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	<title>Science &#38; SpaceCategory: Uncategorized &#124; Science &#38; Space &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Science &#38; SpaceCategory: Uncategorized &#124; Science &#38; Space &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com</link>
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		<title>The Solar Powered Plane Soars Across the U.S.</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/30/solar-impulse-gallery/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/30/solar-impulse-gallery/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:15:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>TIME Staff</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Solar Power]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14383</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the 117 years since the first solar cell was developed and the 110 years since the first powered flight, you&#8217;d have thought we would have combined the two technologies by now. When you&#8217;re trying to get from place to place aboard the only practical vehicle we have that can travel above the clouds, the sun would seem like the first place you&#8217;d look for power. At the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, the Solar Impulse company is at last taking that step. Headed by engineer and fighter pilot Andre Borshberg and psychiatrist and balloonist Bertrand Piccard, and backed by Deutsche Bank, the Omega watch company and the Solvay Idustrial group, Solar Impulse has produced a plane that is equal parts elegant and improbable. The Solar Impulse HB-S1A has a wingspan of 208 ft. (63.4 m)—as large as that of an Airbus A340—yet it weighs only 3,500 lbs (1,600 kg), about the size of an average car. A lot of that weight is solar panels, which cover the wings and the smaller tail fins. The plane has reached an altitude of 30,300 ft. (9,235 m) and stayed aloft for a record 26 hrs., 10 mins and 19 secs. The developers don&#8217;t pretend there&#8217;s anything remotely practical about the HB-S1A yet. Like Lindbergh&#8217;s Spirit of St. Louis, it carries a crew of one. But like that long ago plane too, it&#8217;s meant as a proof of concept—and a teaser of what&#8217;s to come. &#8221;Our plane is not designed to carry a passenger, but to carry a message,&#8221; Piccard likes to say. Message received.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14383&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Solar Power</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/energy/solar-power/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/polaris04423018.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Solar Impulse night flight over San Francisco</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">timeadmin</media:title>
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		<title>Water Worlds: Has NASA Found Mirror Earths?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/04/18/exoplanet/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/04/18/exoplanet/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:16:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael D. Lemonick</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=14498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The search for Earthlike, habitable planets beyond the Sun has been something like a boulder rolling downhill ever since the Kepler space telescope went into orbit in 2009. Before that, ground-based astronomers had been finding so-called exoplanets one or two at a time, here and there in the cosmos, and pretty much all of them were far too large to be hospitable, or much close to the fires of their parent stars, or, usually, both. But ever since Kepler soared into space and turned its relentless, unblinking eye on a single patch of stars and never looked away, it began notching discoveries at an ever-accelerating pace, finding more planets—and more nearly Earthlike ones—all the time. What&#8217;s more, it&#8217;s finding them in the so-called habitable zone, just the right distance from their stars to allow life-sustaining liquid water to exist. Nobody quite imagined what the Kepler team has just announced, however. Writing in Science, William Borucki, Kepler’s principal scientist, along with dozens of collaborators, reports the discovery of not one, but two potentially life-sustaining planets, orbiting a star some 1,200 light-years away, in the constellation Lyra. One, named Kepler-62e, is about 60 percent larger than Earth, and lies at the inner, hotter edge of the habitable zone, where water might be awfully hot but still avoid boiling away. The second, Kepler 62f, is 40 percent larger than Earth and is more comfortably within the star’s just-right region. This, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division at a press conference, “is really cool.” In astronomer-speak, that&#8217;s huge. (MORE: Never Mind Life on Distant Planets, What About Distant Moons?) Borucki and the other Kepler scientists were quick to say they had no direct evidence that either planet actually has liquid water on its surface. All they know for sure is the planets’ size, and their distance from the star: 33 million mi. (53 million km) out for the larger 62e; 65 million mi. (105 million km) for the smaller 62f. In our solar system, that would make both planets too hot for<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=14498&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/sci-nasa-130418.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f2cdfe953fad799c6100332224e6ecb9?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">jkluger</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Why Innovation Alone Isn&#8217;t Enough to Win the Climate Fight</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/02/25/why-innovation-alone-isnt-enough-to-win-the-climate-fight/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/02/25/why-innovation-alone-isnt-enough-to-win-the-climate-fight/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:29:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Energy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cap and trade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[energy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[research]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=13650</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Politics can be frustrating. Actually, it&#8217;s more like politics ARE frustrating, especially in America and especially in 2013, where a constitutional system designed for maximum gridlock has met intense partisanship fed by the nano-second news cycle of social media. Right now the government of the United States seems wholly incapable of getting out of a self-designed trap to needlessly slash billions of dollars in spending and cut hundreds of thousands of jobs at a moment when the American economy is beginning to pick itself off the floor. (You may know this as sequestration.) And this comes just a few months after we nearly tipped over the fiscal cliff, which at least had a much snazzier name than sequestration. Meanwhile the nominated Secretary of Defense floats in limbo at a moment when the world is, well, pretty unstable, all because a few senators are in a snit. Political dysfunction forms the backdrop of our days. What does this mean for climate policy? Well, if the government can&#8217;t get itself together to deal with the much more immediate threats of sequestration, properly responding to a long-term and highly complex challenge like climate change has basically entered the realm fantasy. This is especially true when one of two political parties refuses to acknowledge the problem exists. There was a chance in 2009 and 2010 with comprehensive climate legislation, but that died for countless reasons. And while there are executive actions or EPA regulations that could begin to address carbon emissions, we really need more ambitious legislation. And that simply seems impossible. So it shouldn&#8217;t be surprising that in the wake of cap-and-trade&#8217;s death a few years ago, some climate advocates began to plot another line of attack, one that wouldn&#8217;t break the political deadlock so much as sidestep it altogether. It&#8217;s energy innovation—policy, to put it simply, that focuses on making clean energy cheap, rather than making dirty energy expensive through a carbon cap or regulations. You don&#8217;t have to worry about trying to outflank the coal industry or convince that Midwestern Democratic<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=13650&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Energy</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/energy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/160739937.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">160739937</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Ancient Human Poop: Ah, the Tales It Can Tell</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/12/04/ancient-human-poop-ah-the-tales-it-can-tell/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/12/04/ancient-human-poop-ah-the-tales-it-can-tell/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Veronique Greenwood</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=12168</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the wee hours of the morning in a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, geoscience graduate student Rob D’Anjou sat looking over test results, a pot of coffee nearby. He’d been pulling long days to analyze two narrow columns of silt, mud, and other sediment cored from the bottom of Lake Liland in Arctic Norway, and, frustratingly, was seeing no sign of the molecules with which he’d been hoping to reconstruct the temperature and precipitation records during the lake’s last 7,000-odd years. There were a number of other substances in the cores, though. And some of those other substances, he realized with a jolt, looked familiar. He turned to a cache of chemistry papers and, with their help, confirmed his suspicion: He was looking at human fecal sterols, the last chemical hurrah of poop. And these feces were decidedly ancient ones, manufactured, as it were, starting more than 2,000 years ago. D&#8217;Anjou knew that the find, however unglamorous it might be, was an important one. Human fecal sterols are, by definition, indicators of the presence of human beings and may provide a way to track the migration of ancient peoples, as well as to help paleoclimatologists assess those populations&#8217; effects on the environment. When he presented his data before the geosciences department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the scientists in the audience were quick to suggest colorful titles for his study. But D&#8217;Anjou and his colleagues spent the following couple years giving the samples a far more sober kind of consideration. Their work, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marks the first time fecal sterols have been used this way, but it more than likely won&#8217;t be the last. (More: Study: Neanderthal DNA Lives On In Modern Humans) Lake sediments have long been a rich trove of clues to ancient human history—but often only indirectly so. Paleoclimatologists have probed ancient silt for grains of crop pollen and charcoal from fires, for instance, in attempts to say definitively whether and when human beings were on the scene. But pollen can blow in from miles away, and fires occur naturally, making such techniques, even when used in<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=12168&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2012/12/04/ancient-human-poop-ah-the-tales-it-can-tell/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/1500_danjou1.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">D&#039;ANJOU</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">jkluger</media:title>
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		<title>Desert Dreams: Can the Middle Eastern Country of Qatar Learn to Feed Itself?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/11/19/desert-dreams-can-the-middle-eastern-country-of-qatar-learn-to-feed-itself/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/11/19/desert-dreams-can-the-middle-eastern-country-of-qatar-learn-to-feed-itself/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:00:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Aryn Baker</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[desert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[qatar]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=11765</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From seeding clouds with rain-inducing particles to erecting a wall of trees against the advancing Sahara Desert, scientists have long sought to answer the challenge of growing crops in drought-struck lands. Drylands account for 41% of the world’s land surface and are home to more than two billion people. Those numbers, combined with fears that climate change will exacerbate what could become a chronic global foodcrisis as global population grows, has sparked new interest in turning the world’s deserts into gardens. Nowhere is that more evident than in the tiny Gulf nation of Qatar, a salt scoured spit of land the size of Connecticut that has no rivers, no lakes and annual rainfall averaging 74 mm—barely enough for a respectable puddle. As chairman of Qatar’s National Food Security Programme (QNFSP), Fahad Bin Mohammed Al-Attiya has been tasked with the seemingly impossible: turning Qatar’s food import ratio on its head, meaning that instead of importing 90% of the country’s annual food needs, as it currently does, it will produce them locally. Within the next 12 years. To balance his country’s diet, Al-Attiya envisions nothing less than the complete re-engineering of Qatar’s environment, both physical and social. From new desalinization plants to a total upending of how Qatar uses energy (using the country’s abundant fossil fuels only for export), greenhouses that cover square miles instead of acres and a social revolution that will elevate farmers while regulating them closely, Al-Attiya’s quest to turn Qatar into a nation of locavores knows no limits. That includes, apparently, financial ones. Getting exact figures on the country’s plans is about as easy as finding arugula in a desert, but Al-Attiya says the Qatari government is backing the initiative with about $25 billion. (He argues that the private sector will be investing several times that on major infrastructure projects once the project gets off the ground.) Al-Attiya has the unenviable task of convincing Qataris, and the world, that a homegrown meal is not only possible, but essential for the Mideast country’s national security. If Qatar can succeed<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=11765&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Ecocentric</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/ecocentric/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/qatar_121004_3228.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">image: A migrant workers holds a melon harvested early in the morning at Arab Qatari Agricultural Production Company, Oct. 4, 2012.</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Cosmic Old Faithful: Are There Geysers on Mars?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/10/09/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/10/09/cosmic-old-faithful-are-there-geysers-on-mars/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:02:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jeffrey Kluger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Nasa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Space]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[carbon dioxide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geyesers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Benson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NASA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Planetfall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[water]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=10955</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The rule for space aesthetics has always been clear: First comes the science, then comes the art. You can&#8217;t take the most distant cosmic photographs ever captured unless you build and launch the Hubble Space telescope first. You can&#8217;t capture close-up shots of Neptune&#8217;s aquatic blue or Jupiter&#8217;s spin-painted atmosphere or Saturn&#8217;s braided rings until you get the Voyager spacecraft out to their neighborhood. (Photos: Window on Infinity: Pictures from Space) Now that rule is being proven again with sensational images making the rounds on the Web — and soon to be published in the new book Planetfall, by Michael Benson — that provide a cool and new and faintly eerie look at Mars. Benson is not a NASA engineer, much less an astronaut. What he is however is a photographer and media artist, one with an unusually sharp eye for images from the deep elsewhere that can dazzle terrestrial sensibilities like ours. (More: Martian Blizzard: It&#8217;s Snowing on the Red Planet) The pictures doing the dazzling today were shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)in 2010 and show the predictable — if beautiful — rusty dunes of the Martian surface, sculpted like snowdrifts from the planet&#8217;s tenuous but persistent wind. The scene is broken up, however, buy strange, black, spidery blemishes scattered randomly about. From orbit they look tiny, but on the ground they&#8217;d be huge — surely larger than a football field. It&#8217;s partly their very ugliness that makes them eye-catching and partly the mystery of what causes them. Actually, however, that last part is likely no mystery at all — and the source of the features is one more indication of how complex a planet Mars is turning out to be. (More: Compelling New Evidence For Flowing Water on Mars) While Mars can sometimes be an almost temperate place — at high noon in midsummer on the Martian equator, temperatures can  reach or exceed 70º F (20º C) — at other times it can fall as low as -225º F (-153º C). This can have a dramatic effect<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=10955&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Nasa</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/space-2/nasa-space/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/600_esp_016423_2640_rgb-nomap_crop_rev4_bigger2.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">jkluger</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/geysers_custom-08879bee8e7b30fd8f3367ea86db0d0bfc1512ae-s3.jpg?w=170" medium="image">
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		<title>The Great, Wet, Cosmic Rock</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/09/24/the-great-wet-cosmic-rock/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/09/24/the-great-wet-cosmic-rock/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:00:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jeffrey Kluger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=10772</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Asteroids always get left out of the party. Send a spacecraft to Jupiter or Saturn or one of the solar system&#8217;s other glamor spots and the press will be all over you. But asteroids? Not so much. They&#8217;re cosmic side trips — the turnpike rest stops you speed by on the way to someplace better. But the fact is, asteroids are some of the coolest bodies out there — and some equally cool spacecraft have been visiting them of late. That seems truer than ever this week, with news announced in two papers in the journal Science that the Dawn spacecraft has discovered evidence of water — or at least a watery past — on the asteroid Vesta, long thought to be a wholly dry, wholly barren rock. That finding provides new insight into the formation of the solar system and the possibility that life as we know it could be lurking out there somewhere. (PHOTOS: Snapshots of the Heavens: Amazing Astronomy Images) Dawn was destined to make history no matter what kind of science it uncovered, simply because it&#8217;s aiming to do what no spacecraft has done before: orbit two different non-earthly bodies on one mission. Launched in 2007, it arrived at Vesta — the second largest object in the asteroid belt, at 326 miles wide (525 km) — in July 2011 and settled into orbit. Earlier this month, it peeled off and headed for the even larger Ceres — 590 miles across (950 km) — and is set to arrive there in July 2015. During its time at Vesta, Dawn drew as close as 130 miles (210 km) to the surface, studying the asteroid with nearly two dozen instruments. Both Vesta and Ceres deserve close examination for a couple of reasons. For one thing, asteroids are some of the most ancient artifacts of the early solar system and as such can provide a good look at a long-ago epoch frozen on geological time. Also, the two miniworlds are vastly different. Vesta, though smaller, is more Earth-like, with a layered interior<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=10772&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2012/09/24/the-great-wet-cosmic-rock/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/5135667702.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">SPACE-DAWN-ASTEROID-VESTA</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f2cdfe953fad799c6100332224e6ecb9?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">jkluger</media:title>
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		<title>Window on Infinity: Pictures From Space</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/08/31/window-on-infinity-pictures-from-space-2/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/08/31/window-on-infinity-pictures-from-space-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:00:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Kari Collins</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Space]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Month in Space]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=10349</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stunning images of the sun, Earth and far-away locales in our roundup of cosmic views from August 2012.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=10349&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2012/08/31/window-on-infinity-pictures-from-space-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>The Month in Space</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/space-2/the-month-in-space/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/n5033block_s913.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Month in Space - August</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/fb6c966cfe74751f706dbe9769c856a2?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">kcollins1271</media:title>
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		<title>E-Waste: How the New iPad Adds to Electronic Garbage</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/03/08/e-waste-how-the-new-ipad-adds-to-electronic-garbage/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/03/08/e-waste-how-the-new-ipad-adds-to-electronic-garbage/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:45:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Waste]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blacksmith Institute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[e-waste]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[electronics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[garbage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iPad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[waste]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=8058</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There was a major news event yesterday over at Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, which I know because my Twitter feed was filled alternately with people live-blogging the event (&#8220;retina display!&#8221;) and mocking the live-blogging (&#8220;the screen self-cleans with children&#8217;s tears!&#8221;). This is how we receive the news of a new iPad, which the good people of Apple are calling&#8230; iPad, confounding those who thought it would be called iPad 3 or iPad HD or anything at all to set it apart. We want the iPad—we have the iPad. I&#8217;ll leave it to TIME&#8217;s highly capable technology writers to describe what actually makes the new iPad new. The early consensus seems to be that the third-generation iPad—which should go sale by the middle of the month—offers some interesting new updates, including an ultra-sharp screen, a much-improved camera and a faster processor. But it&#8217;s less of a revolutionary jump than the iPhone 4S was over its predecessor—at least the new iPhone had a much-hyped digital assistant, even if she didn&#8217;t quite turn out to be 100% reliable, especially for the Scottish. The new iPad is an update, the latest version—but not a whole new piece of hardware. Hence the name: just iPad. Which, as Mat Honan of Gizmodo wrote, makes sense. The more updates to the iPad that Apple rolled out over the years, the odder numbering each might have appeared. By iPad 15, it would have looked like a bad horror movie series—though Robin Sloan&#8217;s tweets from the future would seem to indicate that iPad 8 was totally awesome. We can expect Apple to roll out slightly updated iPads every year or so, the way Toyota might follow the 2012 Camry with the 2013 model year Camry. Those with the inclination and their spare cash will come to think of tablets—like our new smartphones—as eminently replaceable objects, good for a year or maybe more before being discarded for the next hot thing. (That could be a large group—4 million people bought the supposedly disappointing iPhone 4S on its first weekend, and the<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=8058&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2012/03/08/e-waste-how-the-new-ipad-adds-to-electronic-garbage/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Waste</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/waste/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/140879287.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">140879287</media:title>
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		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/45aadd4bcc836917a2bee9da10316e12?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Spreading the Gospel of Green Business to Latin America</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/11/16/spreading-the-gospel-of-green-business-to-latin-america/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/11/16/spreading-the-gospel-of-green-business-to-latin-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:00:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conservation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brazil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developing world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hank Paulson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latin America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TNC]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=7150</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You probably wouldn&#8217;t know it from the U.S. media, but there&#8217;s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous economies. But while the rest of us are watching the wars in the Middle East or Central Asia, worrying about economic collapse in Europe or economic growth in Asia, Latin America is poised to explode on the global scene. Brazil&#8217;s economy grew by 7.5% last year, the highest rate in a quarter century, and the World Bank expects that the region as a whole will grow by 4.5% this year. Much of that growth is on the back of surging commodity production—especially energy. Latin America has one-fifth of the world&#8217;s proven oil reserves, and its importance on the global energy markets will only grow. The region has something else too—amazing biodiversity. From the immense Amazon basin to the utterly unique Galapagos Islands, Latin America still possesses some of the world&#8217;s most impact and important forests, wetlands and wildlife left on the planet. The question going forward will be whether the region can grow rapidly—and allowing millions of people to rise out of poverty—without destroying that natural heritage. One glimpse of China, where economic growth has been accompanied by environmental destruction, shows what can happen if things go wrong. That&#8217;s what makes a new initiative spearheaded by the Nature Conservancy (TNC) so valuable. The environmental group has convened the Latin American Conservation Council, a group of more than 30 CEOs and political leaders from around the region that will collaborate on some of the region&#8217;s pressing environmental problems: water security, food security and infrastructure development. The idea is simple: help the region grow the right way, and protect biodiversity and ecosystem services now instead of cleaning up later. &#8220;This is the right time for this idea,&#8221; says Mark Tercek, TNC&#8217;s president and CEO. The council is co-chaired<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=7150&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2011/11/16/spreading-the-gospel-of-green-business-to-latin-america/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/45aadd4bcc836917a2bee9da10316e12?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
		</media:content>

		<media:content url="http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/eco_latam_ceos_1115.jpg?w=300" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">eco_latam_ceos_1115</media:title>
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		<title>Did Fracking Help Cause Oklahoma Earthquakes?</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:57:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=7102</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The good people of Oklahoma were rattled on Nov. 5 when the state was hit by its largest earthquake on record, a 5.6-magnitude temblor that struck 44 miles (71 km) east of Oklahoma City. (The previous biggest quake was a 5.5-magnitude tremor that hit in 1952.) Fortunately, no one was hurt, although 14 homes were damaged, and the state was shaken by a number of moderate aftershocks. Oklahoma isn&#8217;t California — this is a state that is usually pretty seismically stable, one with about 50 small quakes a year until 2009. But the number of quakes spiked in 2009, and last year 1,047 tremors shook Oklahoma. All of which begs the question: Has something changed to make the Sooner State unstable? Perhaps something like hydraulic fracturing? Also called fracking, the practice — producing small fractures in the earth miles beneath the surface with explosives in order to tap trapped oil and gas deposits — is common in Oklahoma, a center of the fossil fuel extraction industry. It&#8217;s not hard to wonder whether injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep underground in order to break up rock might worsen existing faults or even trigger a tremor. (MORE: Can Shale Gas Power the World?) There&#8217;s some evidence that fracking may induce minor tremors. A report (PDF) written earlier this year by Austin Holland of the Oklahoma State Geological Survey concluded that a swarm of about 50 very small quakes — from magnitudes 1.0 to 2.8 — may have been related to hydraulic fracturing. And just last week, a report financed by the U.K. energy company Cuadrilla Resources found &#8220;strong evidence&#8221; that two minor quakes and 48 weaker seismic events in Britain resulted from Cuadrilla&#8217;s fracking practices. Alexis Flynn of the Wall Street Journal reports: The report could complicate efforts by privately held Cuadrilla to resume hydraulic-fracturing activity that was halted after the two seismic incidents. The company said the report concluded that none of the events recorded, including one in April of 2.3 and one in May of 1.5<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=7102&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/45aadd4bcc836917a2bee9da10316e12?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<media:content url="http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/130238727.jpg?w=300" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">Gas Drilling</media:title>
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		<title>The Environment Will Be the Real Victim of Overpopulation</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/10/26/the-environment-will-be-the-real-victim-of-overpopulation/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/10/26/the-environment-will-be-the-real-victim-of-overpopulation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:01:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=7005</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Maybe it&#8217;s just the fact that the official day has been set for October 31—Halloween—but there&#8217;s a distinct whiff of panic and fear around the expected birth of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Here&#8217;s Roger Martin, chair of the NGO Population Matters, writing in the Guardian recently: The 7 Billion Day is a sobering reminder of our planet&#8217;s predicament. We are increasing by 10,000 an hour. The median UN forecast is 9.3 billion by 2050, but the range varies by 2.5 billion – the total world population in 1950 – depending on how we work it out. Every additional person needs food, water and energy, and produces more waste and pollution, so ratchets up our total impact on the planet, and ratchets down everyone else&#8217;s share – the rich far more than the poor. By definition, total impact and consumption are worked out by measuring the average per person multiplied by the number of people. Thus all environmental (and many economic and social) problems are easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible with ever more. Until the 7 billion threshold was approached recently, population growth had largely disappeared as a major international issue—a far cry from the 1970s, when Malthusian thought was back in fashion and countries like India and China were taking brutally coercive steps to curb population growth. That&#8217;s partially a reaction to those dark days—right-thinking environmentalists didn&#8217;t want to be associated with unjust policies, and so population became the green issue that dare not speak its name. But I also think that when the 6 billionth person rolled around—just 12 years ago—the world was in a very different and much brighter place. It&#8217;s a lot easier to feel sunny about the idea of the planet growing more crowded when the global economy is humming, there are few major conflicts ongoing and you can bring a water bottle through airport security. Things, of course, are a little darker in 2011, so suddenly more people just seem like more mouths to feed, more competitors at the marketplace, more straws<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=7005&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2011/10/26/the-environment-will-be-the-real-victim-of-overpopulation/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">Nairobi National Park, Nairobi, Kenya</media:title>
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		<title>New Zealand Copes with an Ongoing Oil Spill</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/10/19/new-zealand-copes-with-an-ongoing-oil-spill/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/10/19/new-zealand-copes-with-an-ongoing-oil-spill/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:30:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[accident]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cargo ship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New Zealand]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ocean]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oil spill]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6970</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You can&#8217;t get much more remote than New Zealand—Auckland is over 1,000 miles away from Sydney, which is itself pretty far down there. But doesn&#8217;t mean New Zealand is exempt from modern environmental ills. Earlier this month the Liberian-flagged cargo ship Rena ran aground on a reef off New Zealand&#8217;s north island, spilling tons of heavy oil that have already washed ashore. About 350 tons of oil have already spilled from the ship, killing more than 1,000 sea birds. Nick Smith, New Zealand&#8217;s environment minister, has called the spill the nation&#8217;s &#8220;most significant environmental maritime disaster.&#8221; And it could get worse—rough weather has made it difficult for crews to offload oil and cargo on the ship, meaning crude is still spilling into the ocean. An additional 1,400 tons of heavy fuel oil remains onboard the Rena, and there may be no way to clear the ship before it&#8217;s too late, as the Los Angeles Times reported: Steven Joyce, New Zealand&#8217;s transportation minister, said there was little chance that workers could remove all the oil before the vessel broke loose. &#8220;I think it&#8217;s a case of getting everything off that you can,&#8221; he said, adding that the ship&#8217;s lean had reached a critical 21 degrees, already causing more than 70 containers to fall overboard. &#8220;So it&#8217;s variable and very dangerous.&#8221; The Rena spill won&#8217;t go down with the Exxon Valdez in the annals of major oil accidents, but New Zealand—a country that prides itself on the purity of its environment—will likely feel the effects for years. And the accident is a reminder that it takes just one mistake—or one bad patch of weather—to cause a maritime catastrophe.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6970&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2011/10/19/new-zealand-copes-with-an-ongoing-oil-spill/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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		<title>Climate Change Caused Crises Half A Millennium Ago, Too</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/10/03/climate-change-caused-crises-half-a-millenium-ago-too/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/10/03/climate-change-caused-crises-half-a-millenium-ago-too/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:20:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tara Thean</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Climate Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Disasters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Weather]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Al Gore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Reality Project]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Zhang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disaster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eurpoe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[famine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food shortage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grain price]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Little Ice Age]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Northern Hemisphere]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nutrition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plague]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social unrest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Temperature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[weather]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6883</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather and accompanying social problemsare inextricably linked to the climate crisis. And say what you will about Gore, that part seems increasingly true. What&#8217;s more, there&#8217;s nothing new about such cause-and-effect. According to a new study, climate change has played a significant role in several of the  crises of pre-industrial Europe and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere over the course of the 300 years. A team led by David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong collected as much data as they could find about climate, demography, agro-ecology, and the economy from the years 1500 to 1800 in Europe and found that these variables yo-yoed up and down along with the weather. The investigators used a number of criteria to confirm that the relationship was causative and not merely associative:  there had to be a strong and, importantly, consistent relationship between variable and effect; the cause had to precede the outcome; and the researchers had to be able to  predict the effect based on the cause. To make all these connections, Zhang’s team used robust correlation and regression models as well as simulations of alternating periods of harmony and crisis in the areas for the earlier periods in which data wasn’t as easily available. More from TIME: Are We Ready for Al Gore&#8217;s Climate Reality? While  numerous civilizations did experience the same ups and downs as  global temperature over the centuries, the immediacy of the cause and effect varied. Sometimes the response to temperature change was almost instantaneous, while others time it took five to 30 years before the impact was fully felt. And as is the case with everything in the environment, a change in one area often triggered  a cascade of changes in<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6883&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://science.time.com/2011/10/03/climate-change-caused-crises-half-a-millenium-ago-too/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Weather</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/weather/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">tarathean</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">pollute</media:title>
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		<title>Government Report Blames BP on Oil Spill. But there&#8217;s Plenty of Fault</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/09/14/government-report-blames-bp-on-oil-spill-but-theres-plenty-of-fault/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/09/14/government-report-blames-bp-on-oil-spill-but-theres-plenty-of-fault/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:40:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BOERME]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deepwater horizone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gulf of Mexico]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offshore drilling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oil spill]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6777</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Federal investigators from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Resource Management and Enforcement (BOERME) finally issued their long-delayed report today on the causes of last year&#8217;s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill. The results are not very surprising: BP, and to a lesser extent contractors like Transocean and Halliburton, made plenty of avoidable mistakes on the way to an accident that killed 11 crew members and led to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. From the report: The loss of life at the Macondo site on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent pollution of the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 2010 were the result of poor risk management, last-minute changes to plans, failure to observe and respond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response, and insufficient emergency bridge response training by companies and individuals responsible for drilling at the Macondo well and for the operation of the Deepwater Horizon. The BOERME report is the most exhaustive of the number of investigations launched in the wake of the oil spill, but the findings don&#8217;t differ much from the conclusions of an earlier Presidential commission on the accident. The investigators note that BP—ultimately responsible for what happened on Deepwater Horizon—should have kept closer supervision over operations, including lack of maintenance on the rig, a poor cement job on the well and the blowout preventer that did not prevent the blowout. More from TIME: The Gulf Disaster Here&#8217;s a list of the federal regulation violations that helped lead to the Deepwater Horizon disaster: BP failed to protect health, safety, property, and the environment by (1) performing all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner; and (2) maintaining all equipment and work areas in a safe condition. BP, Transocean, and Halliburton (Sperry Sun) failed to take measures to prevent the unauthorized release of hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico and creating conditions that posed unreasonable risk to public health, life, property, aquatic life, wildlife, recreation, navigation, commercial fishing, or other uses of the ocean BP, Transocean, and Halliburton (Sperry Sun) failed to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6777&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">Deepwater</media:title>
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		<title>Why We Need to Test Geoengineering—Soon</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/09/07/why-we-need-to-test-geoengineering%e2%80%94soon/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/09/07/why-we-need-to-test-geoengineering%e2%80%94soon/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geoengineering]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geoengineering]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global warming]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6714</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The writer and activist Bill McKibben has a saying: &#8220;You can&#8217;t negotiate with the planet.&#8221; What he means is that climate change will continue to unfold based on the amount of carbon we spew into the atmosphere—along with other physical factors—whether we chose to believe in it or not. That&#8217;s worth remembering as we enter this silly season of electoral politics, when it seems as if the entire Republican Party has decided that it doesn&#8217;t believe in climate change, evidence be damned. But the truth is that even though the current occupant of the White House has an avowed belief in global warming, it hasn&#8217;t made much difference for the climate. Although U.S. carbon emissions fell in 2009 because of the recession, as the economy rebounded in 2010 so did our production of greenhouse gases, reaching 5.6 billion metric tons, while global carbon emissions hit an all-time high of 30.6  billion metric tons. There&#8217;s little reason to expect worldwide carbon emissions to fall anytime soon—the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that global carbon emissions could rise by more than 50% by 2035, thanks largely to developing nations. Because carbon can remain warming the atmosphere for hundreds of years, all our emissions will accumulate like compound interest—which means if we get unlucky and the worst predictions for climate change begin to manifest in the decades ahead, it could be too late to cut carbon and save ourselves. All of which means that it would be very useful to have a Plan B ready should floods and heat waves and storms and sea level rise really get out of hand. (I mean, more than right now.) As it happens, there is one—geoengineering. Geoengineering refers to a number of different schemes to directly reduce the temperature of the Earth, rather than—or in addition to—efforts to cut carbon emissions and increase carbon sinks. In brief, most of them involve either trying to increase the reflexivity of the atmosphere—by amplifying high-altitude cloud cover or even constructing mirrors in space—or aiding the ability of the oceans to absorb<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6714&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">bryanrwalsh</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">geoengineering</media:title>
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		<title>Organic Farms May Keep Bacteria at Bay</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/08/12/organic-farms-may-keep-bacteria-at-bay/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/08/12/organic-farms-may-keep-bacteria-at-bay/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:00:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tara Thean</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Waste]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[antibiotic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chickens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disease]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enterococci]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[non-organic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[organic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poultry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resistance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[salmonella]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6518</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Given how the cracks in our food system have recently expanded into troubling chasms – remember the ground turkey Salmonella scare, and the emergence of an antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strain – health experts are once again fretting about farms and the drugs used in them. And with good reason. Antibiotics may be some of the best medical tools we have, but overusing them can mean a rise in resistant strains of bacteria that sneak their way into meat — and then into us. But new research is showing that the fix may be easier than we think: scientists at the University of Maryland have demonstrated that going organic, or at least removing antibiotics  from large poultry farms, means a huge drop in antibiotic resistance for several types of bacteria. The team zeroed in on enterococci bacteria,  hardy little devils that hang out in our intestines and cause many common urinary tract and surgical wound infections. The investigators studied large-scale poultry farms in the mid-Atlantic region – ten of them newly organic and ten non-organic – to find if these bacteria were present and to check the enterococci&#8217;s resistance to 17 common antimicrobials. More from TIME: The Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Salmonella What they found was that the just-turned-organic farms had a significantly lower presence of antibiotic-resistant enterococci in their poultry feed, litter and water. And the bacteria the farms did have were easier to beat. Just 18% of the Enterococcus faecalis in the newly organic poultry farms, for example, were resistant to an antibiotic that treats pneumonia, whooping cough and bronchitis, compared to 67% on the non-organic farms. The conventional farms also had much higher levels of multi-drug resistant bacteria, or bacteria that can be resistant to all available antibiotics. A whopping 84% of Enterococcus faecium from conventional farms were resistant to multiple drugs compared to only 17% of newly organic farms. “We were surprised to see that the differences were so significant across several different classes of antibiotics even in the very first flock that was produced after the transition to organic<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6518&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Waste</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/waste/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">tarathean</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">Poultry</media:title>
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		<title>Scientists: We Want More Children</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/08/09/scientists-we-want-more-children/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/08/09/scientists-we-want-more-children/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:29:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tara Thean</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Research]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[career]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[children]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[graduate student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[post-doctoral researcher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scientists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tenure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6454</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around – we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other incarnations of the weird and wonderful. But sometimes it’s easy to overlook the hardworking folks behind these discoveries, and it looks like they’ve had to forget things too: their families. Almost half of all women scientists and a quarter of their male colleagues at the nation’s top research universities – Harvard, Princeton and Stanford among them – feel their careers have prevented them from having as many children as they had wanted, according to research by sociologists at Rice University and Southern Methodist University (SMU). And the generation following them has noticed: the researchers found that a worrying one in four graduate students and one in five postdoctoral fellows is considering a career entirely outside science, largely because of these perceived limitations.  But while this is troubling, it&#8217;s hardly surprising. A career in science means committing to the long hours and high stress that come with grant-writing, the pressure to publish, and colleagues who are all smarter than you, or at least scarily competitive. None of these things exactly screams “mom of the year.” More from TIME: Chore Wars “We’re going to lose a lot of scientists at the top research universities,” study author Elaine Howard Ecklund said. “They’re going to go into industry and other professions and leave science altogether.” Ecklund and her colleague Anne Lincoln of SMU surveyed a mix of 3,455 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and tenure-track or tenured faculty members in the country’s top 20 Ph.D programs in astrophysics, physics and biology, as ranked by the National Research Council in 1995 and correlated with the 2008 rankings of the U.S. News &#38; World Report. The surveys, conducted as part of the Perceptions of Women in Academic Scientist (PWAS) study, covered mostly Ivy League and large state universities in the U.S. The pair found that while nearly twice as many women scientists as men – 45.4% to 24.5%<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6454&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">tarathean</media:title>
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		<title>Lethal Levels of Radiation Detected at Fukushima</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/08/03/lethal-levels-of-radiation-detected-at-fukushima/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/08/03/lethal-levels-of-radiation-detected-at-fukushima/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:12:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Krista Mahr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6379</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In many ways, it looks like daily life in Fukushima is slipping back into its familiar routines. In Koriyama, a town south of Fukushima City, a group of taiko drummers set up in front of the train station to perform in an annual summer festival. Girls cruise by on bicycles in their plaid skirts and white socks in the unusually mild August, and customers stop to browse at boxes of fresh peaches — a seasonal specialty of the prefecture, and, thanks to government testing, guaranteed to be mostly iodine- and cesium free. The rhythm of the seasons in this rural swath of Japan may be regaining some sense of normalcy, but a reminder that things are still anything but is never far away. As if to prove that point, on Tuesday Tokyo Electric Power Company announced that workers at their Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant had discovered a second highly radioactive location at the plant in two days. Radiation on the floor inside reactor No. 1 was measured to be 5000 millisieverts per hour, just one day after the employees found another &#8220;hot spot&#8221; of 10,000 millisieverts per hour at the base of a structure between reactors No. 1 and No. 2. (That was also as high as the Geiger counters could read; in reality, the levels could be higher.) As it is, both levels are many times higher than anything previously measured on the site; if a worker was exposed to 10,ooo millisieverts per hour for one hour, he or she could die within weeks. TEPCO says that no workers were exposed to either area, and that it has cordoned off both to determine their source. The radiation between reactors 1 and 2 was likely deposited during the initial phases of the disaster when TEPCO attempted to vent the reactors and released large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to an expert cited by CNN. Though they do not necessarily indicate that radiation levels at the plant are increasing, the back-to-back finds are reminders that things at<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6379&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Uncategorized</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/uncategorized/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">Krista Mahr</media:title>
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		<title>Exploding Bacteria, Self-Fertilizing Bugs and Other Cool Critters</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2011/07/29/exploding-bacteria-self-fertilizing-bugs-and-other-cool-critters/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2011/07/29/exploding-bacteria-self-fertilizing-bugs-and-other-cool-critters/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:39:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tara Thean</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Adaptation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wildlife]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bacteria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[behavior]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[evolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fanged frogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fertilization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hermaphrodite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hermaphroditism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parasite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scale insects]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=6258</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No matter how jaded you become, there is always room to be awed by the little shimmers of magic nature deals us on a regular basis. There&#8217;s something just plain cool about a world that offers up coral shaped like organ pipes, peppermint shrimp, and monkeys feasting on fermented leaves. A handful of unrelated studies this week added a few more life forms to Earth&#8217;s roster of biological weirdness. The smallest — but easily the most dramatic — of the new critters  are the suicide-bomber bacteria discovered by researchers at the University of Oxford and ETH Zürich (think Switzerland&#8217;s MIT) and reported in a paper in The American Naturalist. Known by the misleadingly unremarkable name Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the little bugs have a nasty habit of blowing themselves up and releasing a spray of toxins when too many of their fellow Pseudomonas aeruginosa are in the vicinity. The detonation kills some of the bystanders and reduces competition for food among the survivors. This seems like an awfully egalitarian act, especially for a bacterium, but the paradoxical reason behind the suicide is to increase the deceased&#8217;s chances of  leaving descendants. That ought to be pretty hard when you&#8217;ve just blasted yourself to bits, but according to ETH team-leader Fredrik Inglis, the behavior is likeliest to occur in “clonal” bacterial communities, in which all individuals share the same genes. In this situation, it doesn&#8217;t much matter who survives to divide and who doesn&#8217;t, since the whole reason all creatures — ourselves included — are impelled to reproduce in the first place is to pass on their genes. If everyone&#8217;s got the same DNA blueprint, the next guy&#8217;s descendants are as good as your own. The Inglis team admits that they can&#8217;t say what causes any single bacterium to be the one that takes a bullet for the team, but the research is already pointing in other, more practical  directions. Studying how bacterial toxins work and interact could help explain how bacteria themselves cause disease. Photos from TIME: The Otherworldly Flora and Fauna of the<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=6258&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Wildlife</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/animals-2/wildlife/</primary_category_link>
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