NASA’s buzz about comet Elenin
IMAGE: NASA JPL
NASA posted a video on their website Buzzroom last week, bringing attention to a recently discovered comet in our solar system. The comet was discovered by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin in December last year. Comet Elenin, as it is called, is of particular interest to NASA because of the close proximity to Earth that its orbit will reach during its turn around the sun on its way back out through the solar system later this year.
Most orbits of planets are not circles; they are ellipses. The elongated ends of elliptical orbits are called aphelions and perihelions; the aphelion being the end farthest away from the stationary object being orbited, and perihelion being the end closest to the stationary object. In Elenin’s case, its trip around our sun represents the comet’s perihelion.
So little is known about this comet because of its relatively recent-discovery status, therefore, Read more…
High Gas Prices May Turn Suburbs Into Slums
Americans rarely think much about zoning, but it governs almost every facet of how we live our lives. And unintended consequences of 50-year-old zoning codes may be about to turn some of our loveliest and quietest suburbs into the next slums.
Why? Simply because they’ve been built too far away from everything else, and we won’t be able to afford the gasoline it takes to go to and fro.
Suburbs: slums of the future?
At least, that’s the provocative conclusion of Peter Newman, one of the authors of a study released by the Planning Institute of Australia late last year.
The study looks at the future of suburban Australia, which has evolved in patterns very much like suburban America: sprawling, low-density, auto-dependent residential enclaves miles away from commercial areas and office parks.
“Urban sprawl is finished,” Newman told The Age. “If we continue to roll out new land releases and suburbs that are car-dependent, they will become the slums of the future.”
Following World War II, with the rise of affordable automobiles, cheap fuel and an increasingly Read more…
Large-Scale Assessment Of The Arctic Ocean: Significant Increase In Freshwater Content Since 1990s
The freshwater content of the upper Arctic Ocean has increased by about 20 percent since the 1990s. This corresponds to a rise of approx. 8,400 cubic kilometres and has the same magnitude as the volume of freshwater annually exported on average from this marine region in liquid or frozen form. This result is published by researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute in the journal Deep-Sea Research. The freshwater content in the layer of the Arctic Ocean near the surface controls whether heat from the ocean is emitted into the atmosphere or to ice. In addition, it has an impact on global ocean circulation.
Differences in the mean salinity of the Arctic Ocean above the 34 isohaline between 2006 to 2008 and 1992 to 1999.
Negative values are shown in yellow, green, and blue and stand for an increase of freshwater.
Image: Benjamin Rabe, Alfred Wegener Institute Read more…
Household wealth down 23% in 2 years – Fed
By Charles Riley, staff reporterMarch 24, 2011: 4:04 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The average American family’s household net worth declined 23% between 2007 and 2009, the Federal Reserve said Thursday.
A rare survey of U.S. households, first performed in 2007 but repeated in 2009 in order to gauge the effects of the recession, reveals the median net worth of households fell from $125,000 in 2007 to $96,000 in 2009.
Titled “Surveying the Aftermath of the Storm,” the report offers a broad look at how the financial crisis impacted individual households.
It is widely known that the 2008 financial crisis resulted in the vaporization of trillions Read more…
Breach suspected at troubled Japanese power plant
TOKYO – Two weeks after an earthquake and tsunami triggered a crisis at a nuclear plant, the government said Friday there is a suspected breach at a reactor — another setback that would mean radioactive contamination at the facility is more serious than once thought.
Japanese leaders defended their decision not to evacuate people from a wider area around the plant, insisting they are safe if they stay indoors. But officials also said residents may want to voluntarily move to areas with better facilities, since supplies in the tsunami-devastated region are running short.
The escalation in the nuclear plant crisis came as the death toll from the quake and tsunami passed the grim milestone of 10,000 on Friday. Across the battered northeast coast, hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed still have no power, no hot meals and, in many cases, no showers for 14 days.
The uncertain nuclear situation again halted work at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, where authorities have been scrambling to stop the overheated facility from leaking Read more…
Upcomming days of interest for possible Seismic Activity
- Keep in mind of sunspot 1176’s possible activity
IMF Prepares For “Threat To International Monetary System”
Back in April 2010, before Waddell and Reed sold a few shares of ES, effectively destroying the market on news that Europe was insolvent, we made the following observation: “The IMF has just announced that it is expanding its New Arrangement to Borrow (NAB) multilateral facility from its existing $50 billion by a whopping $500 billion (SDR333.5 billion), to $550 billion.” Little did we know that our conclusion “something big must be coming” would prove spot on just a month later after Greece, then Ireland, then Portgual, and soon Spain, Italy, Belgium, and pretty much all other European countries would topple like dominoes tethered together by a flawed monetary regime. Well, based on news from Dow Jones we can now safely predict the following: “something bigger must be coming.” As if the IMF’s trillions in open lending facilities (many of which have recently been adjusted to uncapped) were not enough, we now learn that the world lender of last resort (which in theory is the Fed, but apparently Bernanke has been getting a little Read more…
Is the European Union on the brink of Collapse?
Foto: THOMAS BORBERG (arkivfoto)
A real risk of disintegration if the EU does not soon display solid internal and external cooperation.
Europe’s external divisions on Libya are as great as its internal divisions on the new Europact.
Over the past few days, EU countries have faced historically difficult decisions without being able to reach agreement.
The indecision has seriously questioned the determination that European countries are able to muster, both in NATO and in the European Union.
The countries seem to have reached agreement on handing over the responsibility for the Libya operation to NATO. The breakthrough has, however, come so late that credibility has already been lost.
For once, Denmark has stood out in a positive light by both sending fighter aircraft to Read more…
Israel to deploy ‘Iron Dome’ anti-rocket system
“I authorised the army to deploy in the next few days the first battery of “Iron Dome” for an operational trial,” Defence Minister Ehud Barak said as he toured the tense Gaza Strip border.
The order comes after a spate of rocket fire by Gaza militants in recent days, some of them striking deep into Israel.
The deployment of the Iron Dome interceptor, designed to combat short-range rocket threats from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, has been delayed until now with officials saying operating crews needed more training and suggestions the system was prohibitively expensive.
The system, developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems with the help of Read more…
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