Scientists Predict When World Will End

 NASA/SOHO Consortium/ESA

A coronal mass ejection, a huge arc of magnetic superheated plasma, shoots from the sun out into space in February 2000.

Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.

The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth farther out into space, but not far enough.

Our home planet will be snagged by the sun’s outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.

“The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun,” explains astronomer Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in southern England.

Previous projections had all figured that the Earth would avoid falling into the sun, even during our star’s red-giant phase.

The good news: This won’t happen for another 7.6 billion years.

The bad news: Life on Earth will end long before then.

In fact, we’ve only got a billion years left before the slowly expanding sun boils off the oceans and reduces our planet to an uninhabitable cinder, says Smith.

That may sound like a long time, but in fact life on Earth’s been around a lot longer than that — a total of 3.7 billion years, according to the latest estimates.

For those first three billion years, true, we were nothing but pond scum. Still, the new figures indicate the long story of life on our fair blue-green planet may be entering its last act.

Is there any way our future descendants can save themselves? Why, yes, explains Smith.

He cites a recent study emanating from the University of California, Santa Cruz. It proposes taming an asteroid to swing by the Earth every few thousand years, slowly nudging the Earth into higher solar orbit, enough to outpace the sun’s own outward growth.

“This sounds like science fiction,” says Smith. “But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries.”

Rusty Worms in the Brain

Iron is vital to human life; for example, it is a component of hemoglobin, the substance that makes our blood red and supplies our cells with oxygen. However, iron can also cause heavy damage; it is thought that iron deposits in the brain contribute to certain forms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons’s, Huntington’ s, and Alzhiemer’s.

A malfunction of the blood transporter transferrin may be to blame. A team led by Peter J. Sadler at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK) and Sandeep Verma of the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur, India) has now been able to show that transferrin can clump together to form wormlike fibrils. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, this process releases rustlike iron particles.

Within the body, iron is present in the form of iron ions with a threefold positive charge (Fe³⁺) and must always be well “wrapped” to prevent it from reacting with proteins and causing damage. In blood plasma, iron is carried in the “pockets” of the iron transport protein transferrin. It only gets unwrapped once it is inside special cellular organelles.

But things can go wrong in this system, as Sadler and his colleagues have now proven. The researchers deposited iron-loaded human transferrin onto various surfaces under conditions that emulate those in living organisms. By using microscopy and electron microscopy, the researchers showed that the proteins aggregate into long wormlike fibrils. These “worms” have a regular striped pattern; the narrow dark stripes contain something similar to rust. “Within the fibrils, the iron ions are no longer properly enclosed;” explains Sadler, “instead, they aggregate into periodically arranged nanocrystals whose structure seems to be very similar to the iron oxide mineral lepidocrocite”.

The researchers suspect that in certain forms of neurodegenerative disease, iron deposits may form in a similar fashion in the brain. Such iron crystals are highly reactive and could lead to the formation of toxic free radicals, which attack and destroy nerve cells. If this assumption can be verified in vivo, agents that hinder the aggregation of transferrin may be the foundation for a new family of drugs.

11 Neighbors from Hell

Thank god for zoning laws, covenants and deed restrictions.

1. So that’s where the bodies are buried.

(Photo by DistortedSmile).

The full-size image is even scarier.

2. Is it a pool or a baptistry?

(Photo by Digital_Freak).

3. And you thought one gnome was one gnome too many.

(Photo by Morgan).

4. Who needs sod when you’ve got asphalt.

(Photo by Eastrocker).

5. Trespassers should be the least of his worries.

(Photo by Matt Daniels).

6. Art? Eyesore?

(Photo by Henry Delgado).

7. When obsessive-compulsives decorate.

(Photo by Alison G.).

(Photo by Kim Ripley).

(Photo by MoniMania).

8. Just because you have the extra paint doesn’t mean you should use it.

(Photo by Sean Cadzow).

9. America, Fuck Yeah!

(Photo by Steveningen).

Courtesy of the America, Fuck Yeah Flickr group.

10. Is Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb home?

(Photo by Images That Surround Me).

11. His and her pig sculptures?

(Photo by LizardGal).

Are you too pretty to fly?

I believe that we have just crossed the line from irritating to incredulous in the Southwest Airlines fashion police scandal.

As I’m sure everyone is now aware, last year, Kyla Ebberts raised a huge ruckus with Southwest when they asked her to change out of the skimpy clothing that she was wearing on a flight. She was perfectly warranted in her argument, mind you; as numerous images prove, she wasn’t wearing anything more than a tight shirt and a really short skirt.

Now it seems like it’s getting out of hand. In the most recent chapter of Skirtgate, two teens flying between Tampa and Los Angeles are crying foul because they were escorted off the plane by security officers (at the destination). Apparently they were causing a disruption on the plane because they couldn’t get water when they wanted it and were knocking on the lavatory door while someone was inside.

Their side of the story is that the flight attendants were rude and discriminatory to them, saying,

“I think they were just discriminating against because we were young decent-looking girls. I mean, nobody else on the plane looked like us except us. [The flight attendants] were like older ladies. We were younger. Who knows, they could have been just jealous of us because we were younger.”

Or maybe you were just being spoiled brats.

Details at Tampa Bay’s 10 are still fuzzy, but I have a feeling I know how this is going to turn out.

Climate protest on Heathrow plane

Four protesters climbed on top of the plane

Greenpeace activists have breached security at Heathrow Airport and climbed on top of an aeroplane.Four people were arrested after unfurling a banner from the top of the British Airways Airbus A320, which had arrived from Manchester.

BAA said operations at the airport were not affected and described the protest as “unlawful and irresponsible”.

The move came as protesters were gathering in Westminster on Monday to oppose plans to expand the airport.

A government consultation on the plan closes on Wednesday.

We are here to draw a line in the sand and tell Gordon Brown his new runway must not and will not be built Anna Jones, Greenpeace activist

Greenpeace said protesters put a banner reading “Climate Emergency - No Third Runway” over the plane’s tailfin at about 0945 GMT.

It said two women and two men crossed the tarmac at the airport after the passengers had disembarked.

One protester, Anna Jones, said: “Our planet and the people who live on it are in danger.

“Climate change can be beaten but not by almost doubling the size of the airport.

“We are here to draw a line in the sand and tell Gordon Brown his new runway must not and will not be built.”

‘Four arrests’

BAA said police were attending the incident but it had not disrupted airport operations.

It said: “The government is currently consulting on the future of Heathrow airport and all parties have the opportunity, through the proper democratic process, to make their views known.”

But it criticised the Greenpeace protest as “unlawful and irresponsible” and said there would be a full investigation.

The four were arrested and taken to Heathrow police station at about 1100 GMT, a BAA spokeswoman said.

8 Nuclear Weapons the U.S. has Lost?!

During the Cold War the United States military misplaced at least eight nuclear weapons permanently. These are the stories of what the Department of Defense calls “broken arrows” -

America’s stray nukes, with a combined explosive force 2,200 times the Hiroshima bomb.

If you don’t have enough to make you lose sleep at night, read on.

STRAY #1: Into the Pacific

February 13, 1950. An American B-36 bomber en route from Alaska to Texas during a training exercise lost power in three engines and began losing altitude. To lighten the aircraft the crew jettisoned its cargo, a 30-kiloton Mark 4 (Fat Man) nuclear bomb, into the Pacific Ocean. The conventional explosives detonated on impact, producing a flash and a shockwave. The bomb’s uranium components were lost and never recovered. According to the USAF, the plutonium core wasn’t present.

STRAY #2&3: Into Thin Air

March 10, 1956. A B-47 carrying two nuclear weapon cores from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida to an overseas airbase disappeared during a scheduled air-to-air refueling over the Mediterranean Sea. After becoming lost in a thick cloud bank at 14,500 feet, the plane was never heard from again and its wreckage, including the nuclear cores, was never found. Although the weapon type remains undisclosed, Mark 15 thermonuclear bombs (commonly carried by B-47s) would have had a combined yield of 3.4 megatons.

STRAYS #4&5: Somewhere in a North Carolina Swamp

January 24, 1961. A B-52 carrying two 24-megaton nuclear bombs crashed while taking off from an airbase in Goldsboro, North Carolina. One of the weapons sank in swampy farmland, and its uranium core was never found despite intensive search efforts to a depth of 50 feet. To ensure no one else could recover the weapon, the USAF bought a permanent easement requiring government permission to dig on the land.

STRAY #6: The Incident in Japan

December 5, 1965. An A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft carrying a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb) rolled off the deck of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean. The plane and weapon sank in 16,000 feet of water and were never found. 15 years later the U.S. Navy finally admitted that the accident had taken place, claiming it happened 500 miles from land the in relative safety of the high seas. This turned out to be not true; it actually happened about 80 miles off Japan’s Ryuku island chain, as the aircraft carrier was sailing to Yokosuka, Japan after a bombing mission over Vietnam.