SCIENCE

Photo: NASA via PolicyMic.

"Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Too bad it's not going to for much longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.
The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And there's not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental structure and nature of our society". Read full article in PolicyMic. E.T.P 6'

Image via Fast Company.

"The question of who has accelerated climate change the most isn't that complicated. It was just a few dozen companies that extracted the majority of our oil, gas, and coal over the last 150 years, allowing the fuel to be burned, and the emissions to cause havoc in the atmosphere.
A recent paper by Richard Heede, from the Climate Accountability Institute, in Colorado, shows that just 90 companies produced two-thirds of the fossil fuels burned in the industrial era. That includes 50 investor-owned companies like Chevron and Exxon, 31 state-owned companies like Mexico's Pemex, and nine government-run entities from the ex-Soviet Union, China and other countries." E.T.P. 6'

SCIENCE

Photo via The Independent.

A new end of the world? Ucranian astronomers discover a 1,300 ft asteroid that might impact with Earth in 2032 with a force 50 times greater than the biggest ever nuclear bomb. With a chance of collision of 1 in 63,000, asteroid TV135 is going to be added to NASA's Torino scale for risky near Earth objects. Read full article in The Independent. E.T.P.: 1'12''.

Photo: Lwp Kommunikáció/Flickr via Futurity.

As humans live longer, number of endangered animals grow. Human life expectancy is a determining factor for the life expectancy of endangered birds and mammals and “it’s not a random pattern,” says lead author Aaron Lotz, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology at the University of California. Read this article in Futurity. E.T.P.: 3'40''

Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 15th of September Edition

EDITORIAL

Autumn is here and so are a lot of interesting and exciting activities to compensate the Summer blues such as the London Design Festival, the Urban Wandering Film and the London Landscape at the Barbican, London Fashion Week and London Film Festival. Get your umbrellas ready and don't let yourself slip under the weather. Together we can make it.

We have some cool recommendations in our To Do List both in London and Liverpool, interesting innovation and design articles; a nice J.D. Sallinger written by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, in our Culture section; and News, concerning the end of the world and a cat that is a superstars. Maybe these two are related. Yes, definitely related.

Anyway.

Any cool stuff to recommend to your fellow procrastinators? Please share it with us. 

Have a nice Sunday and a nice read.


NEWS

Photo: Earth via The Independent.

This is an actual headline of The Independent: World's biggest brains get together to work out how to save us all from the end of the world. Yes! The end of the world is back. Not that it ever left us really. Some of the brains are: Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal and past president of the Royal Society, who is also leading the initiative, Stephen Hawking, Cambridge philosopher Huw Price, economist Partha Dasgupta and the Harvard evolutionary geneticist George Church. Read full article in The Independent.

Photo: Google Street View screenshot via The Independent

G is for Galápagos. So, the Galapagos Islands have been mapped by Google Street View, allowing virtual explorers extraordinary access to Charles Darwin’s biological paradise and marking the 178th anniversary of the great British scientist’s ground-breaking journey of 1835. Read full article in The Independent.

Photo: Lil Bub and her “Dude” Mike Bridavsky by Ariel Zambelich via WIRED

 It's a cat's world. It might be me, but I think that (specially Internet) cats and dogs are relevant when it comes to procrastination. This time we are talking about Lil Bub, the cat that has gone from a shelter  to a massive online phenomenon. According to Wired this weird looking cat has '200,000-plus Instagram followers, millions of YouTube views, her own documentary, a book deal, a web TV show, and (if all goes well) an animatronic version of herself'. I like Grumpy Cat better. But apparently that's just me. If you want to know more about Lil Bub, read the full article in Wired.