environment
esiegel | May 2, 2010Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin
Every weekend, I try to bring something light to you, but there's a lot of heavy stuff going on in the world right now. So instead of the usual, I'd like to tell you just a little bit about why putting even a little bit of oil in the oceans can be so disastrous.
And I can't think of a better modern voice to take us through that than Regina Spektor, whose voice reminds me of greats such as Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. Take a listen to her song Apres Moi.
Apres Moi by Regina Spektor
Most of you know that…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
mikethemadbiologist | May 1, 2010
(from here)
Obama's kinder, gentler "Drill, baby, drill" is looking very short-sighted. We can only hope he has learned that when you use your party loyalists as foils and adopt a center-right compromise, so that you can claim to have boldly discarded the "the tired debates between right and left", that there is a potential pitfall: your party loyalists might actually be correct on the merits. Consider oil drilling (italics mine):
UPDATE via the Wonk Room: Repeating a GOP/Oil industry sounding talking point, earlier this month the President said:
It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs…
clock | April 25, 2010Maggie Koerth-Baker, who I finally met in person at AAAS meeting, just designed an amazing feature on BoingBoing - the Antarctica:
It's about the Antarctic Geospatial Information Center, a group of researchers based at the University of Minnesota who do the information processing and visualization that makes other research on the Frozen Continent possible. The story features some great details about life in Antarctica and tons of photos taken by the AGIC crew.
Quick fun fact: Do you know how researchers use satellite images to find packs of penguins? Turns out, they look for huge smears of…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
jgoldman | April 24, 2010Earlier this week we talked about how to use whale snot for science.
I especially enjoyed blog bff Scicurious's take on the study:
Budgetary requirement: $5000 for series of expensive remote control helicopters.
Source: Toys R Us.
Justification: Need something that can fly close to a whale and collect snot for measurement. Also, this is the only kind that comes in red, and the gunmetal grey ones suck.
This day, however, we will travel farther, er, south. Through the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach, detour through the intestines, take a left at the sphincter, but, what, what's…
esiegel | April 22, 2010Note: This article first appeared here on Scienceblogs one year ago today.
There are many ways to celebrate Earth Day, from sustainability efforts to simply appreciating nature.
And while this is a beautiful shot of Forest Park right here in Portland, it doesn't compare -- in my eyes -- to the perfection of Earth as seen from so far away.
In October of 1946, a V-2 missile was launched from New Mexico, straight up into the air. And at its maximum height of 65 miles (just barely into what was then considered outer space), it snapped the first photographs of the Earth from Space. (And you can…
elerner | April 22, 2010Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, an environmental "teach-in" first promoted by Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. The environment of Nelson's day was a little different than the one we now possess, not only in terms of an extra four decades of pollution, but in the attitudes and information the general public had about conservation. Whereas that public was first starting to consider conservation in their everyday lives, spurred by the first images of Earth from space, our current understanding of the seriousness of the problems we face threatens information overload. For…
cagapakis | April 22, 2010Many people in synthetic biology, including myself and much of my lab, are working on using biology to make things more efficiently, renewably, and sustainably. Being able to make plastic replacing biomaterials, chemicals, medicines, and fuels in living cells from renewable resources (especially in photosynthetic organisms that need only sunlight and water) will undoubtedly decrease our dependence on fossil fuels and with a lot of work in policy and process and infrastructure engineering may one day become truly sustainable. It's difficult to not notice, however, how unsustainable most…
jstemwedel | April 22, 2010First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk's excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I'd share Sharon's grumpiness.
After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse.
That said, I'm going to take this Earth Day as an…
jgoldman | April 22, 2010Happy Earth Day, everyone!
In honor of the day, here's a modified re-post of piece I wrote recently for LAist.
Figure 1: Photo by poloroid-girl via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr.
The great philosopher Kermit the Frog once said, "It's not that easy being green." Maybe he was on to something.
You can't walk three steps down an aisle in any store without running into eco-friendly or "green" products. You probably have many of these products. Is your refrigerator or dishwasher Energy-star compliant? Do you have a paperless Kindle? Maybe bamboo guest towels in the bathroom? A Prius?
Why do you…
cwilcox | April 21, 2010A little over forty years ago, Cleveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire. It wasn't the first time the polluted waters had gone ablaze - indeed, since 1868, the river had lit up at least thirteen times. At the time, the excessive pollution of our nation's waterways was the "price of optimism," the inevitable cost of life in an increasingly urban world.
The fire that burned on June 22, 1969 had a different meaning for many others. To them, it was the Earth's cry for help. In a blaze of glory, Mother Nature was calling out to her children to do something to save her before it was too late.…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued ...
In the US, political parties have what is called a "platform" which is a list of assertions ... "we want this" and "we want that" sort of assertions. The "platform" is made up, quaintly, of "planks" with each plank being about one issue. Like for my local Democratic Farm Labor party unit, one of our Planks is to get the damn road fixed over at Devil's Triangle, a particularly bad intersection down on Route 169. That's a local plank, but if we go to a party event, and a gubernatorial candidate is answering questions, she or he is expected to know what the heck is being…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued
The flames were so hot that we could feel it on our faces over 300 feet away as we stood near the corner of Delaware and Whitehall avenues. At first we gawked at the burning factory from about 100 feet away, but a large explosion caused us all to turn and run. But not too far. While watching from some 200 feet away, the police came by and pushed us back to the 300 foot mark just before several explosions in a row came along. The stuff that came down on us out of the sky was cooled enough to not burn, and some of the bits were recognizable as small fragments of colored…
gregladen | April 21, 2010The first Earth Day was a red letter day in the long, hard struggle to make being good to the environment ... to the Earth ... normal instead of a fringe idea held only by quirky college professors and stoned-out hippies. This year, the first significant health care insurance reform bill was passed and it will be a red letter event in a long, hard struggle to make universal quality heath coverage and care normal instead a fringe idea held only by Kenyan born socialist Negros from Chicago. Or whatever the teabaggers are calling it now. So today, at the beginning of a true change in how we do…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2010tags: Sonnenuntergang, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, sunset, photography
Sonnenuntergang.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: Bob O'Hara, 20 April 2010 [larger view]
Sunset over Frankfurt, as photographed from the bedroom window. This sunset was influenced by the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. The light gold above the sun is a real cloud, but the darker haze surrounding the sun is the ash cloud. This ash cloud made the sun look fuzzy and at times, almost completely obscured it.
Today, the sky cleared for a few hours and everything seemed normal once more, but in the…
clock | April 20, 2010We bought a couple of these recently and use them for all our grocery shopping. They are environmentally friendly, strong chico bags, tiny when wrapped up (and easy to wrap up) and large when opened up:
Conflict of Interest: this is Bride of Coturnix's store (look around for other items). Every item sold puts money in our joint account. Which is good for me as I am owing tons in taxes.....
grrlscientist | April 20, 2010tags: Every Pollen Grain has a Story, pollen, microscopy, forensics, pollen signature, pollen fingerprint, science, Bosnian war crimes, pollinology, Jonathan Drori, TEDTalks, streaming video
Pollen goes unnoticed by most of us, except when hay fever strikes. But microscopes reveal it comes in stunning colors and shapes -- and travels remarkably well. Jonathan Drori gives an up-close glimpse of these fascinating flecks of plant courtship.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of…
revere | April 20, 2010The Icelandic volcanic eruption is still causing havoc in Europe with ripple effects elsewhere as people and planes are grounded for travel in or out of much of northern Europe. Pressure from the traveling public, air carriers and business is mounting to let passenger and cargo planes fly again. What's changed? Not much. There's about as much uncertainty as there was a week ago, just a lot more pushback. The recriminations are already starting: EU and national transport authorities "over reacted." They should have ... done what? At the same time airlines like Air France-KLM are conducting…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: Sonnenuntergang, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, sunset, photography
Sonnenuntergang.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: Bob O'Hara, 19 April 2010 [larger view]
Sunset over Frankfurt, as photographed from the bedroom window. This sunset was influenced by the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. The clouds that you see are fluffy and a light gold color, the ash cloud is hazy and dark and (dare I say it?) menacing.
The haze from the Icelandic volcano is much worse today than it has been ever since Eyjafjallajökull first blew. I know that the airlines want to start flying…