You're Only An "economic Migrant" If You're Poor And Brown

The asteroid Nemesis is named after a Greek goddess who wields an apple branch, lash and sword. She is know for setting the scales right and often identified with revenge. The asteroid is in play with today & tomorrow’s cosmic weather. Good time to ask yourself who, or what, is your worst enemy and what role you play in the dynamic. And maybe make some #apple #tarts too….,

Basic income is a tested social vaccine. It’s been found to increase equity and general welfare. It has been found to reduce hospitalizations by 8.5% in just a few years through reduced stress and work injuries. It’s been found to increase birth weights through increased maternal nutrition. It’s been found to decrease crime rates by 40% and reduce malnourishment by 30%. Intrinsic motivation is cultivated. Students do better in school. Bargaining positions increase. Economic activity increases. Entrepreneurs are born. With experiment after experiment, from smaller unconditional cash transfers to full-on basic incomes, the results point in positive directions across multiple measures when incomes are unconditionally increased.

Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century (via letseyx)

It’s almost as if, as a species, we didn’t need to hurt ourselves in order for life to go on.

(via imathers)

Check in: The Tokyo hotel where guests can curl up with 1,700 good books

Book and Bed, a new Tokyo hotel, has created the sort of space that is impossible to leave. It is a cheap and cheerful dorm with a difference: guests’ bunk beds are hidden behind library shelves filled with hundreds of books in Japanese and English. | Read more

A good way to remember the human bones in the body. Dope pic

www.learninghumananatomy.com

Shaken: cocktail kits by mail

Shaken is a UK startup that sells subscriptions to “the best cocktails you’ve ever made.” Every month, they send you a handsome box with several bottles of rare and delicious booze, small-batch bitters, and a cocktail recipe explaining the history, chemistry and practice of some classic or novel cocktail.

You bring this stuff into your kitchen and play with it, mixing drinks according to the recipe or its variants, or your taste, according to your preference. They supply everything except ice, fruit, shakers and glassware, and each box has enough booze for four drinks.

The Shaken folks took over my old offices in London when I moved to LA this summer and I got to try some of their packages before I left. They turned me on to what is literally some of the best booze I’ve ever drunk (particularly the Plantation rums, which are finished in Cognac casks and taste like nothing you’ve ever tried before – there’s one that finishes exactly like a smoky Islay, which is indescribably brilliant).

Shaken doesn’t assume that you’re a hardcore cocktail fan, and the recipes are simple to follow. But they strike a great balance for people who want to go beyond, with ideas for refining and improving the basic recipe.

The boxes are no-obligation and you can skip a box any time you feel like it.

Read the rest

Setting up any business is a challenge but in Ethiopia those range from daily operating headaches such as on-off internet to even more fundamental business challenges

“The internet goes out a couple of times a week — when that happens, there is not much we can do but rely on phone lines to take orders,” said Feleg Tsegaye, manager of Deliver Addis.

But he also believes the Horn of Africa nation — the second most populous on the continent — offers enormous opportunities.

Tsegaye was born and brought up in the US but moved to Ethiopia, the homeland of his parents, hoping to tap into a still largely untapped but swiftly growing market he believes is one of the most promising on the continent.

“The IT sector is still in its infancy — typically in these markets there is a way to transfer money very quickly and very easily, but here that doesn’t exist quite yet,” he added.

“Once you have a way for entrepreneurs to make money through technology, I think you are going to see that change very quickly.”

With a growth rate of nearly 10 per cent a year over the past decade, according to the World Bank, Ethiopia has attracted entrepreneurs eager to take their cut of a market with over 94 million potential consumers.

The Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa now has three “start-up incubators”, some supported by foreign investors, to help Ethiopian entrepreneurs launch their own business.

Airport Land Art is (Acoustic) Baffling http://ift.tt/1SEHBCD

How To Avoid The Next Atlantis

They say nothing in life is guaranteed except death and taxes. Maybe we should add rising sea levels to that list?

The lapping waves of Earth’s oceans are going to move as much as 1 full meter higher within our lifetimes, and perhaps several meters more in the coming centuries depending on what we do or don’t do about slowing down climate change. Part of this comes from melting glaciers and ice shelves flowing out to sea, and part comes from the natural expansion of water as it warms, but we have to face facts: Sea level is rising.

This new video from MinuteEarth looks at some of the interesting ways that coastal cities around the globe are trying to get ready for a wetter world. I wish this wasn’t something we had to prepare for, but I’m glad we’ve got smart people on the job.

Bonus: Curious what 1 meter of sea level rise looks like? Head over to Climate Central and play with their Surging Seas map simulator. Look, you can even make half of Florida and Louisiana disappear!

Maps like these allow us to see the city in a new light – not just as a massive consumer of energy, but also as a potential powerhouse.

Dr Anne Maassan on the solar potential of cities.  (via thisbigcity)

Hunting for Organic Molecules on Mars

Did Mars once have life? To help answer that question, an international team of scientists created an incredibly powerful miniature chemistry laboratory, set to ride on the next Mars rover.

The instrument, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer Mass Spectrometer (MOMA-MS), will form a key part of the ExoMars Rover, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos. A mass spectrometer is crucial to send to Mars because it reveals the elements that can be found there. A Martian mass spectrometer takes a sample, typically of powdered rock, and distinguishes the different elements in the sample based on their mass.

After 8 years of designing, building, and testing, NASA scientists and engineers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said goodbye to their tiny chemistry lab and shipped it to Italy in a big pink box. Building a tiny instrument capable of conducting chemical analysis is difficult in any setting, but designing one that has to launch on a huge rocket, fly through the vacuum of space, and then operate on a planet with entirely different pressure and temperature systems? That’s herculean. And once on Mars, MOMA has a very important job to do. NASA Goddard Center Director Chris Scolese said, “This is the first intended life-detecting instrument that we have sent to Mars since Viking.”

The MOMA instrument will be capable of detecting a wide variety of organic molecules. Organic compounds are commonly associated with life, although they can be created by non-biological processes as well. Organic molecules contain carbon and hydrogen, and can include oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements.

To find these molecules on Mars, the MOMA team had to take instruments that would normally occupy a couple of workbenches in a chemistry lab and shrink them down to roughly the size of a toaster oven so they would be practical to install on a rover.

MOMA-MS, the mass spectrometer on the ExoMars rover, will build on the accomplishments from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), an instrument suite on the Curiosity rover that includes a mass spectrometer. SAM collects and analyzes samples from just below the surface of Mars while ExoMars will be the first to explore deep beneath the surface, with a drill capable of taking samples from as deep as two meters (over six feet). This is important because Mars’s thin atmosphere and spotty magnetic field offer little protection from space radiation, which can gradually destroy organic molecules exposed on the surface. However, Martian sediment is an effective shield, and the team expects to find greater abundances of organic molecules in samples from beneath the surface.

On completion of the instrument, MOMA Project Scientist Will Brinckerhoff praised his colleagues, telling them, “You have had the right balance of skepticism, optimism, and ambition. Seeing this come together has made me want to do my best.”

In addition to the launch of the ESA and Roscosmos ExoMars Rover, in 2020, NASA plans to launch the Mars 2020 Rover, to search for signs of past microbial life. We are all looking forward to seeing what these two missions will find when they arrive on our neighboring planet.

Learn more about MOMA HERE.

Learn more about ExoMars HERE.

Follow @NASASolarSystem on Twitter for more about our missions to other planets.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.