Quick Links 6

[Image: “Melbourne’s Future Wheel” by Büro North].

Danger Room: “As part of its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon extreme research agency Darpa is launching the Transparent Earth project. They’ll invest $4 million into the creation of real-time, 3-D maps that display ‘the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily-relevant spatial scales.'”

InfraNet Lab: “When snow prospects at lower Cypress looked dim, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) unrolled the contingency plan to use snowcats, trucks, helicopters and a team of about 45 people to equitably redistribute snowfall. This led to two basic weather engineering practices: snow transfer and snow-base packing. Trucks and snowcats are moving snow from higher elevations, while helicopters are ferrying in bales of straw to bolster bases, walls and turns. Snow is being moved hastily—none of the ice brick techniques found at Innsbruck here—almost more as a cut-fill soil strategy. VANOC is trucking in about three dozen loads of snow a day from as far away as Manning Park, more than two hours drive east of Vancouver. That is over 300 truckloads and counting.”

[Image: Snow-hardening in Olympic Vancouver; photo by Jae C. Hong courtesy of the Associated Press (via InfraNet Lab)].

e360: “A group of solutions is emerging under the rubric of ‘rewilding,’ and this new movement has made considerable progress over the past decade. A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the ‘island’ effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators.”

Mother Jones: “A new study shows how North American birds have changed the shape of their wings in the past century as the landscapes around them have been fragmented by clear-cutting.”

New York Times: “Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future.”

Sify: “Reports indicate that the third national survey on cultural relics in China has revealed more than 700 km of ancient Great Wall in the northwestern part of the country.”

[Image: Rho Ophiuchus. Photo courtesy Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA].

PhysOrg.com: “According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation… ‘We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life.'”

PhysOrg.com: “NASA to Study Seeds in Space to Understand Plant Growth… ‘There’s only one way to determine exactly why plants grow differently in weaker gravity environments, like on the moon and Mars, than on Earth—and that’s by using the microgravity environment in spacecraft orbiting Earth.”

White House: “The Environmental Protection Agency is developing regulations that address the safety, efficacy, and environmental soundness of injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground. The Department of the Interior is assessing, in coordination with the Department of Energy, the country’s geologic capacity to store carbon dioxide and promoting geological storage demonstration projects on public lands.”

The Sofia Echo: “Possession and use of a metal detector in Bulgaria [now] requires registration with the Culture Ministry and lack of such registration [will be considered] a crime… Efforts to legalize the open use of metal detectors have consistently been rebuffed by state bodies, which have treated it as attempts to legalize tomb-raiding.”

(Some links via @Tree_Museum, @nicolatwilley, the bewilderingly awesome @treestrategist, and Jessica Saraceni;s posts on Archaeology News, one of my consistent top ten web favorites. Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).