Marietta is a strange place. It's rather large and spread out, housing posh bedroom communities, shiny office buildings, chain restaurants and old, poverty-line neighborhoods all wrapped up together in noisy ribbons of highway. I drive through a portion of Marietta every day.
One turn off of my daily drive, some old button-pusher is selling Obama '08 tee shirts complete with a picture of Curious George eating a banana from his bar in Marietta. His intent is obvious, equating African Americans (or at least this particular African American) with monkeys, but the crank denies it, claiming he just sees a resemblance between the cartoon character and Obama. (You can hear more about it from other Sciblings here, here and here.)
I've been down here for a little over two months now and I'm still baffled by this area sometimes. To and from work I see a massive diversity of young professionals in and out of the city. There's also a huge and thriving gay community in the city and the surrounding area. All things considered, the supposed conservatism of the south has not really made itself apparent to me as of yet. Granted, most of the people I have met so far are not from Georgia originally. They're imports from the north like myself.
Still, I encountered much more racism and backward thinking in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and not just in the rural areas. I have spent equal time on both sides of these states and within their cities, and by far have encountered more of this kind of play innocent, "I'm not a racist but..." kind of attitude that this bar owner is selling. It's not just the south folks. I would expect to see something similar right smack in the middle of Fell's Point in Baltimore or at some dive in Norristown.
That said, there's obviously a lot of folks in this area who agree with the bar owner. Two reasons: Until yesterday, the majority of votes were "yes" in the poll at the AJC website that asked if the tee was okay and the bar owner has completely sold out of the shirts and is currently filling a waiting list of orders.
The May edition of Oekologie will be hosted at one of the lovely blogs at Scientific Blogging (though I'm not sure which...). It's not too late to get your entries in.
Do we have something against David Attenborough in this country? First his narration for Planet Earth was overdubbed by Sigourney Weaver, and now I've heard that Life in Cold Blood is not even going to be televised in the States.
Animal Planet just emailed me.
"Life in Cold Blood" will not be airing May 7 or 14.
They do not know of any new dates.
Sounds like they are dumping it. Won't be seen in U.S. And the only way to see it is to buy the DVD if they do produce one.
Lame. At least Herpdigest is offering the book though:
Or you can buy the book, copies still available.
$29.95 PLUS $7.50 S&H
288 pages with over 200 Color Photos,
By check:
Make the check out to HerpDigest and send it to HerpDigest c/o Allen Salzberg/67-87 Booth Street -5B/Forest Hills, NY 11375
Through Paypal our account is asalzberg@herpdigest.org.
Or credit cards, we only accept Master or Visa Cards, send us your ccard number (split it into two different emails for security), expiration date, shipping and billing address.
I hope this has nothing to do with staying PC about evolution on the network's part. One of the beautiful things about Attenborough's work is his focus on evolution in his "Life" series. He's not preachy or stiff about it; he tells it like it is and you feel like you are there with him exploring life's greatest story chapter by chapter.
In one week exactly, I will be attending a scientific conference in a hot vacation spot for people across the world. Millions flock there every day to relax, socialize and wtfpwn your face with their Night Elf Mohawk.
It ain't Belize, baby; it's the World of Warcraft.
"Convergence of the Real and the Virtual", the first ever scientific conference to be held within WoW, was proposed by John Bohannon, the Gonzo Scientist from Science magazine. It kicks off in Ogrimmar on the Earthen Ring server (RP) next Friday at 12:30 p.m. The conference will focus on MMOs as "natural labs" for research, holding sessions and giving tours of Azeroth (the main area in the game) throughout the weekend. There will still be panels and presenters, but instead of a sea of suits and mismatched sweater vests they'll be wielding melee weapons and donning chain armor.
At Page 3.14, our lovely and gracious Overlords have posted a great new reader's poll encouraging folks to choose their favorite pro-science movie as a sort of response to the anti-science of Expelled.
There's one problem, as one of the commenters has stated. One of the movies on the list is absolutely not pro-science. Jurassic Park is as anti-science as you can get in pop fiction, promoting a Faustian fear of science and knowledge.
Now before I get Booted from ScienceBlogs, let me clarify that I'm not being an ass when I say that Ginny and company are gracious and lovely. They are indeed both, especially considering they gave me ample time to get my shit together while not blogging, and I still got to keep my spot here at Sb. That means a hell of a lot to me.
So this is just a friendly argument of why I think Jurassic Park shouldn't be on that list. More backpedaling and disclaimers below the fold. Maybe I'll even describe the history and difference between Faustian and Promethean stories and why Jurassic Park is the former.
The team measured the size of more than 520 non-branching corals in two major coral reef areas in southern Belize: the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve, a world heritage site in the second largest barrier reef in the world, and the Port Honduras Marine Reserve. In addition to providing habitat for an array of marine life, non-branching massive corals--robust and shaped like mounds, and sometimes called 'brain corals'--buffer coastal zones from erosive wave energy.
Crabbe's team determined the surface area covered by the corals and entered the growth rates of the corals into a computer model to determine when in history the coral colonies first settled. They compared numbers of corals that started life in each year with hurricane and storm data, and as suggested by data from fringing reefs of Jamaica, the coral recruitment was much lower during storm years, Crabbe said.
Not surprisingly, tourism and agricultural pollution are the top two threats to corals around Belize.
If I was given three wishes, I have always said that one of them would be to watch the evolution of life at my leisure, being able speeding things up and slowing them down at will. Of all the time periods we've designated, the Ediacaran and the Cambrian periods would be a frame by frame analysis. Were these organisms really that much different from modern organisms, and if so, did their ecology reflect these differences?
PLoS One published a paper today that attempts to make my pipe dream a reality by taking the well known geological snapshots of Cambrian life, the Chengjiang and Burgess Shales (520 and 505 ma respectively), and trying to reassemble the interactions of the living world of that era.
The desire to reconstruct historic ecosystems has been strong in the field, but many have felt the fossil record was not robust enough to construct any sort of models. Obviously this notion is beginning to change.
Two waterways meet in a surreal junction at Vale Summit, a small low streambed in the Appalachian forests of Maryland, surrounded by high sandy banks and the faint sound of passing traffic.
Bright orange coal mine drainage from the Hoffman tunnel washes iron oxides and sulfates over rocks and tree limbs and completely distorts the little brown flow of Braddock Run, a smaller, slower but rich stream, providing a home to benthic invertebrates and young fish that the drainage cannot.
Braddock Run exhibits all the attributes of a healthy stream: neutral pH, low iron levels and a diverse scatter of mayfly, stonefly and caddisfly larvae. The rushing waters from the Hoffman tunnel are unable to support any benthic life aside from persistent species of algae.
This is the legacy left by coal mining from over a century ago, and one of many such examples of acid mine drainage (AMD) in Western Maryland.
The Hoffman drainage tunnel was built in the early 1900's when Consolidated Coal built a shaft to drain the deep mines, pumping the excess into Georges Creek. Back in the 1930's, the water was dangerously acidic, hovering around the pH of strong hydrochloric or sulfuric acid.
Despite the neon orange appearance of the drainage, the waters downstream from Hoffman Braddock Run support a healthy brook trout population. However, this is not the case for most waterways affected by AMD; they often require remediation to halt the movement of contaminants downstream. Hoffman is affected because legislation regulating AMD and coal mining in general were virtually nonexistent when the problem began.
I wanted to take some of the information I've gained while living in the area about AMD and some of the more interesting ways scientists are remediating the damage in recent years. I even had the pleasure of speaking with Geologist Barry Maynard from the University of Cincinnati, who shared some information on creating wetlands to remediate the damage of AMD. It's all a bit Maryland-focused, and I eventually want to get some more information about Georgia and its history with coal and AMD.
Ed has a great review of a recent paper in Nature presenting new research that describes just how extensive the damage done by the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia. The culprit of the outbreak is most likely climate change since sudden drops in temperature common in northern areas like BC have historically been a check on the beetle's population; in recent years, the winters have been less intense and the beetle populations have benefited from the extension.
It immediately reminded me of the extinction-themed AAAS session I attended and blogged about last year, where ecologist Jim Collins described the chytrid fungus outbreak pushing amphibians to the brink of extinction:
Chytrid attacks the kerotin-rich skin of the frog, and since these animals respirate through their skin, advanced cases cause cardiac arrest and death. Chytrid has also been known to disrupt normal behaviors in frogs.
The idea of a pathogen driving its host to extinction seems contradictory; where's the benefit for the pathogen?
There are a few species of Chytrid resistant frogs in these communities that act as a reservoir species for the fungus. In other words, these frogs show no symptoms of infection, but still maintain the ability to spread the disease (a kind of Typhoid Mary). It's easy to see how this might cause a large extinction of frogs from the constant exchange of Chytrid between susceptible and resistant species.
And the whole bit might be caused by climate change, at least on the local level. As the microclimate shifts, certain pathogens seem to spread more effectively (as in the case of avian malaria in Hawaiian birds).
Collins and company were also able to predict the spread of the fungus to the next location south, more or less confirming the climatic/pathogenic threat of extinction.
The Gallup Poll report linked above was hopeful in some respects and disheartening in others. Across the board there have been small increases in public knowledge and concern about global warming and environmental protection, but in certain cases there are just as many still don't see the problems. This particular chart was of interest to me:
What are we most concerned about? The basics: water, soil and air pollution. What puzzles me is the sudden jump in percentage of "Worry only a little/Not at all" as we move from air pollution to loss of rain forests, from 23 to 31 percent, as if those two concerns were not connected. Then even further below is how concerned people are with the extinction of species (37/31/31 percent) versus their more heightened concerns about animals losing habitat (44/33/23 percent). These stats are a bit bizarre when juxtaposed, but perhaps they're not meant to be in the first place.
It really bothers me that, in light of these recent studies showing how climate change and other anthropogenic forces can be so destructive to life, people, in general, can still be relatively unconcerned with or oblivious of losing an entire species.
I think that's why events like Earth Hour and the other back-patting, bullshit green/light-environmentalism/consumerism-in-disguise events from that crowd piss me off. We still have a lot of work to do in educating the public before we start declaring any sort of victories. There's a schism in this movement between those who want to throw money at the problem without changing their lifestyle and those who want to want to change how things are done without the resources to buy our way out of just plain mindfulness. A government that is actually willing to put pressure on industry to change their ways would be novel as well.
We have some big problems on the horizon. The sky isn't falling, New York City isn't under water, but there are hundreds of species of amphibians in danger of disappearing from the planet because of us. There are plagues of insects wreaking havoc on our forests because of us, and we're looking down the barrel of four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. How's that hybrid SUV treating you now?
I don't like scare tactics and I don't like the guilt and shame game that's played by some environmentalists. But I frequently wonder how much longer can we live the way we do without major, widespread changes to the way we conduct ourselves in business and at home.
Jeremy Bruno is a tech writer who blogs about ecology, evolution, conservation and culture at The Voltage Gate. Visit the 
