![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lost in a Million-Year Gap, Solid Clues to Human Origins
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
Sometimes the maturity of a field of science can be measured by the heft of its ambition in the face of the next daunting unknown, the mystery yet to be cracked.
Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark energy, the pervasive but unidentified stuff that shapes the universe and accelerates its expansion.
In the study of human origins, paleoanthropology stares in frustration back to a dark age from three million to less than two million years ago. The missing mass in this case is the unfound fossils to document just when and under what circumstances our own genus Homo emerged.
The origin of Homo is one of the most intriguing and intractable mysteries in human evolution. New findings only remind scientists that answers to so many of their questions about early Homo probably lie buried in the million-year dark age.
( Read More )
Scientist at Work | Phung Tuu Boi: Through the Forest, a Clearer View of the Needs of a People
By CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
A LUOI VALLEY, Vietnam — Phung Tuu Boi reaches down to inspect one of the spiny shrubs lined up in a row before him. A few feet away, a cow grazes serenely in this emerald valley in the hills of central Vietnam.
Mr. Boi, a forester and director of the Center for Assistance in Nature Conservation and Community Development in Hanoi, points to the cow. “See this?” he says. “Very, very bad.”
An invisible poison clings to the soil beneath the cow’s muddy hoofs. During a short stretch of the Vietnam War this patch of ground served as an American Special Forces air base, and while the soldiers departed long ago, a potent dioxin from the Agent Orange that they stored and sprayed here lingers still.
Mr. Boi, a lively, passionate man whose enormous smile rarely leaves his face, has dedicated his career to repairing the ecological damage left by what people here call the American War. And while he has had much success in the last 30 years, his task is far from over.
( Read More )
From Ozone Success, a Potential Climate Model
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
In 1985, scientists studying the air over Antarctica stumbled on a gaping breach in the billion-year-old atmospheric radiation shield that makes Earth’s surface habitable.
The discovery of a seasonal “hole” in this veil of ozone molecules was so unexpected — “the surprise of the century,” one chemist later called it — that it was presumed to be a data glitch.
It wasn’t. Soon other experts found a connection between the ozone hole and the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and similar synthetic chemicals in solvents, refrigeration, sprays and the like.
The chemical threat to the ozone layer had been identified in 1974, and industries and governments were planning to shift to safer substitutes. But it took the ozone hole, glaring from satellite images like a purple bruise, to make eliminating such chemicals a global imperative. On Sept. 16, 1987, an initial batch of countries signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that has since grown and led to bans on 95 percent of the ozone-eating compounds.
On Sunday, diplomats, scientists and environmentalists gathered in Montreal to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the treaty and to spend a week discussing possible new steps to speed an end to remaining ozone threats.
( Read More )
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
Sometimes the maturity of a field of science can be measured by the heft of its ambition in the face of the next daunting unknown, the mystery yet to be cracked.
Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark energy, the pervasive but unidentified stuff that shapes the universe and accelerates its expansion.
In the study of human origins, paleoanthropology stares in frustration back to a dark age from three million to less than two million years ago. The missing mass in this case is the unfound fossils to document just when and under what circumstances our own genus Homo emerged.
The origin of Homo is one of the most intriguing and intractable mysteries in human evolution. New findings only remind scientists that answers to so many of their questions about early Homo probably lie buried in the million-year dark age.
( Read More )
Scientist at Work | Phung Tuu Boi: Through the Forest, a Clearer View of the Needs of a People
By CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
A LUOI VALLEY, Vietnam — Phung Tuu Boi reaches down to inspect one of the spiny shrubs lined up in a row before him. A few feet away, a cow grazes serenely in this emerald valley in the hills of central Vietnam.
Mr. Boi, a forester and director of the Center for Assistance in Nature Conservation and Community Development in Hanoi, points to the cow. “See this?” he says. “Very, very bad.”
An invisible poison clings to the soil beneath the cow’s muddy hoofs. During a short stretch of the Vietnam War this patch of ground served as an American Special Forces air base, and while the soldiers departed long ago, a potent dioxin from the Agent Orange that they stored and sprayed here lingers still.
Mr. Boi, a lively, passionate man whose enormous smile rarely leaves his face, has dedicated his career to repairing the ecological damage left by what people here call the American War. And while he has had much success in the last 30 years, his task is far from over.
( Read More )
From Ozone Success, a Potential Climate Model
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, September 18, 2007
In 1985, scientists studying the air over Antarctica stumbled on a gaping breach in the billion-year-old atmospheric radiation shield that makes Earth’s surface habitable.
The discovery of a seasonal “hole” in this veil of ozone molecules was so unexpected — “the surprise of the century,” one chemist later called it — that it was presumed to be a data glitch.
It wasn’t. Soon other experts found a connection between the ozone hole and the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and similar synthetic chemicals in solvents, refrigeration, sprays and the like.
The chemical threat to the ozone layer had been identified in 1974, and industries and governments were planning to shift to safer substitutes. But it took the ozone hole, glaring from satellite images like a purple bruise, to make eliminating such chemicals a global imperative. On Sept. 16, 1987, an initial batch of countries signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that has since grown and led to bans on 95 percent of the ozone-eating compounds.
On Sunday, diplomats, scientists and environmentalists gathered in Montreal to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the treaty and to spend a week discussing possible new steps to speed an end to remaining ozone threats.
( Read More )
