Science: June 2007 Archive Page

The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. | On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect--Jeremy Cooke --Vertical farming in the big Apple (BBC)

What will they think of next -- maybe, taking an urban residential skyscraper, tilting it on its side, and chopping the apartments into separate structures -- each with their own private entrance and yards?

I love the future!

Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. --Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net)

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." --R. Timothy Patterson --Read the sunspots (Financial Post)

Because Hollywood and the mainstream press in America have pretty much decided that human activity have caused global warming, I am always interested when I come across reports of an alternative way of thinking .

Environmental reporting is an area in which journalists who are sympathetic to the agenda of environmentalists (after all, who doesn't want clean water and air?) are too quick to pass along scary statistics and predictions that have little or no basis in scientific fact.

At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."

As if the scientific evidence isn't enough, Barsoum has pointed out a number of common sense reasons why the pyramids were not likely constructed entirely of chiseled limestone blocks. --Sheila Berninger and Dorilona Rose --The Surprising Truth Behind the Construction of the Great Pyramids (Live Science)