Unstable Antarctica: What's Driving Ice Loss?

When surface winds are strong, they stir the Southern Ocean and lift the warm water
(red) onto the continental shelf where the additional heat contributes to melt of the ice
shelf. Credit: Frank Ippolito Scientists have previously shown that West Antarctica is
losing ice, but how that ice is lost remained unclear. Now, using data from Earth
observing satellites and airborne science missions, scientists are closing in on ice loss
culprits above and below the ice.

The findings, presented Dec. 15 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union
(AGU) in San Francisco, Calif., are expected to improve predictions of sea level rise.

NASA finds 'significant' water on moon

NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that
could allow for the development of a lunar space station.

The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news
conference.

"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a
little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said,
holding up several white plastic containers.

The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and
Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, intentionally crashed October 9 into the permanently
shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole.

Discovery of Methane Reveals Mars Is Not a Dead Planet

The team found methane in the Martian atmosphere by carefully observing the planet
throughout several Mars years with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility and the
W.M. Keck telescope, both at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The team used spectrometers on
the telescopes to spread the light into its component colors, as a prism separates
white light into a rainbow. The team detected three spectral features called
absorption lines that together are a definitive signature of methane.

"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our

discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in
2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Michael Mumma of
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer,
methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at
Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif." Mumma is lead author of a paper describing
this research that will appear in Science Express on Thursday.

Cloning: a boon and bane

A HUMAN embryo has been cloned in South Korea. All the alpha pluses in the land will
at once anxiously call to mind Aldous Huxley's dystopia. The word cloning is now
mentally inseparable from Huxley's novel, but in fact Huxley was not a simple genetic
determinist. He realised that a clone of a human being was not necessarily identical with
the human being from which it had been cloned. The production of his dystopia required
not merely cloning on a mass scale, by the imaginary Bokanovsky process, so that clones
were produced not individually but industrially, by the score and the hundred, but it
required also utter uniformity of environment for the cloned beings to grow up in.

Although the Huxleyan nightmare is unlikely ever to come to pass, therefore, cloning for
reproductive purposes would nevertheless be wholly reprehensible. The reason for this is
not that it would result directly in a horrible dystopia, but because it would be a
manifestation of our ever-increasing, and deeply unattractive, egotism. What good reason
could anyone ever have for wishing to clone him or herself? Only someone who looks in
the mirror and thinks what the world needs is another me would contemplate it; and a
world of such people would be almost as horrible in its own way as the world Huxley
sketched. In fact, the South Koreans have cloned an embryo with quite other reasons in
mind

The ethical objection to this, however, is that the embryo is a human being as soon as the
ovum divided into more than one cell, that it then becomes "ensouled". However, for
myself, I cannot truly consider an embryo a full member of the human race. I cannot
mourn for its loss as for, say, the death of a six year-old child, nor can I feel the same
outrage at its deliberately induced demise as for an old lady brutally done to death in her
own home by a glue-sniffing youth.

There is, of course, the slippery slope argument, and it is certainly true that there have
been many such slopes down which we have slipped, or joyously skied, in the past few
decades. But unless we believe that we are not masters of our fate, that the Promethean
bargain is completely uncontrollable, this is not a slope we need slip down, at least with
proper regulation. (Of course, it is always possible that the technical difficulties in stem-
cell research will prove insurmountable, and that the promised benefits will never be
forthcoming, but that is another argument altogether.) A greater danger of oversold
technical advance than the production of a horrible Huxleyan Brave New World is that it
will decrease yet further our tolerance of suffering, and further erode a very necessary
understanding of the inherent limitations of human life. For the best that technical
advance ever does is to postpone physical suffering, and prolong our suffering-free
existence. Those who have led such an existence are able (at least in my experience) to
tolerate imperfect health less well than those to whom it has been an accompaniment all
their lives.

No doubt this sounds a little as if I am arguing that suffering is good for the character,
and in my heart I believe that it is indeed so. At the same time, however, I believe that
any individual cause or case of suffering is best avoided. It is certainly possible, though
by no means certain, that stem-cell research will one day alleviate or abolish some
horrible causes of suffering, for example Parkinson's disease. I do not think anyone who
has seen someone die of this condition would doubt for an instant that if it could be
cured, it ought to be. If stem-cell research can do it, I welcome it. Therefore stem-cell
research, made possible by cloning, ought to be allowed, but reproductive cloning ought
not to be allowed.