doomed and damned
February 20th, 2006 by 
Abbas Halai
the future seems doomed and damned.
Increased carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly making the world’s oceans more acidic and, if unabated, could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to one that occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology will present this research at the AGU/ASLO Ocean Sciences meeting in Honolulu, HI on Monday, Feb 20.
Caldeira’s computer models have predicted that the oceans will become far more acidic within the next century. Now, he has compared this data with ocean chemistry evidence from the fossil record, and has found some startling similarities. The new finding offers a glimpse of what the future might hold for ocean life if society does not drastically curb carbon dioxide emissions…
and if that wasn’t enough.
New infectious diseases are now emerging at an exceptional rate, scientists have told a leading conference in St Louis, US.
Humans are accumulating new pathogens at a rate of one per year, they said.
“This accumulation of new pathogens has been going on for millennia - this is how we acquired TB, malaria, smallpox… But at the moment, this accumulation does seem to be happening very fast. So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population…”
and in other non-damning news….you know how you always wanted x-ray vision like superman’s…
Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, have pioneered the technique which could be used to see through rubble at earthquake sites, or look at parts of the body obscured by bone.
The effect is based on the development of a new material that exploits the way atoms in matter move, to make them interact with a laser beam in an entirely new way.
via warrenellis
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