Australia
gregladen | August 15, 2017SolarReserve will build, for the South Australia government, a solar thermal plant rated at 150 MW, which is about 25 MW more than that government uses currently. Over time, assuming Australia goes all on clean and green, the amount of electricity used by South Australia will increase substantially, but for now, this plant will provide the extra to the regional grid.
A solar plant is a way of making the use of solar more full time. Instead of just producing electricity by sunlight, perhaps storing some in batteries, it uses sunlight to produce heat, which is then used to run a turbine all…
dr. dolittle | January 17, 2017 Photo of one of Leonie's hatchlings from Tourism and Events Queensland.
The story begins in 1999 when Leonie, a zebra shark (aka a leopard shark in Australia), was captured from the wild. In 2006 she was transferred to Reef HQ Aquarium in Queensland, Australia where she met her mate. By 2008, she had started laying eggs and the pair had multiple litters of offspring through sexual reproduction. After her mate was removed from the tank to prevent further breeding, she has shared the tank with one of her offspring, a female named Lolly who, since reaching sexual maturity herself, has never…
gregladen | August 11, 2016When the sea levels rose following the last major glaciation, most rapidly between around 18,000 and 10,000 years ago, somewhat less rapidly until about 6,000 years ago, a lot of interesting things happened.
I used to live, and do archaeology in, New England (the one in the US). It was always fun to contemplate George's Bank. George's Bank is a high place out in the ocean, not far from Boston. If you've ever been whale watching off P-town, you were probably out on George's Bank, where the baleen whales forage and frolic, and are easily found during the right season. This is also a great…
gregladen | April 20, 2016Corals are ocean-dwelling invertebrates in the same phylum as jellyfish. Corals are tiny and create an exoskeleton that is fixed to something hard, like the remains of previously existing corals. So these organisms build up a geological stratum, a reef, beneath the surface of the sea, often close enough that parts of the reef are exposed at the lowest water level. The coral reef system is the substrate for one of the Earth's major ecological zones.
Corals are symbiotic with a single celled dinoflagellate, a kind of algae that combines available nutrients such as ammonia and the…
oracknows | January 20, 2016One of the cool things about being a longtime blogger in the skeptical world with a reasonably high profile is that I've met, either virtually or in person at various skeptic conferences, a wide variety of people from all over the world. One place in particular that has a vibrant skeptic movement is, of course, Australia, and I've been happy to meet skeptics such as Rachael Dunlop, Jo Benhamu, Richard Saunders, Eren Segev, and several others. I know that, whenever I finally manage to make that trip to Australia that I've been meaning to make for years, there will be people I know to meet up…
gregladen | September 21, 2015Every now and then an animal shows up where it is unexpected. Why just the other day a black bear had to be coaxed out of a tree down by the middle school, a couple of blocks form here. Even though our marshes, woodlands, and small patches of prairie house cougars, coyotes, deer, and all the smaller critters, both bears and wolves are not at present endemic to the Twin Cities suburbs.
When the unexpected appearance of a wild animal happens, there are usually one three factors at play. A migratory animal (typically a bird) is a bit off course, or lands where it normally flies over. The…
pgleick | June 10, 2015It’s only natural that during a crisis we look to single, “silver bullet” technical solutions, after all, they are supposed to be effective against werewolves, witches, and other monsters. For monsters like the ongoing severe California drought, the current favorite silver bullet is seawater desalination. And why not? California sits at the edge of the largest body of salt water in the world – the Pacific Ocean – and taking salt out of water is a successful, commercial, well-understood technology.
Look at how Israel has solved their water problems by building desalination plants, we’re told…
gregladen | May 14, 2015Bjorn Lomborg has written an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the decision of the University of Western Australia (UWA) to nix previously developed plans to accept a $4 million dollar payment from the conservative Australian government, to be matched by university money, to implement a version of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Institute there, to be known as Australia Consensus.
See: Bjorn Lomborg Is Wrong About Bangladesh And Sea Level Rise
See: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong
See: Are electric cars any good? Lomborg says no, but he’s wrong.
Lomborg’s scholarship in the area of…
dr. dolittle | February 27, 2015I really never thought of spiders as being "pretty" until I came across these two new species of peacock spiders discovered in southeast Queensland, Australia by Madeline Girard (graduate student from the University of California, Berkeley, who is specializing in peacock spiders). Peacock spiders are not only beautiful, they also engage in elaborate dances during courtship.
According to a quote from Jürgen Otto (posted in Live Science), who was a co-author in the study, Skeletorus "looks dramatically different [from] all other peacock spiders known to date, making me think that this group is…
oracknows | February 27, 2015Two months ago, I took note of a somewhat cryptic blog post by a young woman named Jess Ainscough. In Australia and much of the world, Ainscough was known as the Wellness Warrior. She was a young woman who developed an epithelioid sarcoma in 2008 and ended up choosing "natural healing" to treat her cancer. Among the "natural healing" modalities touted by the Wellness Warrior included that quackery of quackeries, the Gerson protocol, complete with coffee enemas and everything. She even did videos explaining how to administer coffee enemas and posted them on YouTube, although that video is now…
pgleick | January 19, 2015By Peter Gleick (Pacific Institute) and Carl Ganter (Circle of Blue)
1. The California Drought Becomes an Emergency
California’s multi-year drought grew dire enough in 2014 to prompt Governor Jerry Brown to declare a drought emergency in January. By the end of the year, California had experienced the driest and hottest 36 months in its 119-year instrumental record. Some researchers described the drought as 1) the worst in over 1200 years and 2) evidence of rising temperatures globally as climate changes accelerate. As of mid-January, the drought is continuing.
As the California and western…
pgleick | November 19, 2014Guest Post: Matthew Heberger Pacific Institute, Oakland, California
New monthly water use data for California water utilities shows that residential water use varies widely around the state, and that the response to the drought has been uneven. Moreover, in some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day, indicating that we could be doing much more to save water.
In July, the State Water Resources Control Board, or the Water Board, issued an emergency regulation to increase water conservation in urban areas. The new regulations prohibit certain water uses, like…
dr. dolittle | October 9, 2013 Photo credit: Margaret C. Hardy
Drs. Glenn King and Maggie Hardy at the Institute of Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Australia have discovered a small protein, aptly named orally active insecticidal peptide-1 (OAIP-1), in the venom of Australian tarantulas (Selenotypus plumipes) that can kill prey when ingested orally. According to the study, OAIP-1 is fast acting and more potent than commercial pyrethroid insecticides and is very effective at killing the agricultural pest, cotton bollworm. The authors suggest that OAIP-1 may therefore be useful as a bioinsecticide. The…
oracknows | May 23, 2013I've never been able to figure it out. Antivaccine zealots seem to have an intense love of Nazi analogies and comparing those supporting science-based medicine to Nazis. While from a strictly nasty point of view, I can sort of understand the utility of such analogies to demonize one's opponents. After all, to political extremists of nearly all stripes (excluding actual real neo-Nazis, of course) Adolf Hitler is the gift that keeps on giving. Antiwar activists liked to try to tar George W. Bush with the Hitler appellation, and, now that Barack Obama is in power, right wing Tea Party types have…
milhayser | April 25, 2013On ERV, Abbie Smith reports on the phenomenal success of the HPV vaccine in Australia. The vaccine, designed to protect against several types of sexually-transmitted papillomavirus, was first administered to Aussie girls in 2007. Since then, total prevalence of the virus among young women has dropped from 11.5% to less than 1%—and to 0% among girls who actually got the vaccine. These girls are also protecting their partners and reducing overall circulation of HPV; infections among young men, who were not even vaccinated, dropped from 12.1 to 2.2 percent. Abbie calls this a "blatant,…
gregladen | January 8, 2013First, a word about the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's position on climate change, heat, and fires. It has been suggested (by a commenter here) that the BoM is claiming that the current heat wave is not related to climate change, but rather, a matter of natural variability and a late arriving monsoon. But that is not true. The BoM has a different take on the current situation. From Ben Cubby, an Australian journalist:
The heatwave that has scorched the nation since Christmas is a taste of things to come, with this week’s records set to tumble again and again in the coming years, climate…
gregladen | January 7, 2013Australia is experiencing a heat spell. The Climate Information Services of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has issued a special statement (I'll provide some details below). This is not unexpected, since over the last few years global warming due to the human release of large amounts of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere has been heating everything up. In fact, a paper that came out mid (southern) winter 2008 predicted that by the end of the century, extreme high temperatures in Australia would reach 50 degrees or more. I'll provide some data for that too. But first, since most of…
gregladen | January 7, 2013Summer is coming on strong south of the Equator, and in Australia this has meant unprecedented record high temperatures, and in the state of Tasmania, severe brush fires that have destroyed numerous homes, adding to the bad news from fires in the southeastern mainland. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said "And while you would not put any one event down to climate change ... we do know that over time as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events." That is not exactly true, of course. There are no climate related events that lack the fingerprint of global climate…
sciencepunk | July 28, 2011In the early hours of a Wednesday morning two weeks ago, three Greenpeace activists made their way past the perimeter fence at Ginninderra Experiment Station in Canberra, Australia, and destroyed a crop of GM wheat using weed strimmers. A spokeswoman for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the national science agency which runs the station, said the damage was estimated to run A$300,000. In a statement released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, activist Laura Kelly stated that "We had no choice but to take action to bring an end to this experiment".
Both…
dblum | June 23, 2010The name Phar Lap comes from an Asian word for lightning; a sky flash. A passing dazzle of light, a spark in the night.
And so he was, the big copper racehorse, born in New Zealand, trained in Australia, whose dazzling speed made him one of those unexpected beacons of hope during the Great Depression and who, according to a report published in an international chemistry journal in April, was killed by a massive dose of arsenic.
Of course, no one who follows race horse history could be entirely surprised by that finding. For one thing, it built on preliminary results from 2006. But from the…