Great Barrier Reef Potential Global Warming Casualty

John Bruno of the University of North Carolina, who heads research linking rising temperatures to disease in coral reefs, says the world's largest coral reef is very ill. He has been studying Australia's Great Barrier Reef since 1998, watching as a bad case of white syndrome has gotten worse.

His research has led him to the conclusion that rising sea temperatures help spread the disease, which spreads more quickly in more densely covered areas, and thereby spreads like wildfire through healthy parts of the reef.

It is called white syndrome because it causes the colorful algae to abandon living on the reef, leaving the white part underneath exposed. The algae is the coral reef's food supply.

Bruno suspects other diseases may respond similarly to the temperature change.

Trip to Pluto in Five Years?

Ever wonder what spacecraft propulsion systems are going to be like in the future, if we as a species are going to discover some immensely fantastic way of doing things that goes beyond normal imagination? Ever think that immensely fantastic thing might turn out to be a 30-mile-wide "spinning web of electrified wire"? That's how Wired described what the Finnish Kumpula Space Center team is proposing.

The web is made of 100 negatively charged wires 15 miles long and thinner than a strand of human hair. Once these spinning strands say hello to the positively charged protons of solar wind with their negative charges, there should be thrust. Enough thrust to get us to Pluto in less than five years.

That's 62 miles per second, 1.9 billion miles in a year. And it's cheap. No $4 per gallon in this baby's tank. Largely because it probably hasn't got a tank. Sources say the prototype could be built in two years.

Of course, naysayer Robert Winglee says that drawing current from the "ambient plasma" could cause technical issues. Of course, he's the competition, so what does he know? Winglee is a scientist and head of a University of Washington group developing MagBeam, which gets its thrust from directed plasma streams pushing against a magnetic field. He's just mad because his system would only be able to make it to the moon, or perhaps Mars.

Earthlike Planet Gliese 581c Has NASA Stepping Up Technology

There could be a whole 'nother planet for the Kumpula Space Center team to take us to. It's been given the unfortunate name Gliese 581c, as though it were part of the tax code, not a cool new planet with Earth-like characteristics.

The good news is, it's just far enough away from its star to be in that "just right" zone where life could possibly be thriving without being frozen or burned to a crisp. The bad news is, we don't have the technology to find out if anything is living there or not.

Yet.

If they can get the funding, NASA and the European Space Agency hope to have that taken care of by 2016. NASA hopes to launch a TPF, or Terrestrial Planet Finder then. You can see an artist's rendering at the Wired site. ###