Environment:
Is it just me or are the mosquitoes extra bad this year? I have a feeling that people would care even more about climate change if, instead of talking about rising sea levels, environmentalists started talking about swarms of mosquitoes....
Posted on July 10, 2008 10:21 AM • 4 Comments •
I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine: When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers...
Posted on July 9, 2008 1:58 PM • 0 Comments •
This is the car I covet: It's been a long day for our adorable yellow test car. This morning we headed for Think's factory in Aurskog, some 40 miles into the bluegrass Scandinavian countryside, with about an 85% charge in...
Posted on June 25, 2008 11:16 AM • 8 Comments •
The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most...
Posted on June 3, 2008 3:29 PM • 13 Comments •
Haven't we done enough to the poor tomato? We've turned the voluptuous fruit into a pale imitation of itself: the average supermarket tomato, turned red with ethylene, tastes like, well, nothing. And now we have to genetically modify it for...
Posted on May 17, 2008 10:49 AM • 18 Comments •
British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets....
Posted on May 6, 2008 2:25 PM • 12 Comments •
So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the...
Posted on April 30, 2008 11:52 AM • 7 Comments •
A recent scene at the Bronx Zoo gorilla exhibit: On the left side of the enclosure, standing five feet away from the glass wall separating man and animal, is a big male gorilla. He crosses his arms as he gazes...
Posted on April 11, 2008 2:12 PM • 4 Comments •
This is very depressing: The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south...
Posted on March 17, 2008 12:14 PM • 0 Comments •
Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts: Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of...
Posted on February 22, 2008 10:45 AM • 5 Comments •
One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely...
Posted on December 31, 2007 9:59 AM • 8 Comments •
The answer is a tenuous yes, although it depends on where you live. If your local utility burns lots of coal, then perhaps you should stick with a fuel efficient compact car. If you don't know how your local utility...
Posted on December 11, 2007 10:59 AM • 7 Comments •
The Times takes the FCX for a spin. The good news is that it drives like an ordinary car, even though it runs on hydrogen: Normalcy is a recurring, and intentional, theme of the FCX Clarity. It is refueled using...
Posted on December 8, 2007 8:59 AM • 0 Comments •
I've never eaten Kobe beef from Japan, and now I never will. Authentic Kobe beef is essentially veal that isn't put out of its misery. Barry Estabrook, in the new Gourmet, investigates the real life of these very expensive cows...
Posted on November 28, 2007 9:59 AM • 15 Comments •
If I were a philosopher-king, the first thing I'd do is make Michael Pollan Secretary of Agriculture. Sometimes, he makes so much sense it actually hurts. In a Times op-ed yesterday, he assailed the latest version of the Farm Bill...
Posted on November 5, 2007 12:47 PM • 5 Comments •
I've always wondered about why manual transmissions generally get better mileage than automatics. The answer is surprisingly simple: humans are better shifters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy ratings, cars with manual transmissions typically beat their automatic peers...
Posted on October 30, 2007 10:13 AM • 14 Comments •
Hendrick Hertzberg takes on the Navy sonar technology which is killing whales: Whales live in a world of sound. A large part of their brains, which in many species are larger than ours, is devoted to processing sound. We don't...
Posted on October 17, 2007 11:44 AM • 1 Comments •
Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming: I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will,...
Posted on September 26, 2007 7:25 AM • 2 Comments •
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids...
Posted on September 20, 2007 10:40 AM • 14 Comments •
The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords....
Posted on August 31, 2007 12:42 PM • 12 Comments •
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
