The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Given the prospect that even a small degree of global warming could cause a massive global extinction on the scale of the dinosaurs, we should be worried about it. Also, it may even be too late to prevent such a catastrophe simply by cutting back emissions:
Everyone with a bit of sense knows that the [...]

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Centauri Dreams describes an interesting solution in a recent paper by Didier Massonnet and Benoît Meyssignac (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, France) to the very real possibility that our beloved Earth will be pummeled by some large, hard, ridiculously fast object at some point before the sun goes nova, some 4 billion years from now. [...]

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The city of Reykjavik, Iceland will be turning off all their lights for thirty whole minutes.
Lights off – Stars on is a grand scale happening that marks the opening of the Reykjavik International Film Festival. The City Council of Reykjavik and its neighboring municipalities have agreed to turn off all the city lights in the [...]

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This quote just blows my mind:
Our entire solar system—planets and all—sits inside a gargantuan bubble of gas about four times wider than the orbit of Neptune. The sun is responsible. It blows the bubble by means of the solar wind. Astronomers call the bubble itself “the heliosphere” and its outer membrane “the heliosheath.”
From an update [...]

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Kudos for pointing this out. From a story over at Centauri Dreams:
There is precedent for planetary demotion, incidentally. After its discovery in 1801, Ceres was generally thought to be a planet, but by the early 1850s so many of what we now call ‘asteroids’ were being discovered that planetary status for all was ruled out.
Ceres, [...]

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