Tag Archives: Harvard University

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Digging into our Roots!

09/10/2013 Nativegrl77

NMAAHC -- National Museum of African American History and Culture

africa diaspora title bannerFINAL-01.jpg

Searching for Your Roots

This event is full. However, please join us via webcast at nmaahc.si.edu/Events/SearchingforYourRoots.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photo by Jeffrey Dunn

Thursday, September 12, 2013 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM

We share a basic drive to discover our own personal stories that explain who we are — and where we come from. In the 2012 PBS series, Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates Jr. explored “the DNA of American culture.” Gates enlisted his own corps of discovery — leading genealogists, geneticists, and ancestry genetic testing companies — to uncover the ancestry of celebrities in each episode. This very team has been busy tracing the genetic histories of tonight’s guests, the Smithsonian’s own Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Washington Week’s Gwen Ifill. Gates will reveal their ancestral backgrounds, discovered through historical records and genomic data, live on stage. Ifill and Bunch will explore the results and comment on what they’ve learned.

Lonnie Bunch

Gwen Ifill

After the ancestral reveal, the program continues with a discussion on the promise and limitations of genomic research and ancestral inference genetic testing. Panelists include:

Aravinda Chakravarti, professor, McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University;

Charmaine Royal, faculty, Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and associate research professor, Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University;

Joanna Mountain, senior director of research, 23andMe.

The panel moderator is Vence Bonham, associate investigator, National Human Genome Research Institute. A question-and-answer session with the audience follows.

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
For more information, email NMAAHCPROGRAMS@si.edu.

Presented in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of Natural History, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Top3 : Same-Sex Discrimination, Racial IQ and The Lottery

05/21/2013 Nativegrl77

TEEN EXPELLED, CHARGED WITH FELONY FOR SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIP

STUDENTS CONDEMN RACIAL IQ STUDY

WHY POWERBALL IS BAD FOR YOU, EVEN IF YOU WIN

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

The Blue Moon And Neil Armstrong: A Cosmic Wink?

08/30/2012 Nativegrl77 1 Comment

The Blue Moon And Neil Armstrong: A Cosmic Wink?

by Judy Molland

The next full moon will be on Friday, August 31, and will be quite special because it is the second within the calendar month. (The first one was on August 1.) This full moon is called a ‘blue moon,’ and will happen in the U.S. at 9:58 am EDT, or 6:58 am PDT.

The time between one full moon and the next is close to the length of a calendar month. So the only time one month can have two full moons is when the first full moon happens in the first few days of the month. That means a blue moon has come to mean something rare. In fact, the next blue moon won’t happen until July 2015.

Can there be two blue moons in a single calendar year? Yes. It last happened in 1999. There were two full moons in January and two full moons in March and no full moon in February. So both January and March had blue moons.

The next year of double blue moons is coming up in 2018.

But wait, there’s more!

There are two other definitions for blue moon. It can be the third of four full moons in a single season. The Old Farmer’s Almanac defined a blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season. One season – winter, spring, fall, summer – typically has three full moons. If a season has four full moons, then the third full moon may be called a blue moon.

The next blue moon by this definition will fall on August 21, 2013.

Or you might actually see a blue-colored moon one day, but it’s pretty unlikely. Unusual sky conditions can create them as they did in 1883, when an Indonesian volcano named Krakatoa exploded. Plumes of ash rose to the very top of Earth’s atmosphere. And the moon turned blue. Some of the ash-clouds were filled with particles about 1 micron (one millionth of a meter) wide–the right size to strongly scatter red light, while allowing other colors to pass. White moonbeams shining through the clouds emerged blue, and sometimes green.

But don’t be misled by the photo above. The secret to photos like these lies in special photographic filters.

What does all this have to do with Neil Armstrong?

Friday, the day of the blue moon, is also the day of a private funeral service for Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, who died last Saturday in Ohio at age 82.

Serendipitous timing!

Armstrong’s family has suggested paying tribute to him by looking at the moon and giving the astronaut a wink.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

$500,000,000,000

02/17/2011 Nativegrl77

According to a new groundbreaking report from Harvard, coal is costing Americans up to an extra HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS every year.

But it’s what’s behind the dollar amounts from the report that really matters. We’re talking about kids with asthma, mothers taking time off of work to take care of sick relatives, communities turning into cancer clusters, climate change…the list goes on and on.

Back in Washington, however, our elected leaders are being pressured by the deep pockets of the coal industry to take away the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate coal-fired power plants. Saying it will cost Americans too much money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Coal will cost us even more if the EPA loses this ability.

That’s why we are going to personally deliver a copy of the Harvard report to both of your Senators along with signatures from the people they’re elected to represent in Washington. We won’t let them ignore or pretend they don’t know about the extra half a trillion dollars coal is costing all of us every year or how their constituents feel about it.

Pleas join us by adding your name to our petition right now and we’ll make sure it is included in the delivery to your Senators. http://us.greenpeace.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=775&s_src=taf

This report marks the first time ever that all of the effects during the lifecycle of coal — from mining to burning in coal-fired power plants — have been accounted for and the results are staggering. The hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country are driving these effects. Which is why Greenpeace is launching a new campaign this year that will take the fight directly to these dirty polluters.

Bridgeport, Connecticut is home to one of these plants. And Greenpeace activists were there today to send a simple message — “Shut it down. Quit coal.” It’s a message we’ll be repeating over and over again at plants everywhere. It’s the same message we’ll be delivering to your Senators along with the report. Sign the petition today and let’s make sure the Senate defends the EPA’s ability to protect us from the true cost of coal.

Quit coal,

Kelly Mitchell

Greenpeace Coal Campaigner

P.S. We’re going to collect these petitions up until March 1st. So be sure to forward this around and get your friends involved.

http://us.greenpeace.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=775&s_src=taf