Since the 1960 launch of TIROS, there has never been a moment when the U.S. hasn’t had a weather satellite in low Earth orbit. The latest is Suomi NPP, a next-generation satellite that was originally a testbed for advanced sensors and was only intended to last three years. Because of problems with its now-cancelled replacement, the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System, or NPOESS, it’s now being asked to serve for five years. Yet even that won’t be enough. It’s likely that sometime in 2016, for the first time in over 50 years, the U.S. won’t have a polar orbiting weather satellite.
And that’s just one piece of a larger, potentially more ominous picture. We here in the U.S. are in danger of losing the majority of our Earth-observing satellites. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
This is my first piece for NOVA Next, that thing I’ve been working on for the past several months, and I’m really pleased I had the opportunity to cover such an important but relatively unknown story. The satellite gap will affect hundreds of millions of people, maybe more. But we’re powerless until we understand the problem. Hopefully this article helps with that.
This is the other thing that’s been keeping me busy. This past October, I took a dream job at NOVA, the venerable PBS science show. Part of my position was to help build a brand new website, one focused on original, in-depth science reporting and opinion. It’s been a huge undertaking, and I’ve had lots of help from my amazingly talented colleagues.
NOVA Next launched yesterday. Drop by and take a look. I think you’ll like it.
Things have been a bit quiet here at Per Square Mile for the past week, and that’s in part because I had the good fortune to drop in Jon Christensen’s class at UCLA, “Environmental Communications in the Anthropocene” on Tuesday. Topics discussed ranged from graduate degrees to the origin story of Per Square Mile to another thing that’s been keeping me so busy (more on that later today).
Jon recorded the discussion, which you can listen to by following the link above.
“Detroit built the American way of life, it built the middle class,” said LeDuff. “Everything came out of coal and steel and rubber and cars — and it went away. And now we still have coherent car companies, but we don’t have the jobs, because those are gone. So what do we do with all the leftover people?”
With the grant money provided by Google over the course of three years, the WWF intends to expand its UAV operations, both technologically and geographically. To this end, the WWF is developing SMART—a marriage of UAVs, sensors, and software—which should allow authorities to tackle poaching more strategically and give confidence to the rangers themselves.
A bit of an overstatement. Micro apartments are a piece of the puzzle, but they can’t be the whole thing. I wouldn’t live in a city if I had to squeeze into a 300 square foot shoebox, and I know I’m not the only one.
Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, writing for Venue:
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Venue met with Dean M. Anderson, a USDA scientist whose research into virtual fencing promises equally radical transformation—this time by removing the mile upon mile of barbed wire stretched across the landscape. As seems to be the case in fencing, a relatively straightforward technological innovation—GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices—has implications that could profoundly reshape our relationships with domesticated animals, each other, and the landscape.
Not only could this change ranching, it could open the landscape back up for free-ranging wildlife, such as bison. Is this the rebirth of the American West?
Sabrina Tavernise, reporting for the New York Times:
The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide.
I wrote about the correlation between suicide rates and population density a while ago. Before researching the topic, I had suspected suicide rates might be higher in cities because of increased stress levels. Not so. They were higher in the countryside. Why? Higher rates of gun ownership.
[Peter] Platzer has engineered a tiny satellite called the ArduSat, which runs on several programmable Arduino computers, is equipped with a camera to take photos of the Earth, and uses an UHF transceiver to send and receive data. The finished ArduSat satellite is roughly the size of a water bottle, 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, and costs less than $1 million to build and launch.
A chance for nearly anyone to get access to a satellite, or just more space junk? Depends on how successful they are in booking their time slots.
The U.S. House and Senate are considering bills that would mandate open access to scientific publications six months (at most) after they’ve first been published. Obviously, full open access would be ideal, but this is a step in the right direction.
Details on the carbon tax are scant, but previous reports indicated that it would come into force by 2015 and might start at 10 yuan ($1.60) per tonne of carbon, rising to 50 yuan ($8) per tonne by 2020. Notably, the tax would be collected by local tax authorities, and not municipal environmental protection bureaus.
If it pans out, China’s carbon tax could be monumental. The top rate of $8 per tonne is still shy of what some experts I’ve spoke with think is an appropriate rate, at least for the U.S. If cost of living differences play a role, then $8 may be spot on for China.
Luke Skywalker is a bumpkin. Before heading off to fight the Empire, he apparently never gets much farther than a country store that sells power converters. Over the course of three movies, his every foray into urban-ness strips away a layer of naïveté, shattering his innocence so utterly that he is almost completely corrupted. Luke doesn’t find peace until the end of Return of the Jedi, when he cremates his father’s remains—alone, in the woods.
It’s a reboot of an older piece of mine, but shorter, sharper, and surrounded by all sorts of Star Wars goodness in this special issue. (It’s number 21 in the web version, but number 11 in the magazine.)
Neil Freeman redrew the United States so each state had an equal population. Bonus: He also named ’em. According to Freeman, I live in Casco and was born in Menominee.
Freeman joins a proudtradition of rejiggering state borders.
A big reason the Achilles is such a foot-dragger at getting better is that the tendon tissue we have as adults is basically the same as we had when we were teenagers. That finding was published earlier this week in The FASEB Journal. But how the researchers figured that out is every bit as interesting as the result. The scientists used fallout from nuclear bomb tests as biological tracers.
I have yet to find a scientific use of stable isotopes that I don’t admire.
Environmentalists have filed lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency to press for tighter standards for nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. Worried that the agency might step in with new mandates, farm groups are weighing a temporary solution: floating islands that could process the nutrients before they reach the river.
Michael Kimmelman, reporting for the New York Times:
Water management here depends on hard science and meticulous study. Americans throw around phrases like once-in-a-century storm. The Dutch, with a knowledge of water, tides and floods honed by painful experience, can calculate to the centimeter — and the Dutch government legislates accordingly — exactly how high or low to position hundreds of dikes along rivers and other waterways to anticipate storms they estimate will occur once every 25 years, or every 1,000 years, or every 10,000.
And now the evidence is leading them to undertake what may seem, at first blush, a counterintuitive approach, a kind of about-face: The Dutch are starting to let the water in. They are contriving to live with nature, rather than fight (what will inevitably be, they have come to realize) a losing battle.
Countries around the world—not just those faced by rising sea levels—should pay heed to the Dutch model of adaptive landscapes. It just makes sense.
Today, there are already several regions around the world where demand for food and water exceed local supply. But human populations continue to grow in these regions because of the global market for food: exporting food also virtually transfers the water needed to grow that food—called “virtual water”—from production areas to consumption areas. The problem, then, is what happens when the water-rich countries have to limit their virtual-water exports in order to meet the demands of their own growing populations. As Suweis et. al. have calculated in a new Early Edition PNAS paper, the resulting decline of trade-dependent populations could happen as early as 2030, just a few years after von Foerster’s doomsday.
