Map Depicts Global Forest Heights

First-of-its-Kind Map Depicts Global Forest Heights

07.20.10

 

Using NASA satellite data, scientists have produced a first-of-its kind map that details the height of the world’s forests. Although there are other local- and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method.

The work -- based on data collected by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites -- should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

A first-of-its-kind global map shows forest canopy height in shades of green from 0 to 70 meters (230 feet). For any patch of forest, the height shown means that 90 percent or more of the trees in the patch are that tall or taller. Areas without forest are shown in tan. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/Based on data from Michael Lefsky.
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Trabalho escravo no BR na zona rural e urbana

Referência enviada pelo Paulo Oliveira


26/07/2010
Agronegócio escraviza milhares de trabalhadores no campo

As culturas da cana, soja e algodão, a pecuária, as carvoarias e o desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica são as atividades preferidas dos exploradores do trabalho escravo.

Por Lúcia Rodrigues

A impressão que se tem é a de que se está entrando no túnel do tempo e retornando alguns séculos no calendário gregoriano. Aos olhos dos mais desavisados, pode parecer estranho e até mesmo irreal que ainda hoje existam pessoas sendo submetidas à escravidão em nosso país. Mas infelizmente essa gravíssima violação aos direitos humanos é uma dura realidade no Brasil do século 21.

Milhares de pessoas ainda são submetidas a trabalho forçado e a condições degradantes no campo e na cidade. Relatório da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT), de 2005, estimava em 25 mil o número de trabalhadores mantidos em condições análogas a de escravos no país. Destes, 80% atuavam na agricultura e 17%, na pecuária./.../

Bolsa Família não é resposta à pobreza urbana no Brasil,

Por BBC, BBC Brasil, Atualizado: 30/7/2010 5:34

Bolsa Família não é resposta à pobreza urbana no Brasil, diz 'Economist'

"Moradores de favela no Rio de Janeiro (Abr/Arquivo)"

A revista britânica The Economist traz em sua edição desta semana um longo artigo sobre o Bolsa Família onde afirma que, apesar da grande contribuição do programa para a redução dos índices de pobreza do Brasil, ele parece não funcionar tão bem no combate à pobreza nas grandes cidades.
De acordo com a revista - que cita dados da Fundação Getúlio Vargas - cerca de um sexto da redução da pobreza no país nos últimos anos pode ser atribuído ao Bolsa Família, "mas algumas evidências sugerem que o programa não está funcionando tão bem nas cidades como nas áreas rurais".
"O sucesso do Brasil em reduzir a pobreza parece ser maior nas áreas rurais que nas urbanas", diz o artigo, que cita dados das Nações Unidas que indicam que houve uma redução de 15 pontos percentuais no número de pobres na população rural entre 2003 e 2008, enquanto nas cidades essa diminuição foi muito menor./.../

The Healing Effects of Forests

Forests – and other natural, green settings – can reduce stress, improve moods, reduce anger and aggressiveness and increase overall happiness. (Credit: Photo taken by Essi Puranen)

ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) — "Many people," says Dr. Eeva Karjalainen, of the Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, "feel relaxed and good when they are out in nature. But not many of us know that there is also scientific evidence about the healing effects of nature."

---

See Also:

Health & Medicine

• Mental Health Research
• Immune System

Mind & Brain

• Mental Health
• Depression

Plants & Animals

• Nature
• Trees

Earth & Climate

• Forest
• Rainforests

Forests -- and other natural, green settings -- can reduce stress, improve moods, reduce anger and aggressiveness and increase overall happiness. Forest visits may also strengthen our immune system by increasing the activity and number of natural killer cells that destroy cancer cells.

Many studies show that after stressful or concentration-demanding situations, people recover faster and better in natural environments than in urban settings. Blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and the level of "stress hormones" all decrease faster in natural settings. Depression, anger and aggressiveness are reduced in green environments and ADHD symptoms in children reduce when they play in green settings./../

UN: clean water is a 'fundamental human right'

28 July 2010 Last updated at 23:43 GMT

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UN declares clean water a 'fundamental human right'

Many people around the world have little or no access to clean drinking water

The UN has declared that access to clean water and sanitation is a fundamental human right.

About 1.5m children under five die each year from water and sanitation-related diseases.

The resolution was passed with 122 nations in favour, none against and 41 abstentions.

Abstaining countries said the resolution could undermine a process in the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva to build a consensus on water rights./.../

Recipe for Longevity: No Smoking, Lots of Friends

By LAURA BLUE Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2010

Elie Bernager / StockImage / Getty Images

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study's follow-up period (an average of 7.5 years) than people with more robust social ties.(See 10 smarter ways to reach your retirement goals.)

That boost in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference observed between smokers and nonsmokers, the study's authors say. And it's larger than differences in the risk of death associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors, including lack of exercise and obesity. "This is not just a few studies here and there," says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, lead author on the review and an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. "I'm hoping there will be recognition from the medical community, the public-health community and even the general public about the importance of this."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2006938,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0uzF8WcnB

Social Relationships and Mortality Risk

Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review

In a meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues find that individuals' social relationships have as much influence on mortality risk as other well-established risk factors for mortality, such as smoking. The abstract of this article has also been translated into Japanese and Spanish.

Read Editors' Summary

Image Credit: striatic

Giving E-books a Spot on the Charts

By ANDREA SACHS Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Illustration by Mark Nerys

• Comment

Will 2010 be the year of the e-book? With Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook and a host of other e-devices now on the market, readers have more alternatives to old-fashioned paper and ink than ever. And as a result, digital sales are soaring: the Association of American Publishers reports that e-book sales jumped 207% in the first five months of this year, and on July 19, Amazon announced that it now sells more Kindle e-books than it does hardcover volumes

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2005872,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0uoV2dLu6

What the Wikileak Means for the Afghanistan War - Swampland - TIME.com

What the Wikileak Means for the Afghanistan War - Swampland - TIME.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1&ref=world

Posted by Michael Crowley Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 11:48 pm

17 Comments • Related Topics: afghanistan barack obama 

The Obama White House is furious this morning about the massive leak of military documents chronicling the unvarnished truth about the Afghanistan war. At the same time, though, there must be a certain sense of relief around the West Wing. When they first learned that the whistleblower website WikiLeaks had given the New York Times, among others, an astonishing 92,0000 documents, senior Obama officials must have been in a panic about what terrible secrets might emerge. But it turns out that most of the terrible aspects of the Afghanistan war--at least those detailed by this trove of insider accounts--are already pretty well known.

Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/07/25/what-the-wikileak-means-for-the-afghanistan-war/?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0uoJSQXSr

The Link Between Marijuana and Schizophrenia

A man smokes marijuana in Berkeley, California.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

By Maia Szalavitz Wednesday, Jul. 21, 2010

Since the days of Reefer Madness, scientists have sought to understand the complex connection between marijuana and psychosis. Cannabis can cause short-term psychotic experiences, such as hallucinations and paranoia, even in healthy people, but researchers have also long noted a link between marijuana use and the chronic psychotic disorder, schizophrenia.
Repeatedly, studies have found that people with schizophrenia are about twice as likely to smoke pot as those who are unaffected. Conversely, data suggest that those who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as nonsmokers. One widely publicized 2007 review of the research even concluded that trying marijuana just once was associated with a 40% increase in risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2005559,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly#ixzz0uoH5knII

Our Ageing Universe: Entropy

July 24th, 2010

Astronomy Without A Telescope – Our Ageing Universe

Written by Steve Nerlich

Energy transfer - something that old universes can't quite manage like they used to. Credit: Gemini observatory.

It all started so full of promise. All at once, our universe burst upon the scene, but much of that initial burst quickly dissipated into background neutrinos and photons – and ever since, pretty much  everything our universe has ever done has just dissipated more energy. So, despite the occasional enthusiastic outburst of supernovae and other celestial extravagances, it's becoming increasingly apparent that our universe is getting on a bit.

The second law of thermodynamics (the one about entropy) demands that everything goes to pot over time – since anything that happens is an opportunity for energy to be dissipate/.../

Pampa perde mais de 50% da área original

Brasília, 22/07/2010Pampa perde mais de 50% da área original
Monitoramento inédito mostra que desmate acabou com mais de 2 mil km² (53,96%) da cobertura vegetal nativa do bioma até 2008

ADRIANA CHAVES
para a PrimaPagina

Segundo menor bioma brasileiro, o Pampa já perdeu 53,96% de sua área original até 2008. É o que aponta o primeiro monitoramento sobre a supressão da vegetação nativa na região, cujos resultados foram divulgados nesta quinta-feira pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente (MMA). O levantamento também avaliou a devastação no Pampa de 2002 a 2008./.../

IDH-D do Brasil

Brasília, 23/07/2010 Com desigualdade, IDH-D do Brasil cai 19%, aponta nova metoldologia do PNUD Cálculo aplicado à América Latina reduz o Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano conforme as diferenças de rendimento, educação e saúde
Relatório do PNUD para a América Latina e o Caribe apresenta um novo cálculo para o IDH. Trata-se do Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano ajustado à Desigualdade, que "penaliza" as disparidades de rendimentos, escolaridade e saúde. Na América Latina e no Caribe, o IDH adaptado também cai 19% em relação ao tradicional (que leva em conta as médias). Queda é maior na Nicarágua (-47,3%) e na Bolívia (-41,9%), e menos intensa no Uruguai (-3,9%) e na Argentina (-5,9%). O estudo afirma que a desigualdade na região é a maior do mundo e é persistente, mas ainda pode ser reduzida.

ALL TIME 100 Novels

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present

Full List

A - B

1. The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
2. All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
6. .....see 95 others...

Read more:http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html#ixzz0ubmyzToc

Millennium Development Goals Report 2010

Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 
"It is clear that improvements in the lives of the poor have been unacceptably slow, and some hard-won gains are being eroded by the climate, food and economic crises," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in the foreword to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010, issued on 23 June. But the report also cites big gains in cutting the rate of extreme poverty, getting children into primary schools, addressing AIDS, malaria and child health, and a good chance to reach the target for access to clean drinking water. 
Press materials

cambio climático afecta a la salud

Expertos aprenden a colaborar a medida que el cambio climático afecta a la salud

Agencia atmosférica de EE.UU. propone crear el Servicio Nacional Climático

 

Concepto artístico de la NASA de una vista de la Tierra desde el espacio.

Por Cheryl Pellerin
Redactora

Washington -- El estado de la salud humana fluctúa según las distintas épocas del año, pero la actual confluencia del clima extremo, el cambio climático mundial y la cambiante repartición de las enfermedades están creando la necesidad de una colaboración más activa entre los científicos y los expertos en salud pública.

Las reuniones entre los expertos climáticos y de salud se han incrementado desde el año 2007, cuando el Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático confirmó que el clima de la Tierra está cambiando y que la actividad humana está afectando a ese cambio. Véase Expertos mundiales instan a preparación para efectos de cambio climático en salud./.../

Treatment for Glioblastoma Multiforme

A Revolutionary New Potential Treatment for Glioblastoma MultiformeBy George Lundberg, MD, Editor-at-Large, MedPage Today  | July 19, 2010

Only rarely does an experienced editor get a spine tingle from a new paper. For the first time ever, today, I predict that a Nobel Prize for medicine will be awarded to J. Martin Brown, DPhil, Oxford, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Professor Brown and his colleagues have discovered and reported a fundamentally new approach to the treatment of solid tumors, beginning with the devastating glioblastoma multiforme.
Here is how it goes: Tumors need blood in order to grow. Powerful radiation can kill many cancer cells. It also kills the cancer's blood vessels. How then do any surviving cancer cells regrow after radiation if they have no blood supply? Where do the nutrient blood vessels come from?
Professor Brown and colleagues hypothesized that circulating bone marrow derived cells recreated endothelium, and thus vasculogenesis (not angiogenesis), thereby providing the needed blood for the cancer to recur./.../

AMICOR HISTÓRIAS 1

Caros AMICOR,

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=12gSgsveCr1gxdeyOQ5RV8260YEfqvkIEKrq-7Oe0AWc

Com este primeiro capítulo relacionado com vivências minhas no Complexo Hospitalar da Santa Casa, dou início a uma nova experiência no Blog AMICOR, convidando os amigos a participarem em cima desta história ou de outras que queiram acrescentar. Sugestões, correções ou outras histórias podem ser postadas diretamente nos comentários ou enviadas para meu endereço achutti@gmail.com
Um abraço
AA

Socioeconomic Position & Health Behaviors and Mortality

Association of Socioeconomic Position With Health Behaviors and Mortality
Silvia Stringhini, MSc; Séverine Sabia, PhD; Martin Shipley, MSc; Eric Brunner, PhD; Hermann Nabi, PhD; Mika Kivimaki, PhD;Archana Singh-Manoux, PhD 
JAMA. 2010;303(12):1159-1166.
Context  Previous studies may have underestimated the contribution of health behaviors to social inequalities in mortality because health behaviors were assessed only at the baseline of the study./.../

Mortality Lower with Metformin By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage TodayPublished: June 30, 2010 Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston and Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner

ORLANDO -- Metformin use may reduce mortality among patients with type 2 diabetes who are at risk for cardiovascular events, researchers say. A large, multicenter trial found a 24% reduced risk of all-cause mortality among patients on the drug, compared with those not taking it, according to Ronan Roussel, MD, PhD, of Groupe Hospitalier Bichat-Claude Bernard in Paris, and colleagues. They presented their findings during a late-breaking session at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) meeting here./.../

Thomas Edison

The Making of America: Thomas Edison

We're surrounded by the fruits of his genius, from electric light to recorded sound, while the example of his "invention factory" at Menlo Park lives on in Silicon Valley. So who was this tireless man, and what are his lessons for us today?

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1999143,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0u2axiogu

WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer)

Friday, Jul. 16, 2010

We're filling in the blanks on everything in the universe
from near-Earth objects to forming galaxies.

• 
  
• 
  

• PETER EISENHARDT,
• scientist with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
• on the abilities of the new space telescope WISE 
• (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). 
• In six months, it found 25,000 new asteroids

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,2004349,00.html#ixzz0u2Z0q12D