Figures & Facts

"Lion Man: Meet the extraordinary man known as 'The Lion Whisperer'. Kevin Richardson's bond with Africa's dominant predator is as astonishing as it is touching. He's devoted his life to understanding and protecting the mighty Lion which is battling human encroachment and shrinking habitat.
Along the way, he cuddles them, tickles them, even sticks his head in their jaws! Despite Kevin's research, it's now feared that within just twenty years there will be no lions "born free"."

The LION WHISPERER Kevin Richardson - Living with the LIONS - Full Length Documentary

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After graduating with a BSc in Anatomy and Physiology, Kevin began his career in postoperative rehabilitation. He made a dramatic career switch when he was given an opportunity to work with lions at a local lion park, sixteen years ago.

As a self-taught animal behaviourist, he has broken every safety rule known to man when working with these wild animals. Flouting common misconceptions that breaking an animal’s spirit with sticks and chains is the best way to subdue them, he uses love, understanding and trust to develop personal bonds with them. His unique method of getting to know their individual personalities, what makes each of them angry, happy, upset, or irritated-just like a mother understands a child-has caused them to accept him like one of their own into their fold.  read more »

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Washington Post: We’ve killed off half the world’s animals since 1970 - a jaw-dropping statistic
The new Living Planet Index report from the World Wildlife Fund opens with a jaw-dropping statistic: we've killed roughly half of the world's non-human vertebrate animal population since 1970.

The main culprits? Exploitation (i.e., overfishing and overhunting), and habitat degradation.

The declines are almost exclusively caused by humans' ever-increasing footprint on planet earth. "Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year," according to the report. The only reason we're able to run above max capacity - for now - is that we're stripping away resources faster than we can replenish them. Carbon consumption - the burning of fossil fuels - represents a huge and growing chunk of the demand we put on the earth. "In 1961, carbon was 36 per cent of our total footprint, but by 2010 (the year for which the most complete dataset is available), it comprised 53 per cent."  read more »

Lucky you
if you’re not
data hacked
data tracked
data stolen
(when the innocent enjoy sharing,
some are busy sneaking, stealing)
data harassed:

Forbes: Expect Hackers To Crack More Retailers This Holiday Season

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*update 06March2015*  read more »

Minute PlanetSolar - April 2011 - World Tour Through the Pacific
Uploaded on May 6, 2011

PlanetSolar around the World
Published on Apr 12, 2012
Turanor PlanetSolar is a solar powered catamaran that is circumnavigating the World. The project was dreamed up by Raphael Domjan and enabled by businessman Immo Stroher.

PlanetSolar in Greece for TerraSubmersa Expedition!
Published on Sep 2, 2014
In August 2014, the vessel resumed her role as a scientific platform for the University of Geneva with the Expedition TerraSubmersa. It aims to explore the prehistoric landscapes submerged in the Argolic Gulf in Greece, in an attempt to reconstitute them and perhaps to find traces of human activity.

PlanetSolar in Venice (Italy)
Published on Oct 2, 2014  read more »

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Forbes: The Buy Nothing Year: How Two Roommates Saved More Than $55,000
A little over a year ago, Geoffrey Szuszkiewicz, a 31-year-old accountant in Calgary, began analyzing his monthly spending. What he saw, he says, was eye-opening: “I was spending so much every month, no matter how much I made it never seemed like I was getting ahead. It was typical lifestyle creep.”

Around the same time, his good friend Julie Phillips, 29, a communications advisor at the University of Calgary, was about to move into a new apartment when it fell through. “Geoff said, ‘You can move in with me, but I only have a bedroom for you to rent,’” she says. “The rest was packed with his stuff. So I got rid of over 80% of my stuff within three days.” (She was thinking she might move in a year and if so, she’d have to get rid of many of her belongings then.) But then she had a meltdown. “I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?’ And then I was like, ‘Why do I need things anyway?’”  read more »

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Around 90% of the fresh water on the Earth's surface is held in the ice sheet. The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland (ice sheets are bigger than ice shelves or alpine glaciers). Greenland ice melting 3 times faster, loss of vast ice sheet. ice (fresh water!) runs away by hundreds of billions of tons a year.

Drinking sewage: solving Singapore's water problem
Australia: Recycled water to be on tap  read more »

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In the North Sea on September 22, 1914, the German submarine U-9 sinks three British cruisers, the Aboukir, the Hogue and the Cressy, in just over one hour.
In the first two months of war, the German High Seas Fleet made little effort to move from its headquarters in Wilhelmshaven. The one naval battle, fought at Heligoland Bight in late August, ended in a convincing British victory, with three German battleships sunk, three more damaged and 1,200 German sailors killed or wounded.

In the wake of Heligoland Bight, Kaiser Wilhelm and the German leadership concluded that the navy should be kept off the open seas, as its best use was as a defensive weapon. As the war continued, Germany’s greatest weapon at sea would not be its light cruisers but its lethal U-boat submarine, which was far more sophisticated than those built by other nations at that time. The typical U-boat was 214 feet long, carried 35 men and 12 torpedoes and could travel underwater for two hours at a time.

The one-sided battle on September 22, which claimed three British cruisers and the lives of 1,400 sailors, alerted the British to the deadly effectiveness of the submarine, which had been generally unrecognized up to that time. In the first few years of World War I, German U-boats took a terrible toll on Allied shipping. By 1917, however, the continued unrestricted U-boat attacks on American vessels traveling to Britain prompted the previously neutral United States to declare war on Germany. The infusion of American ships, troops and arms into World War I, as well as the economic support the U.S. supplied to the Allied powers, would eventually turn the tide of the war against Germany.  read more »