Chicago is being invaded by birds and scientists are trying to figure out what’s going on. Residents of that city have become familiar with their raucous squawking of monk parakeets (those little green birds you see in pet stores), since whole colonies of them, descended from a few pets that escaped or were freed by their owners are not only nesting in Hyde Park, they have spread to over 500 other locations.

Despite the fact that their native habitat is South America, they seem to be thriving in that cold and windy city. Because information about Chicago’s monk parakeets comes from residents’ descriptions, a trio of researchers decided to enlist the public’s help in their “Chicago Parakeet Project.”
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Will WE? – Will human beings, and the earth, survive? Lots of scientists are worried about this and are trying to figure out what to do about it.

A group of nations has come to the conclusion that human activities have already pushed the Earth system beyond three of the planet’s biophysical thresholds, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world. Scientists have been warning for decades that the explosion of human activity since the industrial revolution is pushing the earth’s resources and natural systems to their limits. The new data confirm that 6 billion people are capable of generating a global geophysical force the equivalent to some of the great forces of nature, just by going about their daily lives.read more

Take a vacation on Mars in the future? Forget it: scientists tell us there is too much radiation, even if your spacecraft is shielded. Alas, we need to learn much more before we’re ready to travel into space.

NASA has been discussing going to one of the moons of Mars and going to the planet itself from there. In New Scientist, David Shiga quotes planetary scientist Pascal Lee as saying, “I, for one, would go to Phobos or Deimos in a heartbeat, even without any hope of landing on Mars.”
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Experiments prove that thought changes quantum measurement. But does it go further? Is the universe itself conscious, as Max Planck and Albert Einstein thought? How has this idea, which was central to the early history of quantum physics, become fringe science? Why have we been catastrophically disempowered, and how can we reestablish our connection with earth and the universe?

Listen as William Henry interviews David Sereda about the bone-chilling reasons that we turned away from this reality and began, as a society, to live the lie that the universe is a vast, unconscious desert, perhaps sprinkled with intelligent life and perhaps not.

How do we recover from our disastrous journey into materialism, and regain our power as part of a living universe?
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