SHARK!

Bad news for our friends on the East Coast… The great white shark population is (rapidly?) increasing along the Eastern United States and Canada.

“The number of great white sharks off the U.S. Atlantic Coast appears to have increased since the early 1990s after conservation measures were introduced to halt their decline, a U.S. government scientist said on Saturday.” (scientific american)

This is just perfect news that comes only 3 days before I visit the east coast and its beaches. Loyal EIGN readers, if I get eaten please avenge my death. We must stop these man-eating abominations.

Good News Wednesday: Jupiter's Red-Spot Shrinking

For this week's Good News Wednesday post, we have great news for those of you planning on visiting Jupiter when inter-solar travel becomes a reality. Jupiter's great red-spot is "shrinking dramatically."

"Ju­pi­ter’s trade­mark Great Red Spot—a swirling storm fea­ture larg­er than Earth—has shrunk to its small­est size ev­er meas­ured, as­tro­no­mers re­port. The rea­sons for the shrink­age is un­known, but it’s ac­cel­er­at­ing, as­tro­no­mers said. If it con­tin­ues at re­cently meas­ured rates, the fa­mous blotch will be gone by about 2030. " (world-science.net)

Observing a Gigantic Solar Eruption

From EIGN co-founder Pete:

"This is the sun, I'm floored.  What year do we live in?"

Mega-Earth Found. Yes, Another One...

File this under "Cool"...

"You can add to the growing list of “exoplanets” a huge, dense, surprisingly rocky world with 17 times the mass of Earth. Discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope ... this new planet, officially named Kepler-10c, scrambles the equations that dictate how massive a rocky planet can be without ballooning into a Jupiter-like gas giant." (washington post)

[Ed. note:  We're pretty sure that picture is not of the new planet.] 

Massive Galaxy "About" To Collide With Us

photo by author

The Andromeda galaxy is coming! Watch out! Oh, wait I just watched the video... It's not going to be here for 2 billion years... and our planet will already have been sterilized by our expanding -and dying- sun.  Well... fuck.

(Neat) Video can be found here, at the New York Times.

The Search for a Better Laundry App; or, What is Wrong With Everything

As long time EIGN reader and occasional contributor jg3 said when sending us this next story: "First. World. Problem. !"

"We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. ... the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems." (nymag.com)

The story purports to be about the search for the ultimate laundry app, but really it reads as great cultural commentary on what we've become as a society.

Experiencing Two Terrible Things, Together, At Once

BEEs!
I-95!

Save us now.

A truck carrying 20 million bees overturned in Delaware two days ago.  
It took 13 hours to "clean up" the mess.   After 90% of the bees were "lost."
The driver and two passengers suffered "minor" injuries of 50-100 bee stings each. If those are considered minor injuries I don't want to know what major ones are.

But, I think the scariest thing of all is this nugget from the end of the news story:

"State police spokesman Sgt. Paul Shavack says on-call bee handlers worked with firefighters to spray water to disperse and calm the bees. It was the first time state police used their official honeybee swarm removal plan."

Delaware state police have an OFFICIAL HONEYBEE SWARM REMOVAL PLAN. Holy fuck!

Suburban Sprawl: The Same Everywhere

Good news wednesday!

According to wired, suburban sprawl looks just about the same no matter where you go on the planet.  So now you can live on a caul-de-sac and eat McDonalds no matter where you are on earth.  You tell us the world isn't getting smaller.

“The photos document a peculiar approach to urban growth, one that that dominates rather than accommodates nature. Pittman hopes his photos will contribute to a conversation about our other options as we develop further.

There’s a negative and a positive message, being that I think we’re not living in harmony with our planet, and with each other, and that in the end we’re destroying ourselves,” he says. “But my message is also that I think we can live in harmony with the earth, and we can live in harmony with mother nature. We don’t just have to have this attitude of conquering, because in the end it hasn’t really worked out well so far. There are alternatives; I don’t want to just paint this picture of doom.”  [wired]