http://www.religionnews.com/2015/05/11/m...cceptance/
EXCERPT: A few decades ago, there were two options for people who wanted to follow Jesus but were attracted to the same gender: They could either throw off religion and embrace their sexuality, or they could remain in the faith and hide their sexual orientations. Today, there are other options. Some — like Matthew Vines and David Gushee — are attempting to make a biblical case for same-sex relationships. Others — such as Julie Rodgers and Wesley Hill — are leading a movement of celibate gay Christians.
Among the second group, Eve Tushnet has risen to prominence. She has a popular blog hosted by the Patheos Catholic Channel and has created a stir with her book “Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith.” We asked her why it is important to her to self-identify as a lesbian and whether she’s missing something about the uniqueness and importance of erotic intimacy....
Ceres’ White Spots Multiply in Latest Dawn Photos
http://www.universetoday.com/120244/cere...wn-photos/
EXCERPT: We don’t know exactly what those mysterious white spots on Ceres are yet, but we’re getting closer to an explanation. Literally. The latest images from the Dawn spacecraft taken a mere 8,400 miles from the dwarf planet Ceres reveal that the pair of spots are comprised of even more spots. “Dawn scientists can now conclude that the intense brightness of these spots is due to the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice,” said Christopher Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission from the University of California, Los Angeles....
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Blue Sunset on Mars
http://nineplanets.org/news/blue-sunset-on-mars/
EXCERPT: The Curiosity rover took this picture of the Martian sunset. The image was taken on 15 April 2015 from Gale Crater. The image was taken by the “left-eye” of Curiosity’s Mast Camera on the rovers 956th Martian day. The image has been processed to remove artifacts and was white-balanced. The image does a pretty good job of showing what we would see if we were on the planet and someday perhaps we will. The Martian atmosphere has fine particles of dust that allow blue light to penetrate the atmosphere than longer wavelengths like yellows and reds which are scattered. This is unlike we see here on Earth where the scattering effect is alomost the other way around. The effect is also more pronounced at sunset than at mid-day. So on Mars blue sunsets are the norm.....
http://www.labnews.co.uk/news/martian-an...-possible/
EXCERPT: In the study, published in Nature, the scientists analysed the relative humidity, air temperature and ground temperature data from the Curiosity rover located at Gale crater on Mars. They found that liquid water in very salty state – known as liquid brines – forms at night-time in the uppermost 5 cm of the subsurface and then evaporates after sunrise.
Madsen said: “When night falls, some of the water vapour in the atmosphere condenses on the planet surface as frost, but calcium perchlorate is very absorbent and it forms a brine with the water, so the freezing point is lowered and the frost can turn into a liquid. The soil is porous, so what we are seeing is that the water seeps down through the soil. Over time, other salts may also dissolve in the soil and now that they are liquid, they can move and precipitate elsewhere under the surface”. . . .
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...125404.htm
RELEASE: Around 55 million years ago, an abrupt global warming event triggered a highly corrosive deep-water current through the North Atlantic Ocean. The current's origin puzzled scientists for a decade, but an international team of researchers has now discovered how it formed and the findings may have implications for the carbon dioxide emission sensitivity of today's climate.
The researchers explored the acidification of the ocean that occurred during a period known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when Earth warmed 9 degree Fahrenheit in response to a rapid rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and subsequently one of the largest-ever mass extinctions occurred in the deep ocean. They report their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
This period closely resembles the scenario of global warming today.
"There has been a longstanding mystery about why ocean acidification caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide during the PETM was so much worse in the Atlantic compared to the rest of the world's oceans," said lead author Kaitlin Alexander, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales, Australia. "Our research suggests the shape of the ocean basins and changes to ocean currents played a key role in this difference. Understanding how this event occurred may help other researchers to better estimate the sensitivity of our climate to increasing carbon dioxide."
To get their results the researchers recreated the ocean basins and land masses of 55 million years ago in a global climate model.
During that time a ridge on the ocean floor existed between the North and South Atlantic that separated the deep water in the North Atlantic from the rest of the world's oceans. The ridge was like a giant bathtub on the ocean floor.
The simulations showed this ridge became filled with extremely corrosive water from the Arctic Ocean, which mixed with dense salty water from the Tethys Ocean and sank to the seafloor, where it accumulated. The sediment in this area indicates the water was so corrosive that it dissolved all the calcium carbonate produced by organisms that settled on the ocean floor.
When Earth warmed as a result of a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, it eventually warmed this corrosive bottom water. As this water warmed it became less dense and denser water sinking from above replaced it. The corrosive deep water was pushed up and spilled over the edge of the giant "bathtub" and flowed into the South Atlantic.
"That corrosive water spread south through the Atlantic, then east into the Southern Ocean and eventually made its way to the Pacific," said Tim Bralower, professor of geosciences, Penn State. "The pattern of the event corresponds very closely to what the sediment records tell us. Those records show almost 100 percent dissolution of calcium carbonate in the South Atlantic sediment."
Determining how the event occurred also has important implications for today's climate and how it might warm in response to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
If the high amount of acidification in the Atlantic Ocean was an indication of global acidification, then it would suggest enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are necessary to increase temperatures by 9 degrees Fahrenheit. However, these latest findings suggest that other factors made the Atlantic bottom water more corrosive than in other ocean basins.
"We now understand why the dissolution of sediments in the Atlantic Ocean was different from records in other ocean basins," said Katrin Meissner, associate professor, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales. "Using all sediments combined we can now estimate that the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere causing a temperature rise of 5°C (9 degrees Fahrenheit), was around the carbon dioxide equivalent of 7,000 to10,000 gigatons of carbon. This is similar to the amount of carbon available in fossil fuel reservoirs today."
The big difference between the PETM and the alteration to the current climate is the speed of the change, said Alexander.
"Today we are emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ten times faster than the rate of natural carbon dioxide emissions during the PETM," said Alexander. "If we continue as we are, we will see the same temperature increase that took a few thousand years during the PETM occur in just a few hundred years. This is an order of magnitude faster and likely to have profound impacts on the climate system."
www.livescience.com/50778-most-extreme-mothers.html
EXCERPT: Motherhood is an impressive feat under any circumstances. But for some mothers, it's almost miraculous....
[...] Nadya Suleman [...] gave birth to the only known set of octuplets to live past their first week. . . .
[...] The most children born to any woman in recorded history is 69 [...from...] 27 pregnancies. . . .
[...] The youngest mother ever to give birth [...] was 5 years, 7 months and 21 days old. . . .
[...] The oldest woman to give birth [...] gave birth to twins at age 72. . . .
[...] Thomas Beatie [...] became the world's first man to become pregnant and give birth. . . .
[...] Smallest mom was Stacey Herald, who stands just 2 feet 4 inches (71 centimeters) tall, has given birth to three babies. . . .
http://christiannewswire.com/news/1499976030.html
EXCERPT: Members from many GFA-supported churches in India are responding unconditionally to the disastrous April 25 earthquake in Nepal with widespread prayer, fasting, generous giving, clothing and food drives, as well as sending relief teams to help restore their neighboring country. They are taking their own initiative to help bring relief there, knowing first-hand what it's like to go through significant natural disasters in their own country. Their actions demonstrate the strength of the Christian church in South Asia. "Many who have personally experienced the devastation of powerful earthquakes and storms are now responding to help others," said Dr. K.P. Yohannan, founder and international director of GFA. "The local church, led by and composed of nationals in South Asia, is rising to the occasion by helping to meet the needs of earthquake victims."....
https://plus.maths.org/content/how-does-...arden-grow
EXCERPT: Can maths reveal new phenomena in biology? Jacques Dumais, from Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, and Etienne Couturier, from Université Paris-Diderot in France, think that it can. The power of maths has already been demonstrated in mathematical biology, where mathematical models are inferred from quantitative biological data. For example, the empirical models from epidemiology have allowed the medical community to combat and sometimes even eradicate infectious diseases. What Dumais and Couturier are seeking, however, is slightly different. Dumais says they aim to distill underlying biological principles from observations, allowing them to predict new things in biology. "Theoretical biology is closer to theoretical physics – where the mathematics is formal enough that you can begin predicting things that have never been seen or measured," says Dumais. They hope to uncover mathematical descriptions of biological processes and that these biological laws will allow them to predict and observe previously unknown phenomena, in a similar way to the great insights that theoretical physics has made to our understanding of the physical world....
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...r-of-play/
EXCERPT: Play is the highest form of human activity. At least that’s what Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” when he described a three-step development of the human spirit. First, the human psyche has the form of a camel because it takes on the heavy burden of cultural duties — ethical obligations, social rank, and the weight of tradition. Next, the camel transforms into a lion, which represents the rebellion of the psyche — the “holy nay” that frees a rule-governed person from slavish obedience to authority. Finally, this negative insurgent phase evolves into the highest level of humanity, symbolized as the playing child — innocent and creative, the “holy yea.” Cue the Richard Strauss music.
As usual with Nietzsche, we can debate the precise meaning of this cryptic simile (e.g., is the child supposed to be the nihilism-defeating Übermensch?), but it’s clear at least that Nietzsche considered play vitally important for humanity. Apart from such a rare paean, however, philosophy has had little interest in play, and where it does take interest it is usually dismissive. For many hard-nosed intellectuals, play stands as a symbol of disorder. Plato’s reproach in “The Republic” of artists as merely playing in the realm of illusion famously set the trend, as did Aristotle’s claim that play (paidia) is simply rest or downtime for the otherwise industrious soul. He calls it a “relaxation of the soul” and dismisses it from the “proper occupation of leisure.”
Leisure, for Aristotle, is serious business. We get our word “scholar” from the Greek word for leisure, skole. It should not be squandered on play, in Aristotle’s view, because play is beneficial only as a break or siesta in our otherwise highbrow endeavors.
The Roman poet Juvenal (circa A.D. 100) used the expression “bread and circuses” to describe the decline of Roman civic duty, in favor of mere amusement. The selfish common people, he scolded, are now happy with diversion and distraction. They care not for the wider Roman destiny because play has distracted them from social consciousness.
To be fair, philosophy has not been completely devoid of proponents of play. Bertrand Russell, in his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” offered a positive view of “idleness” and leisure, lamenting “the modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” He also argued that “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” If we reduced our workday to four hours, he suggested, we would have the leisure time to think and reflect on every topic, especially the social injustices around us and the manipulations of the state.
[...] Philosophy should come out to play. [...] The stakes for play are higher than we think. Play is a way of being that resists the instrumental, expedient mode of existence. In play, we do not measure ourselves in terms of tangible productivity (extrinsic value), but instead, our physical and mental lives have intrinsic value of their own. It provides the source from which other extrinsic goods flow and eventually return....
