The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

The Status of "Spaceship Earth"

One of the leading experts on planet Earth, James Lovelock,  believes that there is very little we can do to stave off global warming catastrophes. Lovelock is the man who created the Gaia theory – that the earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

"1,000 Genomes" -The World's Most Detailed Map of the Human Genome

To date, only a handful of humans have had their genes analysed in this way, including scientists Craig Venter and James Watson, and anonymous volunteers.

Teams in the UK, US and China are at work on the 1,000 Genomes Project, which will create the most useful map ever of genetic variation. The project Will read 6 trillion DNA building blocks including populations from Africa, Asia, USA and Europe.

Any two humans are genetically more than 99% identical: variations can explain why some get certain diseases.

Is the Human Species Hardwired to be Kind?

Earth -The Sequel -A Video Classic

Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Insight

Brain researchers have recently discovered that when we perform mental activities such as adding numbers, comparing shapes, or identifying faces these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This "dark network," according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes. Gilbert writes that "if you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?"

New Research Says: Trust Your Subconscious Wiring

Humans don't make very good decisions.  This is clear from the Nobel-prize winning work of Kahneman and Tversky, or to anyone who's spent any time with any humans (including themselves) ever.  Now recent work at the University of Rochester confirms that the only sections of your skull you can trust are subconscious.

The Daily Flash: Eco, Space, Science (12/30)

3-D Moon Imaging Inaugurated With NASA Instrument Aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 Spacecraft

Astronomers Aim to Grasp Mysterious Dark Matter

Inventors Find Inspiration in Natural Phenomena

Richard Feynman on Boltzmann Brains

Wind Power Expected To Be Key Source of Energy in 2009

Green fuel technologies pick up speed in 2008

New Discovery Shows Water Abundant in Early Universe

Water vapor is thought to exist in clouds of dust and gas that feed the supermassive black hole at the center of an ancient quasar 11.1 billion years distant from Earth. The detection was later confirmed by high-resolution interferometric observations with the Expanded Very Large Array.

Scientists Find that Size of Earth's Species Occurred in 2 Great Leaps

All life on Earth all sprang from the same single-celled organisms that first populated the planet, so how did life grow in size from bacteria to the blue whale?

"It happened primarily in two great leaps, and each time, the maximum size of life jumped up by a factor of about a million," said Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental science at Stanford.

Is Global Warming Creating New Climate Zones? Experts Say "Yes"

Anyone with a sense of the 4.5 billion-year history of climate and geological change on our planet knows that change is the only true global constant. Global warming is re-structuring the world's climate zones, with some estimates that by 2100 polar and mountain climates disappearing altogether and formerly unknown ones emerging in the tropics (keep in mind that the Antarctic was once a tropical life-zone).