NASA
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Critical List: Nebraska legislature kickstarts Keystone XL planning; NASA’s climate skeptics
The Nebraska legislature passed a bill that’ll kickstart planning for the rerouted Keystone XL pipeline. Turns out a bunch of former NASA employees are also climate skeptics. Canada’s unlikely to meet its 2020 goal for carbon emissions cuts.
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Your new offshore energy source: Floating algae farms
Forget offshore oil drilling. NASA’s working on a project that would generate clean, renewable offshore energy, by growing algae in floating plastic bags. These floating algae farms would take in wastewater from treatment plants. For algae, wastewater is like the nectar of the gods: The ammonia and phosphates act as a fertilizer. So the algae […]
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This ocean climate model is downright hypnotic
Last year, a group of NASA scientists and animators put together this animation of the world’s ocean surface currents, based on ocean flow data for June 2005 to December 2007. The video starts over the Atlantic, and as the globe rotates, you can see the whorls and waves dancing across the ocean, the relative calm […]
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This train can launch you into space
Getting into space via shuttle is difficult and expensive. So why not take a train? Startram is a magnetic levitation train that could — theoretically — launch people into orbit for a fraction of the cost.
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Holy crap, solar storm!
YOU GUYS THAT’S WHAT THE SUN LOOKS LIKE RIGHT NOW. (Sort of. It’s a false-color composite of some UV photography of what the sun looks like right now. But it’s still pretty rad.) That up there in the upper right corner is the biggest solar storm in seven years, and a coronal mass ejection from […]
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Watch a climate satellite get launched
NASA's new weather satellite — which in typical NASA acronym-happy fashion, is called the NPP, standing for NPOESS Preparatory Project, standing for National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System — is a state-of-the-art way to measure climate impacts. The satellite will monitor ozone levels, temperatures, vegetation cover, ice cover, air pollution, and other effects of climate change, […]
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Critical List: EPA comments on Keystone XL coming soon; Moscow catches the green bug
The EPA is going to release its comments on Keystone XL soon. Also, John Kerry's on the case. America at last launched a NASA satellite to observe the weather and climate of all the earth. And Al Gore rejoiced. No pesto for you! Pine nuts are the latest food to carry salmonella. Environmental laws aren't […]
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Critical List: Wangari Maathai passes away; NASA satellite didn’t kill anyone
Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel peace prize for her work planting trees, passed away. She was the first African woman to win the prize and the first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D.
Around the world, thousands of people met in more than 2,000 demonstrations to rally for a Moving Planet.
That massive NASA satellite managed to plop back to earth without killing anyone. -
Climate change makes alien invasion more likely
Update: Depressingly, this wasn't funded by NASA at all, although one of the authors is from NASA's planetary science division (he worked on it in his free time). It's still a good read though. (Thanks, Kate Sheppard!)
Here's good news for people who have been trying to draft the tinfoil-hat crew into the fight against climate change: A genuinely not-at-all-made-up-by-me
NASAnot NASA study posits that global warming could alert extraterrestrial civilizations that humanity is getting too big for its britches, and prompt them to attack us.