New warfare

Russia knows how to prevent global warming - academic

Talk about scary! At a time when Putin is declaring a new arms race with the U.S., Russian scientists want to stop global warming in their own way... What happens if the rest of the world doesn't want them to do it because we aren't convinced they are right? How do we stop them?

I've thought of this in regards to China blowing up satalites , creating weather and the recent assult on Estonia by Russian born internet virus's and spam too... .

This at a time when strange metal things fall from the sky in New Jersey and orange snow is falling in Russia.

As far as I know there isn't a connection to the orange snow and China's experiements, or the falling metal and blown up satallites - but as far as I know, there aren't publicized investigations either.

The world's diplomacy and negotiation abilities are at a miserable failure with most countries unable to even get along within themselves anymore, even science is at war with itself. But our reliance on science and technology is at it's highest and the power that humans wield is ever growing to influence not just the weather, but the genetic make up of the other living beings that share this planet.

Right now warfare and intimidation are moving away from the military soldier against soldier fighting to terrorists and economic strangling - but where as in the past where scientists would help the military, there may be little need for a 'middle man' anymore. Governments can just use scientists, technicians and your every day nerd for creative strategies that will threaten the economies and communication ability of their enemies... and maybe the food they grow, the weather that falls on them and who knows what else...

Imagine if some country blows up a bigger satalite that causes so much debris in the atmosphere that it takes out or severely limits our ability to communicate or makes just standing in your own house a danger from falling space debris? How do you fight that??

And the arguments we are getting into don't even have to be major, I mean, Russia brought Estonia to it's knees over the insult of a STATUE being moved... Talk about petty reasons to attack your neighbor.

And it wouldn't even be necessary for a government to issue an 'attack', the people themselves could do such a thing if they were organized enough.

The time to get serious about trash and recycling is

There is so much waste and inefficiency in the way the modern world deals with it's garbage and most of it does not have to do with what happens to the garbage once it's made, most of it is the creation of garbage in the first place. Everything we eat comes in disposable packaging, some can be recycled, but at cost and not everyone is required to recycle.

The biggest problem is that selling goods is what drives the market and pretty packaging is much more important than anything else. There are some concerns over safety and weight and cost, but very little thought actually goes into creating packaging that can be easily reused or is minimal for disposal reasons.

If people had to pay per pound to have their trash taken away instead of a flat fee for everything to be taken, you can bet their decisions on what to buy would be based more on the weight and recyclability of their trash and THAT would motivate the products to be more effecient and possibly even market light weight or totally recyclible. and everyone would invest in a heavy duty garbage disposable that would eliminate most food garbage altogether.

There is no reason at all why a big corporation that puts out multiple products of similar size and weight couldn't create packaging that could be completely not just recycled, but reused! A grocery that offered all their products in neatly stackable resealable boxes that they would offer to come pick up (AND WASH) could charge a fee and make considerably more money per product, while the consumer would be able to escape the trash fees.

As it is, the below story is going to continue to happen until something is thought of to do

Naples's trash is a challenge politicians are flunking
By Ian Fisher
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy: Business at Pizzeria
Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The
reasons include egg shells, fermenting teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks
human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, scuzzy wine bottles - all in an
unbroken heap, at places two meters high, stretching the length of a football
field along the curb to the pizzeria's door.
It smells bad.
"If you see all this trash, you don't have much desire to eat," said the pizzeria owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days,
is very angry at the city's leaders.
For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into real crisis, as much political as sanitary. The trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump the region's refuse officially filled up. The last legal dump closed on Saturday.
And as the stench rose, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights - one of many protests for various causes that also included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. Even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.
"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, who is in charge of
sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood,
where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage Wednesday morning. "You smell
this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they
complain."
The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its
loveliness and squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, ongoing
inequity in poor southern Italy and the local mafia, the camorra.
But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point in Italy.
As trash dumps filled up over the years, new places or ways to get rid
of garbage were not found, largely because of local protests or protection by
one politician or another. Years of postponing the problem finally caught up
with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperatures rose, creating as much
stink as unsightliness).
"This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure," said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of the Italian Parliament for the center-left Daisy party.
Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling "to make strong
choices" to build new dumps or incinerators in any particular place.
And so, as the world's media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets last week, the nation's president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual "extreme energetic
appeal" to all levels of government, and politicians of the left, right and
center, finally to solve the region's crisis. At stake was not just public
order, he said, but "the image of the country."
The president's office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case, Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town - led by one devout and praying woman dubbed "la Passionaria of Parapoti" - to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.
That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the
surrounding communities to finally begin digging themselves out - and hopefully
lower tempers here, too.
Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to the tourist trade upon which it depends heavily, seemed largely clean, and in the last few days, the city's sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.
But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains,
compounding longstanding problems, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of
southern Italy, where dingy high-rises already are plagued by drugs and the
mafia.
On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods,
drug dealers sat across the street from a dumpster spilling over with
construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot. "It's never been like this
- I can't tell you why," said Sabato D'aria, 37, owner of a grocery also across
from the dumpster. Politicians, he said, only "talk, talk, talk. But in the
end you see very little. Unfortunately here in the south we are always more
penalized. Italy is divided."
There is also the problem of the camorra, which, experts say, profits extraordinarily from the region's endless crisis over its trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war. Experts say the camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis - and which experts say are far more harmful than legal ones to the health of humans and the environment.
In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been
proposed by an emergency commission: In short, greater recycling and the opening
of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring
provinces. But as has happened in several towns over the last two weeks, locals
that may be affected protest loudly.
"The reaction is very strong," said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government's "trash czar."
She called it "an exaggerated Nimby syndrome," in which she said the
"not-in-my-backyard" protesters get disproportionately large media coverage.
And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, a town just north of Naples - and people there have been complaining, too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three gray smokestacks for the region's only incinerator, set to start up in several months, rise from the town's edge.
But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attract clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor's yard.
"Acerra shouldn't die," said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. "It should fight." So it remains to be seen whether Naples is ready to
overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can agree on where new dumps and
incinerators should be located. Shipping it abroad does not seem an option:
Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy's
trash. If difficult decisions are not made - and quickly - nearly everyone
fears trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and
questions on how this can still happen in Europe.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.

Genetic Engineering of our plants

I'm going to ignore the climate change aspect of this article and focus on the fascinating science behind plant breeding, which narrows down the genetic diversity in order to yield more crops that taste better and are resistant to pests and drought, and their wild plant cousins who live out in the world and contain much more variety in their genes.

Like 'well-bred' dogs and the wild wolf, humans get the traits they want from the species by controlling who gets to mate with whom - which is different than genetically designing a dog in a petri dish. However, imagine taking a dog breed such as a poodle and deciding you want spots like a dalmation - a breeder would need multiple generations to make that possible. But once the genes were mapped out, a scientist in a lab could do it in much less time.

However, in both cases, you still need something to work with - be it a wild species of plant or the breeds of dogs that have the genetic material you want. A place that built it's work on the breeding of specialized chimera would need wild animals and breeds of chimera from which to draw from when creating it's ever more specialized population of creatures.

Vital Genetic Resources For Resisting Drought, Pests Jeopardised By Climate

Wild relatives of plants such as the potato and the peanut
are at risk of extinction, threatening a valuable source of genes that are
necessary to boost the ability of cultivated crops to resist pests and tolerate
drought, according to a new study released by scientists of the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The culprit is climate
change, the researchers said. According to the study, in the next 50 years as
many as 61 percent of the 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of the
108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct as the result of climate
change. Most of those that remained would be confined to much smaller areas,
further eroding their capacity to survive. The study also examined wild
relatives of cowpea, a nutritious legume farmed widely in Africa. It found that
only two of 48 species might disappear. However, the authors predict that most
wild cowpeas will decline in numbers because climatic changes will push them out
of many areas they currently inhabit. "Our results would indicate that the
survival of many species of crop wild relatives, not just wild potato, peanuts
and cowpea, are likely to be seriously threatened even with the most
conservative estimates regarding the magnitude of climate change," said the
study's lead author, Andy Jarvis, who is an agricultural geographer working at
two CGIAR-supported centers - the Colombia-based International Center for
Tropical Agriculture and Bioversity International, with headquarters in Rome.
"There is an urgent need to collect and store the seeds of wild relatives in
crop diversity collections before they disappear. At the moment, existing
collections are conserving only a fraction of the diversity of wild species that
are out there." Extinction of crop wild relatives threatens food production
because they contain genes for traits such as pest resistance and drought
tolerance, which plant breeders use to improve the performance of cultivated
varieties. The reliance on wild relatives to improve their cultivated cousins on
the farm is expected to intensify as climate change makes it too hot, too cold,
too wet or too dry for many existing crop varieties to continue producing at
their current levels. The results of the study were announced on International
Biodiversity Day, organized by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Jarvis and his colleagues looked specifically at the effects of climate change
on the three crops in Africa and South America. The scientists focused on the
two continents because this allowed them to consider how known populations of
wild plants would fare in a wide variety of growing conditions. They found the
impact of climate change is likely to be more pronounced in some species than in
others but that, in general, all three groups of species would suffer. Though
not apparent to the average consumer, the wild relatives of crops play an
important role in food production. All food crops originated from wild plants.
But when they were domesticated, their genetic variation was narrowed
significantly as farmers carefully selected plants with traits such as those
related to taste and appearance as well as to yield. When trouble arises on the
farm -attacks by pests or disease or, more recently, stressful growing
conditions caused by climate change - breeders tend to dip back into the gene
pool of the robust wild relatives in search of traits that will allow the
domesticated variety to overcome the threat. In recent years, genes available in
wild relatives have helped breeders develop new types of domesticated potatoes
that can fight devastating potato blight and new types of wheat more likely to
survive drought conditions. Wild relatives of the peanut have helped breeders
provide farmers with varieties that can survive a plant pest known as the root
knot nematode, and resist a disease called early leaf spot. In fact, according
to the report, more than half of new domesticated peanut varieties developed in
the last five years have incorporated traits from wild relatives. Cowpea wild
relatives are known to be a reservoir of genes that could confer resistance to
major insect pests. In the US alone, the value of the improved yield and quality
derived from wild species is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of
dollars a year. Jarvis said the vulnerability of a wild plant to climate change
can depend on its ability to adapt by, for example, extending its range as
warming in its native regions becomes too hot to handle. One reason wild peanut
plants appear to be so vulnerable to climate change is they are largely found in
flat lands and would have to migrate a long way to reach cooler climates, a
predicament exacerbated by the fact that peanuts bury their seeds underground, a
meter or less from the parent plant. That limits the speed at which seeds can
move into more favorable climates. By contrast, plants in mountainous locations
could theoretically survive by extending their range slightly up a slope, even
by only a few meters, to find cooler weather. What scientists must do, Jarvis
said, is identify which wild relatives are most likely to suffer from climate
change and give them priority for conservation. "The irony here is that plant
breeders will be relying on wild relatives more than ever as they work to
develop domesticated crops that can adapt to changing climate conditions," said
Annie Lane, the coordinator of a global project on crop wild relatives led by
Bioversity International. "Yet because of climate change, we could end up losing
a significant amount of these critical genetic resources at precisely the time
they are most needed to maintain agricultural production. Research that
identifies crop wild relatives threatened by climate change is part of a broader
CGIAR effort to anticipate and blunt the effects of global warming on
agriculture. In the local, national, and international policy arenas, CGIAR
researchers are generating innovative options to foster adaptation to climate
change. In addition, new research at CGIAR-supported centers focuses on
understanding the impacts of shifting climate patterns on natural resources,
such as water, fisheries, and forests, and on planning for improved management
of these resources to meet the needs of growing populations as the climate
changes.

What happens when the Federal Government can't enforce it's own laws the States don't like?

What's to be done when a centralized government such as the U.S. Federal Government, makes laws and claims lands that the local constituants abhore, and when the local government decides it is probably in their best interests to do what their people want than to obey the centralized government? Do you charge people fines - what if they don't pay them and the state/county governments don't enforce them? Do you go in with federal troops to try to force compliance? What if the state puts up a defense, do you start a civil war? Does the federal government have enough power to stop this from happening? Does it have enough willpower to do it? Will it change the laws before it makes outlaws of it's citizens?

Posted on Sun, May. 27, 2007

Utah defies U.S. land policies
National parkland is a flash
point. Residents demand it for grazing and off-road vehicle use.
By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

RECAPTURE CANYON, Utah - It's a small gesture of
defiance: a narrow metal bridge that allows off-road vehicles illegal access to
this archaeologically rich canyon. But the structure, built by San Juan County
on U.S. government land, is a symbol of the widespread local resistance to
federal authority across much of southern Utah's magnificent
countryside.
Historically, people in the rural West have challenged federal
jurisdiction, claiming ownership over rights-of-way, livestock management and
water use. But nowhere is the modern-day defiance more determined, better
organized or well-funded than in Utah, where millions of taxpayer dollars are
spent fighting federal authority, and where the state is helping to pay the tab,
much of it, critics say, without oversight.
For a decade, the legislature and
two state agencies have funneled money to southern Utah counties for legal
challenges to federal jurisdiction. Most recently, a state representative
persuaded the legislature to provide $100,000 to help fund a lawsuit by ranchers
and two counties seeking to expand cattle grazing in the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Grand Staircase is one of a dozen
parks and monuments that draw tens of millions of visitors to the region every
year to take in the spectacular high desert and red-rock canyons that have awed
travelers since John Wesley Powell voyaged down the Green and Colorado Rivers in
1869.
"This is a beautiful and unique land," said Bill Smart, retired editor
of Salt Lake City's Deseret News. "It's distressing that we can't all be more
appreciative of the values that other people see here. To me it's very
disappointing that our own people can't see what we have."
A deep resentment
In southern Utah, where the federal government controls as much as 90 percent of
the land in some counties, many residents feel they are permanent tenants on
land their ancestors pioneered. The resentment hardens whenever Washington
restricts ranching, mining, energy development or motorized recreation.
"Who
gets to control the land is the great American story," said Karl Jacoby,
associate professor of history at Brown University. "In part it is about
economics, but a lot of it is about identity and who we are as a
people."
Officials of one county have written a bill, pending in Congress,
that would order the sale of federal land, with the proceeds given to the
county. Other Utah counties have said they would follow suit. And officials from
the two counties surrounding Grand Staircase have lobbied in Washington to
dramatically reduce the two-million-acre national monument.
Elected officials
have flouted federal authority by bulldozing roads in the Grand Staircase
monument and Capitol Reef National Park, and by tearing down signs banning
off-road vehicles in Canyonlands National Park. A handful of counties have
developed transportation plans that declare federally closed roads
open.
Selma Sierra, Utah director of the federal Bureau of Land Management,
insisted that the agency's relationship with counties was good.
"The BLM
manages a substantial amount of land in this state," Sierra said. "Yes, those
lands belong to everyone in the country, but the decisions we make affect those
[local] individuals more so than anywhere else."
A threat to the land But
federal officials say increases in motorized recreation and scarring of the
landscape from energy exploration threaten historic and cultural treasures and
damage wildlife habitat.
A BLM archeological assessment of third-century
Anasazi ruins and cliff dwellings in Recapture Canyon found evidence of looting
and off-road-vehicle damage. According to the assessment, the new, county-built
bridge "can be expected to hasten and increase indirect impacts to cultural
resources here."
"It's quite common in Utah to hear people say, 'The federal
government should give the land back to the state.' But the state never owned
it," said Daniel McCool, director of the American West Center at the University
of Utah.
McCool said rebellious county commissioners no longer represented
the demographic of the American West.
"There is a new rural resident," he
said. "They didn't move here to ranch and raise cattle. They moved here for the
amenities value of the public lands. That's what's driving the economy now.
Today, the single largest nongovernmental components of Utah's economy are
tourism and recreation."
According to an economic analysis commissioned by
the National Parks Conservation Association, national parks generate at least $4
for state and local economies for every dollar in the parks' budgets. Zion
National Park, in southwest Utah, had 2.5 million visitors last year and
provided nearly $100 million in annual recreational benefits to the surrounding
county, according to the study.
But Lt. Gov. Gary R. Herbert said in an
interview that Utah had endured an "erosion of rights."
"We're not going to
sit back anymore. We're going to be proactive. We are going to protect our
rights," he said.
State Rep. Mike Noel, a Republican from the southern
community of Kanab, said it got down to "sovereignty and autonomy."
"It's
Western independence," Noel said. "We own the water, we have the right to graze,
the minerals are still available, and the roads belong to us. By dang, we are
not going to give them up."

Chimera Ebryos to experiment on, but not implant

This is what I expected to happen, that experimentation will take place but under strict controls... but in the novel, the people who knew how to do this will get tired of being told what they can and can't do, and move to a place where they won't have a government who cares or gets involved... or maybe the government will WANT it to happen for their own reasons.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2081755,00.html

Hybrid embryos get go-aheadDavid BattyThursday May 17, 2007

The government has overturned its proposed ban on the creation of
human-animal embryos and now wants to allow them to be used to develop new
treatments for incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
The proposal, in a new draft fertility bill published today, would allow scientists to create three different types of hybrid embryos.
Scientists would be allowed to grow the embryos in a lab for no more than two weeks, and it would be illegal to implant them in a human.

The first kind of hybrid allowed under the bill, known
as a chimeric embryo, is made by injecting cells from an animal into a human
embryo. The second, known as a human transgenic embryo, involves injecting
animal DNA into a human embryo.

The third, known as a cytoplasmic hybrid, is created by transferring the
nuclei of human cells, such as skin cells, into animal eggs from which almost
all the genetic material has been removed.

This is this type of human-animal embryo that is being developed in British
universities. Scientists say that developing these embryos will provide a
plentiful source of stem cells - immature cells that can develop into many
different types of tissue - for use in medical research.

The move is a U-turn on proposals to outlaw all types of human-animal
embryos set out by ministers in a white paper published last December. But the
new proposal would not allow the creation of "true hybrid" embryos, which would
involve fertilising a human egg with animal sperm or vice versa.

The government was criticised by the Commons science and technology
committee for proposing an outright ban after objections were raised by pro-life
groups opposed to any research on embryos.

The draft bill, which also covers fertility treatment, will overhaul the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

British scientists have already applied to the Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Authority, which regulates embryo research, for a licence to use
human-animal embryos for medical research.

Professor John Burn, head of the human genetics institute at Newcastle
University, welcomed the government's U-turn.

"I'm delighted that common sense has prevailed. I fully understand the
knee-jerk reaction that creating human-animal embryos is worrying," he
said.

"But what we're talking about here are cells on a dish not a foetus. We're
talking about something that looks like sago under the microscope. And it's
illegal to ever turn these cells into a living being."

A team led by Lyle Armstrong at Newcastle University's stem cell institute
has applied to the HFEA to use cow eggs to develop stem cells for the treatment
of diabetes and spinal paralysis.
Another team led by Professor Stephen
Minger, director of the stem cell biology laboratory at King's College London,
wants to use human-bovine embryos to study degenerative neurological diseases
such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.