Looking inside Earth from above

Europe has just launched a spaceship called Goce which can monitor tiny fluctuations in Earth’s gravity.  These fluctuations are caused by such things as changes in ocean currents, melting ice caps, underground lava flows, and the presence of underground stores of oil, water, and various minerals.

It will, therefore, be immensely helpful in predicting volcanoes in time for people to escape from danger, for monitoring climate change, and in locating oil and other mineral deposits beneath Earth’s surface.

Later this spring, the Europeans are also launching Herschel, the most powerful telescope ever put into space.  Unlike Hubble, Herschel detects infrared radiation.  What scientists are hope to find out is whether stars developed after the galaxies were formed, or whether stars came first, and then massed together into galaxies, each of which has several hundred billion stars.

Another small step for mankind into a very very big universe…

Birthdays of heroes

During this last week, we have celebrated the birthdays of two great men – Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln was President of the United States during the American Civil War, the war in which Americans killed each other by the thousands.  Ostensibly the issue was states rights.  But in fact, they were fighting over the issue of slavery, and it was Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Decree freeing all the slaves in America.  From then on, the Constitution that declared that “all men are created equal” did not have a hidden parenthesis excluding people with black skin.

150 years ago Charles Darwin published his book about evolution, “The Origin of the Species.”  Evolution is a story of amazing beauty and astonishing complexity in which life moves forward in a myriad of glorious manifestations.  To those who believe in God, it is a great peon of praise and honour.

Both Lincoln and Darwin in their own ways defended and celebrated the diversity of mankind.  What both were saying is that our strength lies not in our uniformity, but in our various talents, our different abilities, our divergent insights.

When the temptation is to retreat into our bunkers and shoot anyone within sight who is slightly different, who speaks a different language, wears different clothes, or worships at a different altar, learning again that our strength and survival lies in embracing our differences might help save us once again.

In today’s fractious and globalized world in which we rub so closely together, perhaps the lessons of these two men are more needed than ever before.

Paper houses that don’t blow down

In the story of The Three Little Pigs, only the house that was built with bricks was not blown down by the huffing and puffing of the big bad wolf.  But a house made of paper has just gone on the market, and it might be better than bricks for millions of people surviving in shantytowns around the world.

The paper house is resin-soaked cellulose from recycled cardboard and newspapers which has been put under intense heat and pressure.  The result is prefabricated building panels that are rainproof, strong, good insulators, earthquake proof, and very light.

And very cheap.  An entire house with a veranda, sealed-off shower and toilet and sleeping accommodation for eight costs $5,000.

Paper houses are already being assembled by local developers in Nigeria and Angola.  The inventor, Gerd Niemoeller from Germany, thinks paper houses are ideal for any place from Europe to Africa to Latin America where people are displaced and living in cobbled-together shacks or tents.