A Medley of discoveries.

A few of us have dreamed about installing solar panels on the top of all saints.... well apparently the Vatican has one upped us - they have not only installed such solar panels, but soon will actually be carbon neutral.

Consilence Journal, recently founded by a group of Columbia U. undergrads (i.e. kids our age), is an online journal on multidisciplinary sustainable development. Impressive.

This one is for Helen more than anyone, but perhaps a few profs would find this interesting, too. There's a group called Chemists Without Borders. Nothing too fancy, but it is just one example of people realizing that we have the solution to most of the problems in our world (such as lack of water & food & health) - it is more a matter of getting the right people to the right place with the right information.

The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative is a group of biologists who go around the world looking for the next HIV, bird flu, etc under the premise that prevention of epidemics is much easier than control, as we have learned so dramatically as HIV ravishes our world.They were just featured in the New York Times.


Dot Earth is a fantastical blog out of the New York Times which focuses on sustainable development. Also, Green, Inc. is another NYT blog you should check out.

My reading for oceanography today was about "ocean biogeochemical dynamics" - what a mouthful! Anyways, in between pages of very large equations with lots of big variables, I was shocked to learn that the current influx of anthropogenic carbon into the atmosphere - assuming we manage to stop spewing carbon out into the sky and stop the deforestation - will be around for a looooooong time:

After several tens of thousands of years, about 8% of the initial pulse remains in the atmosphere. On timescales of several hundred thousands of years, this remaining CO2 will react with igneous rocks on land, so that the entire initial pulse will disappear from the atmosphere on timescales approaching a million years.

Crazy, isn't it? Not only have we altered our world today, but we have altered the world for the next 1,000,000 years! Humans as we know them have only really been around for ten thousand, and in two hundred years of industrial activity we've seriously altered the planet. We apparently have also created (starting back in 1800) a new geologic age with all this anthropocentric activity: the Anthropocene. Hopefully we won't be extinct soon.

And here's a really cool image of a forminifera, a unicelluar organism that is important in climate change research. There's other great images (that look like galaxies in outer space) out there of these little guys, but I can't seem to find them right now.