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We're Scarily Close to the Permafrost Tipping Point →
Permafrost—the ground that stays frozen for two or more consecutive years—is a ticking time bomb of climate change. Some 24 percent of Northern Hemisphere land is permafrost. That’s 9 million square miles (23 million square kilometers) found mostly in Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and other higher mountain regions.
Unfortunately, thawing permafrost releases massive amounts of methane and/or carbon dioxide. The question is whether that would happen over the course of decades or over a century or more.
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The Man Who Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again →
You know what’s an irreversible waste of time, money and effort? Eating food you take pleasure in eating. I mean, wouldn’t you rather just ingest a tasteless form of sustenance for the rest of your life and never have to go through that tedious rigmarole of opening and eating a pre-made sandwich or enjoying a huge hungover fry-up ever again? Rob Rhinehart – a 24-year-old software engineer from Atlanta and, presumably, an impossibly busy man – thinks so.
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We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction →
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
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McArthur Grant recipient and MIT inventor Saul Griffith on the world’s energy budget.
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Study finds fungi, not plant matter, responsible for most carbon sequestration in northern forests →
A new study undertaken by a diverse group of scientists in Sweden has found that contrary to popular belief, most of the carbon that is sequestered in northern boreal forests comes about due to fungi that live on and in tree roots, rather than via dead needles, moss and leaf matter.
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Cheaper desalinization with graphene filters →
The process would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater.
Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter.
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Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature? →
Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another. Being in two places at once. Communicating information seemingly faster than the speed of light.
This kind of weird behaviour is commonplace in dark, still laboratories studying the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, but what might it have to do with fresh flowers, migrating birds, and the smell of rotten eggs?
Welcome to the frontier of what is called quantum biology.
