environment
grrlscientist | October 22, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part seven of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 22, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part six of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 21, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part five of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
emjohnson | October 21, 2009In a shocking reversal after denying climate science for decades, a spokesperson for the US Chamber of Commerce (the world's largest business advocacy group) announced yesterday that they have reversed their historical stance on the issue of global climate change.
According to the press release carried by The New York Times, Reuters, CNBC, the Washington Post and FOXNews:
WASHINGTON, D.C.-The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing its weight behind strong climate legislation, a spokesman for Chamber President Tom J. Donahue announced today at the National Press Club.
"We believe that strong…
grrlscientist | October 21, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part four of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 20, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part three of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 19, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part two of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
ejohnson | October 19, 2009As SciWo explained to daughter Minnow last week in a video on Sciencewomen, lakes, ponds, oceans and other natural bodies of water are as ecologically important as they are beautiful. But the ecological health of many is severely compromised due to widespread pollution, global warming, ocean acidification and other factors. GrrlScientist shed light on the origins of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating island of plastic debris covering an area twice that of Texas that has amassed by way of natural currents. She also shared a video that shows cell and molecular biologists how to reduce…
pharyngula | October 19, 2009There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It's concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It's not good for marine life.
One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn't at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part one of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
grrlscientist | October 16, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
Next week, starting Monday, I will show you the entire film because this film is not yet in general circulation.
The critics say:
"An astonishingly wide-ranging film. An informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests." - New York Times
"Lively and engaging...Smartly Done" - Los…
esiegel | October 16, 2009...we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the…
sciencewoman | October 16, 2009This week on SciWo's Storytime, we're reading about Lakes and Ponds in a book by Cassie Mayer, from the same series as an earlier episode about oceans. While the text of this series of books is simple, I'm finding that they are a great way to engage Minnow in a conversation about the topic. Listen to how excited she gets about lakes and boats...
I wanted to take Minnow to a local lake for "No Child Left Inside Day" earlier this Earth Science Week, but instead we played with the neighborhood kids and dug in the dirt, which was pretty fun too. In any case, Minnow and I have a long tradition of…
razib | October 15, 2009Owen Lovejoy has some theories which he is using to process the data from the spate of Ardipithecus ramidus papers. When it comes to the argument about social structure based on the anatomy of the extant remains I'm skeptical. I just recorded a diavlog with John Hawks which is 2/3 devoted to Ardi-issues (should be up Saturday), and he pointed out that Lovejoy has been laying out the case for a monogamous social structure for early hominins for years. This is why I'm not that surprised that some of the numbers he cites from the literature are off. He's probably quoting older values, and hasn't…
esiegel | October 15, 2009
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. --Peter Pan
Much like any new venture where the outcome is uncertain, there are a lot of fears surrounding the LHC. And I know, because it occasionally shows up in my comment threads, in my inbox, or in my office.
Could it form a black hole and destroy Earth? Could we somehow do something in the future that would destroy the past? Or is it just generally unsafe?
The answers to these questions are no, no, and no. The first question -- about creating a black hole and destroying Earth -- requires that we apply the laws of…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2009tags: North Pacific Gyre, plastics, pollution, Pacific Ocean, streaming video
The center of the North Pacific Gyre is a relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes). The circular rotation around it draws waste material in and has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These…
j7uy5 | October 13, 2009National Geographic reports on a new consequence of global climate
change: giant, mucus-like sea blobs. They've been around for a
while, actually, but now there are more of them.
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This is from the on-line article,
href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html">Giant,
Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger. The danger
comes from the fact that these blobs harbor bacteria:
The study team discovered that the blobs are hot spots for
viruses and bacteria, including the deadly E. coli. Coastal communities…
khannula | October 12, 2009It's ! It's also the week before the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I'm going to be spending this week running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything graded, an exam written, a post written about my talk (Tuesday afternoon), and my student's poster printed. (He's graduated and currently fighting forest fires, and he put the draft poster together by himself, so I guess I can wrestle with the dreaded plotter.) So I'm probably not going to try to help you understand climate myself. However, I can be a cheerleader for this week's events!
Tuesday…
grrlscientist | October 11, 2009tags: garbage patch, Pacific Ocean, environment, science, Scripps Institute, streaming video
Scripps scientist Miriam Goldstein talks about the SEAPLEX expedition to the North Pacific Gyre and how shocked she was to find the amount of plastic on the ocean's surface when floating around in a skiff.