.
"Our best idea is that the nitrogen and carbon cycles were linked tightly back then and they are linked tightly today," McLauchlan said. "Humans are now manipulating both nitrogen and carbon at the same time, which means that there is no net effect on the biosphere."
The balance may be only temporary, McLauchlan said.
"Based on what we learned from the past, if the response of plants to elevated carbon dioxide slows, nitrogen availability is likely to increase and ecosystems will begin to change profoundly," McLauchlan said. "Now more than ever, it's important to begin monitoring our grasslands and forests for early warning signs."
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Kansas State University: http://www.k-state.edu
Thanks to Kansas State University for this article.
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Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/guest-lineups-sunday-news-shows-183815643.html
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Friday, March 22, 2013
Manual to "goblinproofing" chicken coops named Oddest Book Title
LONDON (Reuters) - A book offering advice on how to protect chicken coops from goblins has won the Oddest Book Title of the Year award, organizers of the contest said on Friday.
"Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop" by Reginald Bakeley and Clint Marsh attracted 38 percent of 1,225 online votes to beat craft manual "How Tea Cosies Changed the World" with 31 percent to win the 35th annual Diagram Prize.
Third place went to a book by Tom Hickman titled "God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis".
Also shortlisted for the award this year was a study of Adolf Hitler's health titled "Was Hitler Ill?", "Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts", and a guidebook titled "How to Sharpen Pencils".
Philip Stone, coordinator of the prize run by industry publication the Bookseller, said the award might seem just fun but publishers and booksellers were well aware that a title can make all the difference to the sales of a book.
"It spotlights an undervalued art that can make or break a work of literature," Stone said in a statement.
He cited books such as "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian", "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" as owing part of their success to odd titles.
"The kind of niche, off-beat publications that often appear on the Diagram Prize shortlist might not make their writers or publishers rich beyond their wildest dreams, but the fact writers still passionately write such works and publishers are still willing to invest in them is a marvelous thing that deserves to be celebrated," Stone added.
The Diagram Prize was founded at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978, and past winners include "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice" and last year's "Cooking with Poo", a Thai cookbook by Bangkok resident Saiyuud Diwong whose nickname is Poo.
(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/manual-goblinproofing-chicken-coops-named-oddest-book-title-000539751.html
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Bitcoin and Other Virtual Currencies Finally Get Some Regulation
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Transportation department launches car safety app
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Transportation Department is launching a free app for iPhones and iPods that gives real-time vehicle safety information.
Consumers can use the "SaferCar" app to look for crash test ratings for vehicles by make and model. They can also use the app to file a vehicle safety complaint, find recall information, subscribe to recall notices and find the nearest car seat installation station.
Vehicle safety information is also available on SaferCar.gov, run by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The agency is developing a version of the app for Android devices.
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For more information:
http://www.safercar.gov
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/transportation-department-launches-car-safety-app-150239828.html
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Thursday, March 21, 2013
Popular mobile security app Avast! marking Gmail, Whatsapp, others as malware
Whoopsies. It appears that the popular "Avast! Mobile Security" -- it's got somewhere between 10 million and 50 million downloads from Google Play -- is marking Android's Gmail as malware. You might get a lot of spam and other unwanted e-mail, but that doesn't quite make gmail itself a malware app. This, folks, is what you call a false positive.
More: Android Malware scanners - should you use one?
Users of Avast are reporting other false positives as well, including WhatsApp, Amazon, ScoreCetner, Redbox, PayPal, Google Currents, YPMobile, HP ePrint, Rdio, Linked In, Foscam Remote and others.
The good news is you can white list it with the app. Also, Avast apparently is aware of the mix-up and has a new set of virus definitions on the way. Support forum moderator Filip Havlicek writes:
it seems that this false positive detection somehow got through our systems to everyone. I'm sorry for that. Don't worry though, there should be a virus definitions update soon that will remove this detection. I'm going to reroute all topics to this one and lock them so everyone knows what's happening. I'll post here when the update is out so everyone can do a manual update of their definitions to fix this (or you can, of course, wait for the automatic update to happen, but manual will most probably be faster in this case).
So, yeah. False positive. Let's hope Avast didn't miss anything that actually is malware.
Source: Avast support forums
Thanks, @xalasten and @walnuts315!
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/1L64Pq7t0uA/story01.htm
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