Weird Links

Hurricane forecaster William Gray, a Colorado State University researcher, claims that ocean circulation patterns are behind a decades-long [global] warming cycle. He has argued previously that the strength of these patterns can affect how much cold water rises to the surface, which in turn affects how warm or cold the atmosphere is.

Gray complained that politics and research into global warming have created "almost an industry" that has unfairly frightened the public and overwhelmed dissenting voices.

This is fuking scandalous if it's true:

The government of Ecuador will wait up to one year to see if the international community offers to compensate the country for not developing a major oil field in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Energy Minister Alberto Acosta says. The area of lush, primary rainforest shelters a unique diversity of animals and plants.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and his government say that if the international community can compensate the country with half of the forecasted lost revenues, Ecuador will leave the oil in Yasuni National Park undisturbed to protect the park's biodiversity and indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.

The House on Wednesday narrowly approved a $124 billion war spending bill that would require American troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq by Oct. 1, setting the stage for the first veto fight between President Bush and majority Democrats.

The Senate is expected on Thursday to approve identical legislation [edit: they did, see below for link], which provides more than $95 billion for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through Sept. 30, with the money conditioned on the administration’s willingness to accept a timetable for withdrawal and new benchmarks to assess the progress of the Iraqi government.

The research team used the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) 3.6-m telescope to discover the super-Earth, which has a mass about five times that of the Earth and orbits a red dwarf already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet.

[The authors] have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid.

Women with a lifetime history of migraine have less cognitive decline over time than women without migraine. It's possible, researchers suggest, that antimigraine medications, as well as diet and behavior changes, play a role in the apparent protective effect of migraine on cognition.

A pill that can correct a wide range of faulty genes which cause crippling illnesses should be available within three years, promising a revolution in the treatment of thousands of conditions.

As well as offering hope of a first effective treatment for two conditions that are at present incurable, the drug [called PTC124] should also work against more than 1,800 other genetic illnesses, [because it] targets a particular type of mutation that can cause very different symptoms according to the gene that is disrupted.

Savannah chimpanzees, which can make weapons to hunt other primates for meat, can also seek refuge in caves, much like our earliest human ancestors.

Researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time.

...adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest ...humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.

Russia is working on a space transport system that could eventually lead to the industrialization of the moon.

The Reuters news agency quoted a Russian space expert as saying: "...it is time to do this given the limits to natural reserves on Earth and the pace of civilization’s progress. Nor can we dismiss the idea of outsourcing harmful industries into space".

See also: New Russian Spaceship Will Be Able To Fly To The Moon.