environment the state of the earth
The glacial waters of Patagonia. From Flickr, by angela7dreams
May 9, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
For the Triangle locavores A special issue of The Independent on local food scene: The road to real food Farm to table challenges Farmers' helpers One missing link: organic grains...
The World's Fair
Michael Pollan: Chewed Up and Spit Out "Big claims. Not too much support. Mostly unconvincing."
The World's Fair
Science podcasts heard 12 million times daily Some nanotechnology, some environmentalism, a lot of links.
Greg Laden's Blog
No More UN Aid to Burma The first deliver of aid from the UN World Food Programme was stolen by officials from the Burma military Junta. As a result, the shipment of aid into the country by the UN has stopped. This is as earlier reports indicating that the death toll...
Shifting Baselines
Goodbye Salmon, Hello Prawns Fishermen off of Oregon's coast could go broke sitting, or could go broke working, which is why they're trading in their salmon fishing gear and began outfitting their boats for prawns. This is a classic case of overfishing (as well...
May 8, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
Conclusions First! Legislature wants polar bear study: The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon -- researchers just have to fill in the science part. That's how little Johnny Alaska...
Discovering Biology in a Digital World
Would your class like to clone and sequence plant genes? Dave Robinson and Joann Lau from Bellarmine College in Kentucky are going to be describing their student project in a free webinar next Friday, May 16th. Their students clone GAPDH (Glyceraldehyde 3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase) genes from new plants, assemble the DNA sequences, and submit them to the NCBI. Here's an example. Plus, since GAPDH is a highly conserved, it's a great...
A Blog Around The Clock
How atrazine affects development? PLoS ONE paper The Herbicide Atrazine Activates Endocrine Gene Networks via Non-Steroidal NR5A Nuclear Receptors in Fish and Mammalian Cells will be one of the topics covered by Science Friday on NPR tomorrow - tune in if you can, or...
Stoat
Sea ice minimum kerfuffle The summary of betting on sea ice refers. If you look in my comments, you'll find any number of well intentioned people advising me that its time to close up the bets before I take a bath. But I haven't....
Stoat
Betting on climate change, again? As I said before, I don't think much of the latest prediction of cooling. But apparently , the authors take it seriously, and believe it as a prediction (pers comm). So RC has decided to see if they are serious....
Pure Pedantry
Stephen Colbert on Gas Tax Holiday Stephen Colbert skewers as per usual......
Highly Allochthonous
Active, dormant, and extinct volcanoes How do you know your if friendly neighbourhood volcano is dead, or merely dozing?
Pure Pedantry
The Gas Tax Holiday as a Symbolic Gesture Bryan Caplan writing in the NYTimes suggests that in spite of making no economic sense whatsoever the gas tax holiday might be a good idea as a symbolic gesture: The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap...
Deep Sea News
Some Topics I Wish I Had More Time To Write About This week I have found that my cup runneth over with work. Several things around the web have caught my eye which deserve substantial commentary. That's what you pay for, right? Unfortunately, today they get a link. First, here is...
The Corpus Callosum
Peak Oil, Proton Therapy, and the Future of High-Tech Medicine One thing about hospitals, is that they use an awful lot of electricity. We already know about some of the challenges that will occur in health care in the post-peak-oil era; I wrote about that in October 2007. ...Petroleum...
May 7, 2008
Deep Sea News
How Artificial Reservoirs Affect Global Sea Level A new study lead by Chao in Science estimates that nearly 10,800 cubic kilometers of water are stored in artificial reservoirs. That is little over twice the volume of Lake Michigan. The authors estimate this quantity of water reduces global...
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Mangrove Destruction Magnified Burmese Tragedy Destruction of mangroves results in yet another human tragedy, this time, in the wake of cyclone Nargis.
The Intersection
Did Nargis Kill 100,000? That's what CNN is suggesting. This puts the catastrophe at tsunami scale. And it suggests that Nargis could rank among the top three or four most deadly cyclones of modern times. My god. Courtesy of Weather Underground, the deadliest cyclones...
The Intersection
My MSNBC Interview About Cyclone Nargis MSNBC's Alan Boyle, author of Cosmic Log, just interviewed me about the ever worsening Nargis catastrophe. You can hear the audio here, and excerpts here. An excerpt: Q: Is this another sign that the global warming nightmare is coming upon...
Highly Allochthonous
What's up with those Archean sandstones? In addition to searching out evidence for Archean microbial mats, my revisitation of the Pongola sandstones gave me the chance to look a bit more closely at their lithology. When I last posted pictures from this sequence, there was a...
The Intersection
War on Science Alive and Well, Thank You I can't tell you how many people this morning have emailed me this Michael Gerson op-ed from the Washington Post, which debunks the "Republican war on science" thesis. They all want me to debunk the debunker in this instance. But...
Framing Science
McKibben Launches Site to Unite the World Around 350 PPM Creating a psychological target...
The Intersection
Deforestation And The Death Toll Myanmar ranks #4 in the world for annual forest area lost per year. Between 2000 and 2005, the country lost, on average, 466,000 hectares per year which puts their annual deforestation rate at 1.45% based on FAO statistics. Given deforestation...
Thus Spake Zuska
Four White Flowers In the first year, this deer-resistant plant was savaged by the enormous deer herd that practically lives in my backyard.
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Five Easy Ways to Save The Planet An amusing but instructive video describing five easy ways that you can contribute to saving the planet.
“City living, it's the way to go: it might feel crowded or dirty, but on an individual scale, people are much 'cleaner' for their small environmental footprint.” Rachael on Hippy-Crites
