environment
voltagegate | March 28, 2008Okay, not really.
But Jen did just get back from a hiking trip in Utah and has some fantastic photos, including examples of rock art, which she promises to write about in the near future.
I'm holding you to that Jen.
voltagegate | March 27, 2008
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield.
Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution.
"Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees."
British…
gregladen | March 26, 2008Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical.
The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is here.
Let us begin right away with the Artichokes. Seeds Aside has a piece on the relationship between the artichoke and the cardoon, both known in ADL (ancient dead language) as Cynara cardunculus. The phyloge relatinship between the two, and the story of domestication for each, is very…
edyong | March 25, 2008We've all seen the images of receding glaciers and stranded polar bears that accompany talks of climate change. But rising carbon dioxide levels also have subtler and less familiar effects, and may prove to be a boon for many animal groups. Plant-eating insects, for example, have much to gain in a high -CO2 future as rising concentrations of the gas can compromise the defences of the plants they feed on.
Plants and herbivorous insects are engaged in a silent war that we are rarely privy too, where chemicals act as both weapons and messengers. Munching mandibles trigger the production of…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dog walking, wild birds, ground-nesting birds, conservation, peer-reviewed research
Dog walking in natural areas harms wild birds, according to recently published research.
Millions of people walk their dogs every day, and many of them enjoy walking their dogs in natural areas where birds and other wild animals live. Unfortunately, a scientific paper was recently published showing that the presence of dogs, even when they are on a leash in these natural areas, seriously interferes with wild birds' reproductive success and even scares many of them away.
This…
gregladen | March 19, 2008During Earth Hour, you switch off the lights and other non-essential electronic devices. At 8:00 PM March 29th. You'll save electricity, but more importantly, you'll be making a point.
Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.
This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm March 29, 2008 millions of people in some of the world's major capital cities,…
clock | March 17, 2008The wilding of the American West is definitely a controversial idea. Josh Donlan provides links to the details of the proposal and asks the readers to do a quick poll about it - go do it!
revere | March 12, 2008Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water. Some of it is pretty deep (at least by human standards). Above us is the atmosphere. It goes up. Way, way up. So if we were to make a sphere with just the earth's water and another one with the atmosphere at standard temperature and pressure (STP), how big would be spheres be? The answer seems to have surprised some people (see the comments at this link). But it shouldn't have. Volume goes up with the cube of the radius of a sphere while the surface increases by the square of the radius. This means that for larger spheres, the surface to…
gregladen | March 12, 2008
The pending federal decision about whether to protect the polar bear as a threatened species is as much about climate science as it is about climate change.
The US Fish and Wildlife service is contemplating the listing of the obviusly endangered polar bear as a threatened species. Well, duh...
The problem for them (the US Federal Government, which has been converted over the last 7 years into a right wing think tank) is that the main threat to the polar bear is global warming, and there are still plenty of individuals in charge of the US that want to deny global warming.
But, with…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Environmental Issues
The most recent edition of A Carnival of Environmental Issues is now available for you to enjoy. This is a new blog carnival for me. As its name suggests, it focuses on environmental issues. It is quite large, too, so go there and be prepared to learn more about how to live lightly on our planet.
revere | March 6, 2008We don't especially like being anonymous on this blog but we feel it is prudent given the retributive nature of this administration. We don't care that much ourselves as we are pretty well established. But we worry that our students, our colleagues and our institution will become collateral damage in retribution for things we say here. It's not just that we read about this stuff in the news. We know the people involved personally. Last week we posted about Deb Rice, a scientist in the State of Maine health department who is also one of the world authorities on the health effects of the…
gregladen | March 5, 2008This, obviously, is the removal of an entire mountain to get at the coal, to ship to a power plant near you so that you can get electrictiy. There is a movement to reduce the amount of mountaintop removal mining, and you can get the details here at Bootstrap Analysis.
You will also find a number of links to other discussions on the topic, as well as a handy widget to help you decide just how badly you should feel about this.
I was a little surprised to find out how much coal from Virginia powered us here in Minnesota. I see the coal trains coming down from Canada in large numbers, so I…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2008'Minimalist' conservative and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts apparently believes that one's obligation to pay monetary damages after damaging the environment should be, well, minimal:
...the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on how much money ExxonMobil should be forced to pay as damages for its Exxon Valdez oil spill 19 years ago. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank notes that Chief Justice John Roberts appeared "bothered" that Exxon might have to pay for its destruction:
What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion -- roughly three weeks' worth…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008How do you track the relative contributions of a plant species in an ecosystem? When you are talking about thousands of square miles of land area this can be an incredibly daunting task, but it is very important because it provides important information related to invasive species that may be displacing their native counterparts in an ecosystem.
I remember in a biology course a Stanford we were shown how you perform experiments like this using trees in a nearby nature reserve. In order to a get a sense of the geographic distribution of different types of tree, we would walk around the park…
gregladen | March 5, 2008I only heard this term recently, as one of my students is beginning a research project on the topic. The idea, of course, is that the more food you eat from local sources, the better your impact, or lack there of, on the environment. (Well, I had heard of this concept before, but not that particular term.)
"Buying local is like a hippie movement of 2008, but is it really a good use of a college graduate's time," asked food science professor Joe Regenstein. Indeed, is it not "indulgent and hedonistic?" He had just heard Cornell nutrition expert Jennifer Wilkins analyze claims made by "…
clock | March 5, 2008Common-sense environmentalism
I like to consider myself an environmentalist, but I almost never call myself one. Mainly because I really don't want to be associated with a lot of the people who do.
Because environmentalists are usually right about the facts of the issues they attempt to confront: global warming is a reality, the rape of the world's forests is a disaster in the making, corporate pollution is poisoning us, and the extinction of animal species is both an ecological and a human disaster. On the science and on most policy issues, the environmentalists are right.
But on the human…
revere | March 1, 2008Full disclosure: I know the toxicologist who is the subject of this post. Not well. But I know her and I know her work and she is, as the story from the LA Times says, a highly respected scientist. And no shrinking violet, which accounts for the fact that the Bush EPA has dismissed her from an expert panel on brominated flame retardants widely used in consumer products like upholstery and electronic equipment. Your body is also full of them. Well, at least that's true for some 90% of Americans. Maybe you are the one in ten. Back to the one in 300,000,000, the President of this country (for…
edyong | February 29, 2008
The next time you watch a snowfall, just think that among the falling flakes are some that house bacteria at their core.
It's a well known fact that water freezes at 0°C, but it only does so without assistance at -40°C or colder. At higher temperatures, it needs help and relies on microscopic particles to provide a core around which water molecules can clump and crystallise. These particles act as seeds for condensation and they are rather dramatically known as "ice nucleators".
Dust and soot are reasonable ice nucleators but they are completely surpassed by bacteria, which can…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Historical records indicate that 130 years ago, the white-tailed jack rabbit was abundant in the Yellowstone vicinity. The last confirmed sighting was in 1991. What happened? This apparently remains a mystery, according to Rabbit Expert Joel Berger.
"It could be disease, extreme weather, predation, or other factors," he says. "Since the rabbits blipped off without knowledge, there has simply been no way to get at the underlying cause."
Berger believes the absence of jack rabbits--historically, an important prey species in the ecosystem--may lead coyotes to rely on juvenile elk, pronghorn…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Or is it just that they are more often recognized. Or more sensationally reported. A recent study suggests that "emerging" diseases such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Ebola are more common.
By analyzing 335 incidents of previous disease emergence beginning in 1940, the study has determined that zoonoses - diseases that originate in animals - are the current and most important threat in causing new diseases to emerge. And most of these, including SARS and the Ebola virus, originated in wildlife. Antibiotic drug resistance has been cited as another…