Total Eclipse of the Heart
Skywatchers in a narrow band of Africa, Europe and West Asia were treated to a total solar eclipse this Wednesday. The path of the total eclipse swept across the Western Hemisphere in just three hours. Jay Pasachoff, a professor of astronomy at Williams College who watched the eclipse in the Greek Isles, told the BBC that the event "was more fabulous even than we expected." (Read Seed's coverage of the eclipse here
After axing a mission to two of the solar system's largest asteroids a few weeks ago, NASA resurrected the project and is planning for its launch in 2007. The Dawn project was initially cancelled because of a combination of budget concerns and technical problems with the probe, which is designed to explore the composition of asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. After the lab responsible for the mission appealed the cancellation, NASA took a second look and decided they had invested too much money—$257 million thus far—to scrap the launch.
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The first commercial rocket ever to attempt lift-off was grounded due to a fuel leak that caused an onboard fire 25 seconds into the launch. Executives at the company SpaceX had originally planned to launch the rocket in November, but technological problems forced an initial delay. The private space venture hopes to try again within the next six months.
Emission Remission
A British government report found that the country was unlikely to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2010. The emissions target, which was set in 1990, is far more ambitious than the reduction mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, and the government still expects to have reduced its levels by 15 to 18%. The review also recommended that individual citizens do more to reduce their own contributions to global warming. (Read more about this here)
A new hybrid-electric car was put on the market in England, despite worries that consumer ignorance would stall the launch. In a survey conducted by Honda, the manufacturer of the new automobile, 40% of Brits were unaware that a hybrid car had a combined internal combustion and battery-powered engine—some even thought it referred to two cars welded together. Hybrid cars are slowly catching on in Europe—of the 130,000 hybrids Honda has sold worldwide, only 2,000 were sold in all European countries combined.
Americans fret almost as much about the country's dependence on foreign oil as they do about the war in Iraq, according to a poll in the magazine Foreign Affairs. Nearly half of the 1,000 people surveyed in the poll believe that lawmakers are trying to free the country from foreign oil and almost 90% believe the dependence is a threat to national security. The nonpartisan group Public Agenda, which conducted the poll, announced that Americans are at a "tipping point" regarding our energy sources.
Stumping for Biodiversity
At a UN conference on biodiversity, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva chastised the world's wealthier countries for not spending more to preserve the planet's variety of species. He pointed to the fact that the most diverse ecosystems are often located in developing countries, where fewer resources are available to slow the rate of species decline.
At the same conference, the tiny island nation of Palau announced it would set aside wide swaths of the South Pacific and land area in Micronesia in order to protect the region's marine wildlife. In a separate announcement, Kiribati said it planned to create one of the world's largest marine parks around the coral reefs of the Phoenix Islands. Biodiversity in the region is under threat from deforestation, overfishing and the destruction of coral reefs—30% of which are severely damaged.