Smart Energy

It turns out a group of psychics believe Apollo 16 might have found an alien ship on the moon. Plus, the sun is spitting giant magnetic bubbles of radiation at the Earth like we talked about its sister! Enjoy This Week in Discovery News.

via Psychics on the Moon and Incoming Sun Spit : Discovery News.

Backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as this one by Portland, Oregon, builder Hammer & Hand, are part of the trend towards greater urban density. (PRNewsFoto/Earth Advantage Institute)

Earth Advantage Institute, a nonprofit green building resource that has certified more than 12,000 homes, announced its annual prediction of 10 green building trends to watch in 2012.

The trends, which range from a boom in certified multi-family construction to the advent of consumer friendly home energy technology, were identified by Earth Advantage Institute based on discussions with a broad range of audiences over the latter part of 2011. These sectors included policymakers, builders, developers, architects, real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, and homeowners.

“While the economy has not been kind to most new home builders, we have seen a surging interest in home energy management and energy improvement among homeowners,” said Sean Penrith, executive director, Earth Advantage Institute. “Those builders and remodelers who have adopted a transparent green message have been quite successful.” Read the rest of this entry »

Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

via Dramatic links found between climate change, elk, plants, and birds.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject and Kevin Zeinio has a great rant on the topic of keeping scientific knowledge open and accessible, too. What follows is an analysis by Janet D. Stewwedel from the Scientific American blog. Read the rest of this entry »

A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences.

the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

“It could be occurring in other polyploids, but this sort of methodology just hasn’t been applied to many plant species,” said study co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “So it may be that lots of polyploids — including our crops — may not be perfect additive combinations of the two parents, but instead have more chromosomes from one parent or the other.”

Researchers analyzed about 70 Tragopogon miscellus plants, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was followed by polyploidy.

via Newly formed plants could lead to improved crop fertility.

Andy Baio looks at youngsters’ persistent misapprehensions about copyright law, which is stricter than many realize. Exhibit A: a popular YouTube of Pulp Fiction scenes, remixed in chronological order, posted with the disclaimer “No copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project.”

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I’d wager the vast majority people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.

Isn’t it also interesting how many young artists still instinctively honor the idea, as they see it, of copyright? Respect for other artists comes naturally. People don’t stop respecting copyright until they see how little the claimed principles have to do with the reality of enforcement—especially when it’s used to condem their own creative expressions as a form of theft.

via Young people’s idea of copyright vs. the law – Boing Boing.

Here is a fast, easy, free, and non-violent way to drive the big banks out of their greedy little minds is sitting in your mailbox right now. And it will help support the postal system, too! Hey, it’s win-win.

This came in the form of an email from Bruno Clarke to the SLSA listserv. I’ve loved Margulis and Sagan’s books for years. In her youth, Margulis was married briefly to Carl Sagan, the father of her son, Dorion.

Lynn Margulis was Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and in 1999 received the Presidential Medal of Science from Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill O’Reilly does’t want to Monday morning quarterback, but even even Megyn Kelly says that Lt John Pike didn’t exactly look “surrounded and threatened” before he started dousing protesters in pepper spray. She did, however, call pepper spray “a derivative of actual pepper … a food product, essentially.” Or as they put it at Grist, ” after all the cop just lightly seasoned these students with a delicious food mist.”

Or as one wag of a commenter at Gawker noted,

• Megyn Kelly on fire hoses: “It’s a sports beverage, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on police dogs: “It’s a family pet, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on tasers: “It’s static cling, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on rubber bullets: “It’s a pencil eraser, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on hand grenades: “It’s a Fourth of July firework, essentially! God bless America.”

via In The Alternate American Universe, Pepper Spray Joins Pizza as a Vegetable : TreeHugger.