Scientists have proposed what seems like an obvious solution to finding life on other planets—look for pollution similar to that found on Earth. Light or air pollution would be a dead giveaway to life on another planet, according to a study to appear in the journal Astrobiology.
Of course, this is assuming that extraterrestrial life is even remotely similar to ours, and even if it is, finding the pollution won’t be easy, according to New Scientist:
Even if all the electricity we generate was used to produce light, it would still be thousands of times fainter than the glint of sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface. To reliably detect even this massive amount of artificial light on a planet orbiting a relatively nearby star—say 15 light years away—would require an array of telescopes with a combined light-collecting area of 1.5 square kilometres….
That’s about 370 football fields’ worth of telescopes.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are another source of pollution that would be a tell-tale sign of alien life, according to the study. CFCs do not form naturally and absorb infrared light, so they could be observed from afar. But by looking for CFCs we’d have to assume aliens are dumb enough to spew the pollution into their atmosphere—in other words, that they’re as dumb as we are.
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• Giant blobs of mucus are invading the oceans. Yes, you read that right—giant blobs of mucus. Movie version coming soon.
• Hey, Obama won the Nobal Peace Prize! And it’s taken over Twitter!
• Forget polygraphs: Art projects are the new lie detector tests.
• New spectrometer-laden scalpel can actually sniff out tumors as it cuts.
• And now, for something completely different: Miami has the hottest and least intelligent people in the nation, according to a completely opinion-based unscientific survey done by Travel & Leisure.
Fashion has been beefing up its environmental conscience (if not its models) over the past few years—and with good reason. The production, transport, and disposal of clothing is a serious source of pollution, with the textile industry holding steady as the third largest consumer of water, and the source of up to 20 percent of industrial pollution.
This year, it’s fabric dye that’s getting the Green treatment. Coloring a pound of fabric can take up to 75 gallons of water, and a single dress or pair of pants can use up to 25 gallons.
So what if we could dye all our clothes without water? That was the idea tackled by Colorep, a California-based technology development company that created a new way to color fabric using air rather than H2O. Called AirDye, the process applies non-plastisol-based inks within garment fibers, rather than as a layer on top (which is how it’s done with water).
This Fashion Week (yup, it’s going on now—you can tell by all the hungry-looking Eastern European waifs roaming the streets) the AirDye system made its debut at the Costello Tagliapietra show, in which the clothes (see photo) were dyed almost entirely without water.
Granted, until this new dyeing method hits jeans and T-shirts, your DISCOVER staff likely won’t be testing it out ourselves.
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And the trophy goes to…Picher, Oklahoma! Years of lead and zinc mining have left the town so polluted that “the soil is poisoned, the water runs orange and the air has been ruled unsafe,” according to MSNBC. The effects on residents include a variety of cancers and birth defects. Watch the full report here:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms.
Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we’d like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them.
Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish can be farmed in the ocean away from the coastal waters. The Aquapod cage has 8-foot long propellers, which are controlled and powered from a generator in an attached boat. The cage, which strikingly resembles the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, is built with triangular panels that are coated in steel nets. National Geographic reports:
“The idea of a cage towing a buoy, with the buoy in radio contact with the shore, is quite feasible,” [director Cliff Goudey said]. “It’s a little futuristic for today’s industry, but we could have a sensor on the cage which gives its heading and a GPS system to report its effective speed over the ground.”
Another group at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory has a more open idea for a “cage”: They allow their fish to swim freely, but train them to return to their cage at the sound of a dinner bell. Granted, fish are hardly terriers: The bell worked for black sea bass for about a week, but when a school of bluefish came to dine on the bass, they refused to return to their cage despite the researchers’ offer of free food.
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Last summer, we speculated whether the air pollution in China—home to the tirelessly-publicized 2008 summer Olympics—could prove hazardous to the health of the Games’ athletes and spectators. Still, the nation managed to clean up its air that summer by closing factories and allowing cars to hit the roads only every other day.
Unfortunately, the trend was too good to last: The veil of smog suspended over Beijing is back just a year later, and the nation’s air quality is now rated “hazardous” by the embassy. Although the so-called “Green Olympics” might have raised public awareness about the pollution in China, its political effects have been paltry. AFP reports:
“It changed the public mentality and made people remember the clear days we had 20 years ago and wonder why can’t we have that again. That’s a big achievement,” said [China climate and energy campaigner Yang Ailun].
However, the fact that China had to basically shut down much of the city of 18 million to meet its Olympic clean-air promises, showed that little real progress has been made.
“The Beijing experience did not provide any examples of cost-effective policies that can actually deliver results. All the major measures taken by the city were expensive and not easily replicated elsewhere,” she said.
Beijing maintains some restrictions on how many cars can be on the road on any given day, for example—but with the addition of 1,500 cars daily, such a measure is a little like teaspooning water out of a sinking aircraft carrier.
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Image: flickr / kevindooley
The 2008 blockbuster Wall-E won heaps of awards and made over 150 critics’ lists of the best movies of the year. But the also movie made a statement about how we treat the planet today—and how we can make sure that it’s habitable tomorrow. That was the basis of the event put on Thursday night by the World Science Festival, entitled “Wall-E’s World: Design for an Invisible Footprint,” which was moderated by DISCOVER’s own Carl Zimmer and held at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
In the first scene of the movie, the intrepid Wall-E rolls through streets filled with garbage, crushing waste into boxes and constructing skyscrapers with the refuse.
Ben Schwegler, Walt Disney Imagineering R&D’s chief scientist, offered a more hopeful view of the future during his presentation and the subsequent discussion with two other panelists. “Could we really be overwhelmed by waste” he asked the audience of around 150 people. “Not in the long run, because things will evolve to eat the waste we produce.”
He showed the audience a few photos of what appeared to be the metallic cores of laptops. It was then he revealed that cockroaches had stripped away the plastic casings in about a year and a half, upon which researchers halted the experiment because they were too grossed out.
Perhaps another part of the solution to keep garbage at bay is to change our attitude toward refuse. In a view called renewable urbanism, we would consider waste a valuable resource. That was one suggestion by Mitchell Joachim, who works at Terrefuge, an organization for ecological design in New York. “If I were an alien looking down,” Joachim said, “I would see the city as something meant to produce waste.”
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You might remember how L.A. recruited goats to clear plants from land for commercial development. Now Maryland has got the goat idea—for lawn mowing, that is. Mowing lawns isn’t just tedious and fuel-intensive: It also poses a threat to bog turtles, a threatened species that makes its home in the grassy areas along a highway project in the state, according to officials.
That’s why they’re starting a two-year, $10,000 experimental project to use goats to trim their grass, instead of noisy, gas-guzzling lawnmowers.
Goats are cheaper and lighter than cattle, which could also stomp the bog turtles to death. And, of course, there’s a side benefit: The goats do the job of a blade-wielding machine without gobbling up precious fossil fuels.
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You might’ve heard that the U.S. Navy has been purposely sinking old ships to make homes for fish—and that research shows this technique could be harmful to underwater ecosystems.
Well, folks at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission apparently haven’t given up on the idea. In fact, they’ve spent 75,000 man-hours and $8.6 million making an artificial reef out of a 17,250-ton, 522-foot long retired Navy ship—the same vessel featured in 1999’s Virus with Donald Sutherland and Jamie Lee Curtis.
The ship, USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, took less than two minutes to sink into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico near Key West, thanks to explosives placed strategically inside the bilge area beneath the water.
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No, he’s not Supercat, but apparently a fuzzy feline in the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing began sprouting triangular, fur-covered “wings” out of his back when he was about a year old.
Some speculate the strange growths are the result of a mutation caused by chemicals the cat’s mother was exposed to before giving birth. It’s certainly possible, since the heavily industrialized city of Chongqing is packed with chemical, metal, and automobile factories pumping out acid rain and air pollution. In fact, as of 2004 the city was the second most polluted worldwide. And it’s taking its toll: Environmental authorities suspect chemical contaminations were behind the deaths of thousands of fish in the Fujiang River in Chongqing a few months ago.
Others say the so-called wings are actually growths from an embryo that never completely separated from the cat before birth – in other words, the cat’s, er, Siamese twin.
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