Saturday at Grandma's house...

Well spent my afternoon today at my grandma's house.. Long time never visited.. And watched haruhi suzumiya and lucky star and ELT's PVs/Lives..

Read two articles in the newspaper today that I feel is very interesting and the first one is DEFINITELY of EXTREME CONCERN. 

Here goes.

The 1st article is about Global Warming. It underscores the amazing [and unwanted ] effects of increase in temperature. Sourced from The Straits Times which Sourced from IPCC [ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ] and National Geographic.

The article highlights the possible effects/outcomes of different increase in temperature but overall humans WILL lose out and i personally think its humans using the Earth to recycle humans this virus of the Earth...

+1-2℃

The species

9-31% face extinction

Northern Australia

47% rainforest habitat lost

18% of frogs

14% of reptiles

10% of birds

15% of mammals

USA

Droughts in western US will affect global wheat and meat markets.

Arid regions to revert to desert like environments.

Desertification to be spread from texas on the western US up to the border with Canada.

South Pole

Krill numbers will fall. Krill is the base [other than phytoplankton and zooplankton, which krill feed on]  of the food pyramid of the marine ecosystem. ∴  Fish, Whales, Seals and Penguins numbers will fall

North Pole

Arctic will be ice-free in the arctic summer. [ This is very bad news for polar bears, which will drown ]

South Atlantic

Hurricanes' power will increase with the increased temperature on the ocean's surface. [ revise your physical geography people xp]

India

Rising tides to submerge thousands of homes.

+2-3℃

The Loss

15-52% of all species face extinction, they include:

24-59% of mammals

28-40% of birds

13-70% of butterflies [ i dunno why butterflies....]

South Africa

Overall, 41-50% of the 106 species of endemic plants are lost.

Also, 21-45% of reptiles disappear.

USA

Insects migrate in new directions because of the heat and the overall ecosystem will suffer.

EG: as a temperate climate moves up north [cox of rising temperatures] pine beetles travel with the warmth and kill off the great whitebark trees. Which if im not wrong in the cold temperate area...

Marine ecosystem

The vast majority of the world's tropical coral reefs die off.

24% loss of freshwater fish habitat [which means dried up ponds/lakes and sorts]

27% loss of salmon in North America

The forest

Forest, soil and plants start to PRODUCE MORE carbon dioxide than they ABSORB.

+3-4℃

The weather

A new global climate pattern emerges that is extremely unstable, perhaps mirroring the weather anomaly called El Niño. This leads to the NEXT GENERATION of superstorms, the first Category 6 hurricanes/cyclones appear. Thousands of species worldwide face extinction.

 [ Geography info from yours truly: Cox when mercury climbs worldwide. All the climates shift north/south from the equator. So where some parts of the world has temperate climate (4 seasons) it will have tropical/equatorial climate. And Singapore will experience a new climate which i guess has no name yet ]

The Ocean

Coral Reef systems disappear.

Amazon Rainforest

The forest experiences repeated cycles of drought and fires. Which will re-release hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. Perhaps intensifying global warming BY ANOTHER DEGREE CELSIUS all by itself.

Alpine snowcaps

An increase of 3℃ cause the snowcaps on the Alps to disappear almost completely. The mediterranean and parts of Europe wither in searing summer heat. Alpine species face extinction.

+4-5℃

The oceans

The entire West Antarctic Sheet COLLAPSES, sending sea levels rising even further, flooding heavily populated deltas. Countries like Bangladesh and Egypt are devastated, and Venice will be totally submerged. Singapore will have flooding and certain areas are submerged.

The Himalayas and Ganges river.

 There will be no more glaciers [which keeps rivers flowing] in the Himalayas by year 2035. The fast melting of the Himalayan glaciers will unleash floods downstream and after the glaciers are gone, the rivers will subsequently dry up and water will be very, very scarce and famine will occur as the Ganges river provides water to over a billion people in China, Nepal and India.

+5-6℃

The Humans [ or Homo Sapiens for long ]

Climate refugees to number in the tens of millions, and the potential for conflict over scarce resources [which are scarcer] will involve even the developed countries such as the USA.

>6℃

The World

The environment resembles that of the Cretaceous Era, [ Which FYI is when triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex roam ] 144-65 millions years ago, when global

temperatures were much higher than today. Natural disasters become part and parcel of life.

Some of the world's cities are flooded or abandoned.

The oceans appear bright blue because of depletion of nutrients. Deserts march across continents like conquering armies.

And now to the next article.

Its by senior writer Andy Ho in The Straits Times.

Its about the research of robotic limbs. There are hundreds of millions of neurotic connectors in your brain. Remember this first.

This person, who is paralysed neck down, had a cap on his head with electrodes on his brain that kept track of his brainwaves. He managed to walk in his avatar in Second Life.

So? You must think right. Then there’s this demonstration in 2002 that shows how immobilized monkeys could feed themselves using thought-controlled robotic arms.

But the current technology required this procedure called craniotomy, which is to remove part of the skull sosensors can be implanted directly in the brain.

But what has been discovered so far reveals an unexpected malleability of the brain. The misconception was that once human becomes adults, the brain will be “fixed” with using the four limbs that the human has. But, monkeys can not only learn to control a robotic arm with their thoughts but their brains can also change PHYSICALLY in the process of learning.

In January, Duke Scientists managed to transmit the BRAINWAVE of a monkey in North Carolina [where the university is] over the internet to control a bipedal robot in Kyoto in REAL TIME. In this way, a monkey walking in the US had the robot walking at the same pace in Japan. WOW. Imagine humans when monkeys can do this.

Significantly, these scientists also showed that while some nerve cells in the monkey controlled its own legs. Others learnt how to control the robotic legs within an hour of practice. Using their thoughts. The site inn the monkey’s brain where the electrodes responsible for controlling  the robot’s locomotion were implanted actually developed a REPRESENTATION of the robot’s limbs. That means, the brain registered the robotic limbs as PART OF THE BODY.

 

The monkey could do one thing with its own limbs  and another with the robotic one. It could toggle between the two and even perform different tasks simultaneously with real and robotic arms.. The monkey can do that. So can we….

So you see, the brain has hundreds of millions or more of neurotic connectors and they can go in countless ways. Imagine 98134896P364789.  [ P for permutation, Amath…] The possibilities are endless.. Therefore the brain can reorganize itself to take the robotic limb as part of itself… 

These twoarticles are from The Straits Times.. [Cite , cite, cite]

And I hope you will understand it… Especially the first one…  lol