What Would Have Once Sounded Like A Far-fetched Feminist Fantasy – Women Forming The Majority Of A

Map of the Humongous Fungus: The largest living organism on Earth [1936x1310][OC] CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS! thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

Forests For All Forever

From tissue and paper, to packaging, furniture and building materials, people consume and depend on forest products every day.

We often take our surroundings for granted. This is an excellent piece that outlines some of the problems and proposes a cool way to keep our forests going. 

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a key building block for next-generation devices. It takes features from diamonds, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltage and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips, allowing us to run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster and more efficiently.

Brand: Christie Brown

Designer: Aisha Obuobi 

Coupe de Classe Winter 2015 Collection

Tumblr: cutfromadiffcloth.tumblr.com | Twitter: @IAM_CFDC | Instagram: @IAMCFDC | Facebook: CUT FROM A DIFFERENT CLOTH | Website: www.cutfromadiffcloth.com

UN values ecosystem loss to trillions of dollars a year

The study authors have calculated the cost of the “lost ecosystem services value” our planet has suffered in the last decade and a half. According to their calculations, the loss due to land degradation averages US $43,400 to $72,000 per square km, some US $870 to $1,450 per person, globally each year. The percentage of the world’s land affected by land degradation has grown a lot in the last decades – it has doubled between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. And the process is far from its end.

“This study by ELD shows the immediate and global impact of land degradation and highlights that actions to tackle it pay off,” Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commented on the paper.

“Increased land degradation is also one of the factors that can lead to migration and it is being exacerbated by climate change. On our planet, the area affected by drought has doubled in 40 years. One third of Africa is threatened by desertification. As President Juncker said in his State of the Union speech last week, climate refugees will become a new challenge – if we do not act swiftly.”

UAV Will Determine Best Locations for Wind Energy

Citizen Maths: free/open adult math education for practical real-world numeracy

Without scientific understanding, we don’t run the government, the government runs us” -Carl Sagan, in his final interview.

Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).

(Image: Jonathan Worth, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.

Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:

* tools like spreadsheets;

* purpose-built self-standing “apps” of various kinds;

* coding in Scratch.

Each powerful idea is shown in action in several different contexts. For example, “uncertainty” involves the following situations:

* Making decisions — value of insurance, risk comparisons;

* Judging — the meaning of cancer screening results;

* Gaming — appreciating odds in roulette, dice, horse-racing;

* Modelling — the uncertain prediction of the weather.

The powerful ideas and the situations in which they are shown in action have been selected in consultation with maths teachers, and with organisations familiar with the learning needs of adults.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/03/citizen-maths-freeopen-math.html

Meet Hannah Herbst, a 15-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, who just might be the nation’s top young scientist. Earlier this month, Herbst won a $25,000 prize with a very cheap invention: a prototype probe that converts the movement of the ocean’s currents into energy and costs just $12 to make. Out of nine other middle-school finalists, Herbst was awarded first place in the 2015 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge.

This 15-Year-Old’s Invention Converts Ocean Currents Into Energy—for Cheap | GOOD

Greenland is Melting Away

This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change.

 By NYTimes: Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins                                    

On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet. [bold/itals mine]

“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Dire report by three excellent Times journalists covering a team of researchers camped out on the icesheets of Greenland. The conclusion is that glaciers and land ice are melting at rates far higher than scientists anticipated, or that climate models have shown. This means that sea levels are rising faster than projected, and many coastal communities are in grave danger.

The economic impacts are incalculable.

Watch: A haircut may not solve homelessness — but it can make all the difference for these women.

Follow @stylemic