How To Suicide in MARS ! Wanted Volunteers!

I'm Sending Four People to Mars for the Rest of Their Lives

Space travel has always been tainted with a few big, unavoidable problems for me. The first is that I spent all three years of my university career occasionally learning what Foucault thinks about reality television, rather than anything vaguely scientific that would teach me how to launch myself through earth's atmosphere without dying immediately. The second is that everything is just so staggeringly, unfathomably far away. The half hour commute to work is bad enough; three days to get to a pretty nondescript floating hunk of rock just seems pointless and like a massive waste of time that could be spent not crowded up in a little shuttle hurtling through the sky.

Although, I suppose if there was an exciting prospect at the end of the journey I wouldn't mind so much. Like a new, ready-made home for me to spend the rest of my years, for example. Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp is going to be furnishing those exact dreams with his Mars One project, which aims to build a liveable settlement on Mars, before sending four humans to live there for the rest of their lives in 2023, followed by more batches of people as the years go on, living there for the REST of their lives.        

Besides that minor detail, his project is remarkable in that it aims to raise the majority of its funding through creating the biggest media spectacle the world has ever known – covering every stage of the project and allowing viewers to vote on who gets to take the trip – rather than relying on governments and having to deal with any kind of political interference. I met Bas for a drink to talk about his plans.

 VICE: So tell me what sparked this whole idea of sending people to live the rest of their lives on Mars.
Bas Lansdorp: I was originally inspired around 15 years ago when the first rover landed on Mars. I basically thought it'd be much cooler if humans were walking up on Mars, rather than the machine. I always wanted to go myself and knew I didn't stand a chance if I went through the normal NASA or European Space Agency (ESA) procedures, but I kind of forgot about the idea when I started studying mechanical engineering. Then, a few years later, someone told me that the Americans were planning a one-way trip to Mars – which is so much more feasible than a return mission – so I decided to drop everything and go for it.

What were you doing at the time?
I was working at a company, but I sold half my shares to get things going. Then John de Mol, the inventor of Big Brother, told me I could finance the project through the media, so I thought 'I really have to take this chance now.' I mean, it's extremely complex, but I have to take the risk and do it.

Yeah, it's interesting that you're planning on funding the whole project with media money.
Well, we have other revenue ideas, of course, but yeah – we need to finance a lot of things before we can send any humans out to Mars and creating a media spectacle is a good way to do that. I'll just add that it's not my main goal to create a media spectacle, though. There are much easier ways of doing that than sending humans on a one-way mission to Mars.

 Ha, yeah I assume there probably are. How much is it going to cost?
It's going to be £3.8 billion to set it up, then another £630 million for each one of the four astronauts. I initially thought that number was unrealistically high, but the International Olympic Committee had a revenue of one or two billion pounds for one three-week-long event, so that's half a billion a week, which makes our numbers not look too bad.

Literally everybody who has access to internet or TV will watch it and, by that time, nearly four billion people will have the internet, so imagine being the brand that sponsors an event like that. You'll immediately have the biggest name on the planet.  It's a lot of money, but I'm very entrepreneurial and also very down to earth, so I wouldn't do it if I didn't believe it was possible.

Cool. So what's the process? What's being sent up first?
We've got a demonstration mission in 2016 to show the technology that we've purchased, which is where we'll send a communications satellite to Mars, then, in 2018, we'll send a rover up to find the best location for the settlement.   

What factors determine a good place for a settlement?
It's got to be north enough to have a good amount of water crystals in the soil and south enough for the solar panels to be effective. It's gonna be on the northern hemisphere because the seasons are less extreme there. But it's also got to be as low as possible in altitude, because Mars has a very thin atmosphere and the lower down you go, the more time you'll have to slow down and land safely.

 And everything is going to be ready built for the humans' arrival, right?
Yeah, everything will land in big pre-built components that will be assembled by the rovers. There'll be two capsules for the life support system, two capsules for the living units and two capsules with supplies.   

Nice. Is it right that the astronauts are being picked with a lottery system?
No, that was just something some news show said. The way we're doing it is to have our experts determine who's suitable from those who apply, then we'll ask the audience who they want to send to Mars. The people picked will be the world's first ambassadors to Mars, so it's important that the general public have their say.

What would be your perfect candidate?
Well, when I started, I thought we'd need doctors and engineers, but the most important thing is actually the person's personality. You need someone who's capable of sitting in a very small vehicle for the seven month journey, then able to cope mentally with leaving earth behind. The medical and engineering aspects are obviously very important, too, but we'll train them in those for the eight years before they leave, so it's the personality that's the most crucial thing. 

 What happens if two of the astronauts have a baby, or something? 
Well, that's not the goal. We're putting people up there, but they'll be largely responsible for their own actions. Because of the time difference between Earth and Mars, it's not like we'll be able to say, "Pick up that rock" or guide them through stuff in realtime, so they'll have to be responsible.

And any responsible person knows that Mars – with only three other people for company – probably isn't the ideal place to have a baby. The means to get a baby into the world will be there, though, and the long-term goal is create an outpost where that could happen – maybe when there's 20 or 30 people there. 

So you eventually want to start a whole new Martian society?
Yeah, that should be the goal. We want to establish a small self-supporting society on Mars that doesn’t need the Earth anymore. Although, it's such long-term planning that it's not really something you can keep under control, so we'll have to see.

Do you want to go and live on Mars eventually?
I wanted to. I talked to our medical director, Norbert Craft, though, and he said I don't have the patience or the calmness to cope. I'm the architect and the entrepreneur, not the right person to actually go on the mission, but I will be extremely, extremely jealous when the first four people leave.

 One of my friends put his name down for it. He's always wanted to live in the remote Scottish wilderness, so I suppose Mars would be an even better alternative.
Oh, cool. We just got a bid from an investor, so we're getting really close to signing contracts with our suppliers. When that happens, we think we'll be far enough along to start selecting astronauts.

Nice, I'll let him know. Lastly, what's your personal mission with this? Scientific discovery? Moving the human race forward? Or just leaving your mark on the universe?
Somewhere in the middle, I suppose. I’m interested in the science – I mean, imagine if we found life on Mars. We don't know how much life there is in the universe, let alone on our neighbouring planet. And who knows – it could even bring us closer to understanding the history of the solar system and where we all come from. Of course, the prospect of putting humanity on a different planet is also just breathtaking. It seemed incomprehensible to me before, so my biggest motivation at the moment is to achieve sending the first ever people to Mars. 

By: Unknown On 00.20

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The Hottest Temperatures for 1,400 Years

 Late 20th century was warmest in 1,400 years

PARIS, France - Earth was cooling until the end of the 19th century and a hundred years later, the planet's surface was on average warmer than at any time in the previous 1,400 years, according to climate records presented on Sunday, April 21.

In a study spanning two millennia published in Nature Geoscience, scientists said a "long-term cooling trend" around the world swung into reverse in the late 19th century.

In the 20th century, the average global temperature was 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than that of the previous 500 years, with only Antarctica bucking the trend.

From 1971-2000, the planet was warmer than at any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

This measure is a global average, and some regions did experience warmer periods than that -- but only for a time. Europe, for instance, was probably warmer in the first century AD than at the end of the 20th century.

The investigation is the first attempt to reconstruct temperatures over the last 2,000 years for individual continents.

It seeks to shed light on a fiercely-contested aspect in the global-warming debate.

Skeptics have claimed bouts of cooling or warming before the Industrial Revolution -- including two episodes in Europe called the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age -- are proof that climate variations are natural, not man-made.

The new study does not wade into the debate about greenhouse gases, but points to two planetary trends.

The first is a clear, prolonged period of cooling. It may have been caused by a combination of factors, including an increase in volcanic activity, with stratospheric ashes reflecting the sunlight, or a decrease in solar activity or tiny changes in Earth's orbit, both of which would diminish sunlight falling on the planet.

The cooling -- between 0.1-0.3 C (0.2-0.6 F) per thousand years, depending on the region -- went into reverse towards the end of the 19th century, and was followed by an intensifying period of warming in the 20th, the paper said.

Beneath this global trend over 2,000 years were episodes of continental cooling or warming, some of which were quite long.

And some continents lagged the overall planetary trend, but with the exception of Antarctica, all followed it.

"Distinctive periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age stand out, but do not show a globally uniform pattern on multi-decadal time scales," said Heinz Wanner of the University of Bern in Switzerland, one of 78 researchers from 24 countries who took part in the project.

"There are things that are common to all the regions of the planet -- long-term cooling, until the 19th century, followed by warming on all continents, except for Antarctica, where it is less clear, but also strong variations from one region to another," Hugues Goosse, a climatologist at Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven, told AFP.

Previous research into climate change has pointed to a warming spurt in the 20th century and attributed it to the rise of heat-trapping carbon gases emitted by burning coal, oil and gas.

The warming trend shifted up a gear in the middle of the 1970s, in line with record-breaking levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to this past research.

2012 saw the 36th straight year that global temperatures were above average since 1880, when scientifically acceptable records were first kept, and was the ninth or 10th warmest on record, US scientists said in January.

The temperature reconstruction published on Sunday was coordinated by a scientific initiative called the Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2K Network.

It brings together weather data as well as telltales of temperature variation from tree rings, pollen, corals, lake and marine sediments, ice cores and stalagmites garnered at 511 locations across seven continental-scale regions.

By: Unknown On 22.39

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Male Will Be Extinct - Be Prepared !!

The end of men? Expert predicts males will be extinct in five million years... and the process has already started!

    Leading Australian expert says 'inherent fragility' of the male sex chromosome will lead to male demise
    Says the research is 'very bad news' for all men

Battle of the sexes: A leading Australian expert says 'inherent fragility' of the male sex chromosome will lead to male demise

Men are living on borrowed time, according to a leading female scientist.

Professor Jenny Graves even claims the male of the species is heading for extinction.

And chaps, the bad news doesn’t end there, because the process may have already started.

Professor Graves, one of Australia’s most influential scientists, believes that women will win the battle of the sexes – and in the most definitive way possible.

She says that the inherent fragility of the male sex chromosome, the Y sex chromosome, means that men are sliding towards extinction.

Professor Graves’s prediction hinges around the number of genes on the male and female sex chromosomes.

The female, or X, chromosome, contains a healthy 1,000 or so genes.

What's more, girls and women have two of them.

The Y chromosome started off with as many genes as its female counterpart.

But over hundreds of millions of years it has crumbled away, leaving fewer than 100 genes in modern man.

This includes the SRY gene, the ‘male master switch’ that determines whether an embryo is male or female.

What is more, while women have two X chromosomes, men have just one, ‘wimpy’, Y.

This is key, as the pairing allows the X to make crucial repairs.

Lacking a mate, the Y chromosome finds it more difficult to patch up mistakes and so decays away.

Professor Graves, of Canberra University, said: ‘The X chromosome is all alone in the male but in the female it has a friend, so it can swop bits and repair itself.

‘If the Y gets hit, it’s a downward spiral.’

Giving a public lecture, the professor said: ‘It is very bad news for all the men here.’

And there is more bad news.

In her talk at the Australian Academy of Science, the professor described the remaining genes on the Y chromosome as being mostly ‘junk’.

She said: ‘It’s a lovely example of what I call dumb design.

‘It’s an evolutionary accident.’

However,  there is some good news. 

Professor Graves estimates that it will take five million years for the Y chromosome, and the men it produces, to disappear all together.

Other experts urged men not to panic.

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, a sex chromosome expert from the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said that studies have shown the decay to occur in bursts.

And the Y chromosome has not lost any genes for at least 25 million years.

He said: ‘I would say this is of no concern whatsoever.’

Professor Chris Mason, of University College London, said that even if the Y chromosome does crumble away in the next few million years, medicine will have plenty of time to catch up.

He said: ‘Five or six million years should be plenty of time for medical science to produce a fix and probably a Nobel Prize.’

Professor Graves has her own solution.

She says that when Y chromosome falls to pieces, another chromosome could take on the role of the missing Y, leading to the creation of a new species of human.

There is already a precedent for this in nature, in the form of a Japanese spiny rat which has survived the loss of its Y chromosome.

In fact, the  process may already be underway in some isolated groups of people, said the professor.

She said: ‘We would not even suspect it without checking the chromosomes.’

A CHROMOSOME CRISIS

The female, or X, chromosome, contains around 1,000 genes, and females have two of them.

The Y chromosome started off with as many genes as its female counterpart.

But over hundreds of millions of years it has crumbled away, leaving fewer than 100 genes in modern man.

This includes the SRY gene, the ‘male master switch’ that determines whether an embryo is male or female.

What is more, while women have two X chromosomes, men have just one, ‘wimpy’, Y.

This is key, as the pairing allows the X to make crucial repairs.

Lacking a mate, the Y chromosome finds it more difficult to patch up mistakes and so decays away.

By: Unknown On 01.38

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Thousands of Dead Fish in The Lake

Dead Fish Float In The Rodrigo De Freitas Lake In The in Rio de Janeiro

 The Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, due to host the rowing events of the 2016 Summer Olympics, was filled with dead fish earlier this week. To be exact: it was filled with 86 tons of dead fish.

The lagoon, which sits below the famous Christ the Redeemer statue, has hosted rowing events in the past (see: the 2007 Pan-Am Games), but it has also hosted other mass fish die-offs (see: 2000, 2009). And it doesn’t seem—ruling out bio-engineering or the use of a time machine—that there’s any way to prevent this from happening again:

According to Mr Moscatelli, the presence of sewage in the lake was due to problems with the lake’s outlet into the Atlantic sea, the canal of Jardim de Allah, which then caused the phenomenon, called efflorescence. Algae expert Mariângela Menezes said that samples of more than 400 per milliliter of the culprit micro-organisms were collected during the days leading up to the disaster, far above what would normally be expected.

From USA Today:

 It took 100 municipal workers 48 hours to clean up the mess, which actually sounds quite impressive when you look at the scope of the decay.

By: Unknown On 22.24

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The World's Rarest Horizontal Rainbow

Un grand horizontal: Rare FLAT rainbow photographed above the Paris skyline

Horizontal 'fire rainbows' rarely seen in northern Europe but common in U.S.
Appeared in Paris for just five minutes before disappearing again

A horizontal rainbow, known as a fire rainbow, is pictured above the Paris skyline by Parisian Bertrand Kulik
Horizontal rainbows, or circumhorizon arcs, occur when cirrus clouds are elevated enough to form plate-shaped ice crystals


The view of the Eiffel Tower against the Paris skyline is breathtaking on an ordinary day, but the French capital was recently bathed in a rare horizontal rainbow.

Across the city's horizon a clear spectrum of colours emerged for a short time, in a natural phenomenon known as a fire rainbow.

Parisian Bertrand Kulik, 33, spotted the unusual display out of the window of his apartment in France's capital on March 17.

Amateur photographer Mr Kulik said: ‘I have never seen a rainbow like that before. This light phenomenon looked like a rising aurora over Paris.

'When I saw it, I had to react very fast. I was very impressed by this beauty and I knew that I could not miss it.’

The display was only visible for a short time, but Mr Kulik quickly grabbed his camera and captured the rare sight.

He added: ‘It was only possible to see it for few minutes. Often I am waiting to catch some weather pictures. Every day I hope to see some atmospheric phenomenons like that.

‘The day was tormented with a stormy sky. Even in a big city it's possible to see some amazing natural phenomenon.

‘It was a very turbulent day and I will remember it for a long time.’

The horizontal rainbow was brought on by heavy rainstorms that lashed Paris last week.

Fire rainbows, known by the proper name of circumhorizon arc, occur when cirrus clouds are far enough up in the air to form plate-shaped ice crystals.

They are not actually rainbows, but a halo effect, although they are commonly referred to as fire rainbows.

When the sun is at the right angle it hits the top of these plates and splits into different colours that are viewable on the ground.

Although such fire rainbows are relatively common in the United States, they are a rarer sight in northern Europe where the sun less frequently has the required elevation needed for it to occur.

By: Unknown On 18.15

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1,000 Dead Ducks

1,000 Dead Ducks Found In China's Nanhe River; Pig Carcass Count Continues To Rise 

Chinese authorities have a new mystery to ponder after 1,000 duck carcases were found floating down the Nanhe river in the country's Sichuan province on Tuesday.

As with the puzzling count of dead pigs -- now totaling 16,000 -- found in the Huangpu river and its upstream tributaries in the last several weeks, the government has yet to offer an explanation for the phenomenon.

Liang Weidong, an official with the county's publicity office, told Xinhua, China's state news agency, the rotten birds had been found tucked into 50 woven plastic bags, from which they were removed before being sanitized and buried. As the Nanhe is not a source of drinking water, authorities say the waterfowl pose no threat to public health.

That assurance, however, seems to have had little effect with some Chinese citizens voicing their distrust on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter. Writes one person, in a translation provided by Financial Times, “How can you tell they are harmless when you don’t know how the ducks died?”

Another poster, under the username Baby Lucky, added via the BBC, "Dead pigs, dead ducks ... this soup is getting thicker and thicker."

Thick soup, indeed.

Though the appearance of ducks is a new development without even a speculative explanation, the Wall Street Journal has tentatively linked the pig carcasses to questionable "deadstock disposal" practices in the country.

Any outbreak of disease at large Chinese farms can trigger questionable disposal techniques of dead animals, explains CBS , particularly as officials have cracked down on the sale of illegal and contaminated pork products. Given the sudden lack of illegal buyers, it appears farmers have begun dumping tainted animals in the river.

"Ever since the police have stepped up efforts to crack down on the illicit market of sick pigs since last year, no one has come here to buy dead pigs, and the problem of pig dumping is worse than ever this year," said an unnamed villager to the state-run Jiaxing Daily newspaper, in a translation provided by CBS.

Carcasses are only the latest ailment to tarnish China's waterways. According to a January report by Voice of America, 40 percent of China's rivers have been classified as "seriously polluted."

In February of this year, a Chinese entrepreneur by the name of Jin Zengmin offered his local environmental protection bureau chief 200,000 yuan ($32,000) to swim in a nearby river tainted by industrial runoff. The officer refused, then explained his department was "not responsible" for the pollution.

By: Unknown On 17.29

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