Conscious Choice of Food Can Substantially Mitigate Climate Change, Research Finds

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: Reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products and improving agricultural practices could decrease global greenhouse gas emissions substantially. By 2055 the emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture could be cut by more than eighty percent, researchers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research find. The results of the modelling study have recently been published in the journal “Global Environmental Change”.

“Meat and milk really matter,” says Alexander Popp of PIK. “Reduced consumption could decrease the future emissions of nitrous oxide and methane from agriculture to levels below those of 1995,” explains the first author of the study. In the past, agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly methane and nitrous oxide, have increased steadily. In 2005 they accounted for 14 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. “Besides the conscious choice of food on the consumers’ side there are technical mitigation options on the producers’ side to reduce emissions significantly,” says Popp.

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Coffee or Tea: Enjoy Both in Moderation for Heart Benefits, Dutch Study Suggests

American Heart Association: Coffee and tea drinkers may not need to worry about indulging – high and moderate consumption of tea and moderate coffee consumption are linked with reduced heart disease, according to a study published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers in The Netherlands found:

• Drinking more than six cups of tea per day was associated with a 36 percent lower risk of heart disease compared to those who drank less than one cup of tea per day.
• Drinking three to six cups of tea per day was associated with a 45 percent reduced risk of death from heart disease, compared to consumption of less than one cup per day.

And for coffee they found:

• Coffee drinkers with a modest intake, two to four cups per day, had a 20 percent lower risk of heart disease compared to those drinking less than two cups or more than four cups.
• Although not considered significant, moderate coffee consumption slightly reduced the risk of heart disease death and deaths from all causes.

Researchers also found that neither coffee nor tea consumption affected stroke risk.

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Want to Find Your Mind? Learn to Direct Your Dreams

New Scientist: “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.

If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream – a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart’s content.

Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain’s behaviour during the dream state (see “Dream mysteries”). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience. Read the rest of this article

Strange Discovery on Titan Leads to Speculation of Alien Life

This artist concept shows a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of the smoggy moon Titan.

NASA: Two new papers based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan’s surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized “methane-based life.”

One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene.

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NCAR: Ocean Currents Likely to Carry Oil Up Atlantic Coast

National Center for Atmospheric Research: A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. The modeling results are captured in a series of dramatic animations produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators.

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor. The results were reviewed by scientists at NCAR and elsewhere, although not yet submitted for peer-review publication.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock, who worked on the study. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.”

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