In an effort to ensure global food security, 10,000 new varieties of crops from around the world are being added to the ‘doomsday’ seed vault in the Arctic. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on an island off Norway’s northern coast, already stores 825,000 samples of seeds, which represent 13,000 years of agricultural history. The vault provides a back-up to the network of seed banks around the world, which store seeds but can be threatened by war, accidents and natural disasters. Protecting the diversity of the world’s crops is ‘fundamental’ for ensuring food security in the face of climate change, warned the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), which manages the vault.

A series of deliveries of seeds to Svalbard this month will help in that fight, the GCDT said. Four shipments from major genebanks based in Bulgaria, Colombia, India and Taiwan are delivering varieties from more than 100 countries. The shipments include types of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, peal millet, chickpea, groundnut, Asian and African aubergine. Seeds of a number of indigenous African vegetables, including okra, amaranth, spider plant and jute mallow are also being deposited. Preserving different food plant varieties will help breed and develop crops that can withstand a changing climate, for example, by being more drought resistant or able to cope with higher temperatures, the trust said.

Marie Haga, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said: ‘The Svalbard Global Seed Vault symbolises how we can create a long-term, sustainable and positive solution to feed the world forever. ‘The issue of hunger is global, and increasingly urgent. If we continue as we are, food production will be reduced and food prices will rise. Even more people will go hungry. ‘Crop diversity is essential if we are to provide more food, more nutritious food and affordable food for the poor. ‘Maintaining crop diversity, and the genetic wealth it provides to current and future generations, is beneficial not just to crop breeders, but to the farmers that feed all of us on this planet.’ The GCDT is calling on governments, businesses, foundations and wealthy individuals to contribute to a £500 million ($800 million) endowment fund which will pay to conserve crop varieties in perpetuity.

You see, in the monster in the mirror game you're not talking to a ghost or an actual monster, but you're talking to yourself. You're talking to the side of you that lingers in your subconscious. You're letting them out, but only momentarily. What's most important about this is the fact that you need to be in control the entire time. If you lose it- even for a second- there's a chance you might not gain it back. That being said, if you're still brave enough to play, here are the rules:

First things first, you'll need a few things:
-A pen/pencil
-A piece of paper
-A mirror that you can clearly see yourself in
-A small light source (a flashlight/nightlight)
-Someone to check on you every hour

Once you have all these things you're ready to start. First, be in a pitch black room with the mirror, and have something to write on. Second, plug in the nightlight, or turn on the flashlight. The point of this it to make it as dark as possible while still being able to see. Third, make sure there are no distractions. You need to be alone in the room, the person who is to check on you should wait just out side the room you're in. Now, this is where patience comes in handy. You see, this can be anywhere from a few minutes to hours. What you need to do is just stare into the mirror, and wait. You may notice that words are coming into your head, words that don't completely feel are yours. Write them down.

Every one's experience is different. Some will hear voices, others will start to hallucinate. Don't let this scare you, write down whatever you can. You won't need to talk- because they already know what your going to say.

They themselves will say things that will stick with you, but don't let them scare you, and most importantly, don't break eye contact with your reflection. Ever.

Just a few more things, if the light ever goes out, get out of there. If you break eye contact, get out of there. If you start to lose control, get out of there. If this has already been enough to put you on edge, this is not for you. If you're still going through with it- good luck. Your about to see the monster beneath the surface, and you can't run from yourself.

The victim of this morning’s pile-on is Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who was asked in an editorial board meeting whether she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Grimes hemmed and hawed a bit, obviously scared to say Yes. That isn’t too surprising — when you run as a Democrat in a red state (just as when you run as a Republican in a blue state), you spend a lot of your time explaining why you aren’t like the national party and its leaders. But some people are outraged, including Chuck Todd, who said on Morning Joe (with a look of profound disgust): “Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?…I think she disqualified herself. I really do, I think she disqualified herself.”

No question, Grimes botched this badly, and she should be able to answer a question as simple as this one. But this affair gets at the odd set of unspoken rules that dictate what gets designated a “gaffe” or a serious mistake, and what doesn’t.

The problem isn’t that one party gets treated more harshly than the other does. There are plenty of Republican candidates who have gotten pummeled for their “gaffes.” Rather, the problem is the standard that reporters  use, probably unconsciously, to decide which gaffes are worthy of extended discussion and which ones merit only a passing mention, a standard that often lets GOP candidates get away with some appalling stuff.

For instance, when Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst flirted with the “Agenda 21″ conspiracy theory — a favorite of Glenn Beck, in which the U.S. government and the United Nations are supposedly conspiring to force rural people in Iowa and elsewhere to leave their homes and be relocated to urban centers — national pundits didn’t see it as disqualifying. Nor did they when it was revealed that Ernst believes not only that states can “nullify” federal laws they don’t like (they can’t); and, even crazier, that local sheriffs ought to arrest federal officials implementing the Affordable Care Act, which is quite literally a call for insurrection against the federal government. I guess those are just colorful ideas.

National observers also didn’t find it disqualifying when Tom Cotton, who is favored to become the next U.S. senator from Arkansas, expressed his belief that ISIS is now working with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate America over our southern border.

Why do candidates like Cotton and Ernst get away with stuff like that, while Grimes gets raked over the coals for not wanting to reveal her vote and someone like Todd Akin can lose a race over his ruminations on “legitimate rape”? It’s because the standard being employed isn’t “Does this statement reveal something genuinely disturbing about this candidate?” but rather, “Is this going to be politically damaging?” Grimes’ chief area of political vulnerability is that she’s a Democrat in Kentucky, where Barack Obama’s approval ratings are low, so whenever the question of Obama comes up, reporters are watching closely to see how deftly she handles it; if she stumbles, they pounce. Akin got hammered for “legitimate rape” not so much because of how bogus and vile the idea is, but because reporters knew it could have serious consequences among women voters, given both the GOP’s constant struggles with women and the fact that Akin’s opponent was a woman.

Of course, these judgments by reporters end up being self-fulfilling prophecies: if they decide that a “gaffe” is going to have serious political effects, they give it lots of attention, which creates serious political effects.

And in the last few years, there’s a baseline of crazy from the right that the press has simply come to expect and accept, so the latest conspiracy theorizing or far-out idea from a candidate no longer strikes them as exceptional. Sure, there are exceptions: For instance, Republicans Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell both saw their candidacies derailed by their crazy or outsized statements. But their utterances were truly, deeply bizarre or comical, so they broke through.

But during this cycle, Republican crazy just hasn’t broken through at all. It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right. At this point so many prominent Republicans have said insane things that after a while they go by with barely a notice. This is an era when a prominent Republican governor who wants to be president can muse about the possibility that his state might secede from the union, when the most popular radio host in the country suggests that liberals like Barack Obama want Ebola to come to America to punish us for slavery, and when the President of the United States had to show his birth certificate to prove that he isn’t a foreigner.

So ideological extremism and insane conspiracy theories from the right have been normalized. Which means that when another Republican candidate says something deranged, as long as it doesn’t offend a key swing constituency, reporters don’t think it’s disqualifying. And so it isn’t.

A cloud of methane gas about the size of Delaware was detected over the Four Corners area of the American southwest years ago. The readings were so unusually high that NASA scientists dismissed them. A new study confirms the methane hotspot is real.

“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said Christian Frankenberg, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, in an article on NASA’s news website.

Methane gas is the most potent of the so-called “greenhouse gases” that trap the Earth’s heat and contribute to global climate change. Carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, is far more plentiful in the atmosphere, but methane is about 80 percent more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, according to an article on The Atlantic’s CityLab website.

An article on the Christian Science Monitor website says that the 2,500-square mile methane cloud over the region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet traps more heat in a year than all the annual carbon dioxide emissions of Sweden.

The change of heart by NASA scientists is described in a new study published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which took another look at the earlier data, and confirmed the existence of North America’s largest methane “hotspot.”

The source of the methane is believed to be extensive coal-mining activity in the San Juan Basin, according to Eric Kort, a professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and lead author of the study. He calls the Basin “the most active coalbed methane production area in the country.”

The study shows that there were 0.59 million metric tons of methane released every year during the period 2003-2009, 3.5 times more than earlier estimates.

There is currently a sharp increase in hydraulic fracturing – commonly called fracking – in the region, but because the cloud predates the fracking activity, Kort and Frankenberg say the earlier coal-mining activity is most likely to blame.

“The results are indicative that emissions from established fossil fuel harvesting techniques are greater than inventoried,” Kort said. “There’s been so much attention on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but we need to consider the industry as a whole.”

Quote from: DAS B00T x2 on October 12, 2014, 03:54:58 PM

Quote from: Jocephalopod on October 12, 2014, 03:54:20 PM

how in the nig do do have over 3000 posts?

Because he is the Serious forum.

Yeah, if you want to post a thred in Serious, you have to PM Meta first.