environment
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2007
I've known for some time from the local papers that the site of the old Tollare paper mill is badly polluted. It's only 1.6 km from my home, on the opposite shore of the Lännerstasundet inlet (one of the main historic shipping routes into Lake Mälaren). A couple of years ago, a large area in the water outside the site was fenced off with floating länsar to keep the bottom sediments from moving. Apparently, this was one of those paper mills that used mercury in a big way. They've recently started covering the polluted sediment with geotextile, cement and crushed rock. (Hope no interesting…
voltagegate | December 24, 2007To put it mildly, the cards are stacked against the blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay area. In the past 60 years, the human population of the area has jumped from 3.7 million to almost 18 million and, subsequently, farming and industry has exploded (it is often joked that everyone on the eastern shore of Maryland is a chicken farmer), leading to waterways filled with ferrous compounds, nitrates and phosphates.
Essentially, the Chesapeake has become a sink for these pollutants running through 141 streams and five rivers from six states--New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland,…
pharyngula | December 23, 2007At least somebody tried to meet the green gingerbread house challenge—Janet and the sprogs built one, although they cheated a little bit.
Everyone else has until 31 December to send in entries!
grrlscientist | December 23, 2007tags: ice storm 2007, ice fingers, photography, nature, Image of the Day
I am running a series of images that my friend and long-time reader, Dave Rintoul, took in the aftermath of the recent ice storm that gripped the midwest of the United States. This series began on 20 December and the last image in this series will appear on 24 December.
Icy Fingers (Ice Storm, December 2007)
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]
clock | December 22, 2007
Is there any kid who does not love giraffes? They are just so amazing: tall, leggy, fast and graceful, with prehensile tongues and a need to go through complex calistehnics in order to drink. The favourites at zoos, in natural history museums and on TV nature shows.
Giraffes were also important players in the history of evolutionary thought and I bet you have all seen, and heard the criticisms of, the iconic comparison between Lamarck's and Darwin's notions of evolution using a comic strip featuring giraffes and how they got their long necks.
Giraffes sleep very little and mostly standing…
grrlscientist | December 22, 2007tags: ice storm 2007, curly twig in ice, photography, nature, Image of the Day
I am running a series of images that my friend and long-time reader, Dave Rintoul, took in the aftermath of the recent ice storm that gripped the midwest of the United States. This series began yesterday and the last image in this series will appear on 24 December.
Curly Twig in Ice (Ice Storm, December 2007)
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]
grrlscientist | December 21, 2007tags: seedhead on ice, plants, photography, nature, Image of the Day
Beginning today, I am running a series of images that my friend and long-time reader, Dave Rintoul, took in the aftermath of the recent ice storm that gripped the midwest of the United States. The last image in this series will appear on 24 December.
Ice on Branch (detail)
(Ice Storm, December 2007)
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]
revere | December 20, 2007One of the enduring mysteries is what causes traffic jams. Sometimes it's obvious -- sort of. I remember having to make a daily trip from New York to Bellevue Hospitals in New York down FDR Drive. At one spot the three southbound lanes suddenly widened into five lanes because of some construction and then, after about 100 yards, narrowed again to three lanes. If you didn't know better you'd think the extra capacity of the roadway wouldn't be a problem but in your mind's eye you can see exactly what happened. All those cars that filled up the extra space had to reconverge to three lanes. The…
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is:
...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.
This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…
clock | December 18, 2007The League of Conservation Voters has issued a comparison of all the Presidential candidates of both parties on the topic of conservation and global warming. Look at the Chart and watch the Video. Then decide.
gregladen | December 17, 2007A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.
3,000 experts, including several renown US scientists, jointly won the award with former US vice president Al Gore for their work to raise awareness about the disastrous consequences of global warming.
In mid-November the IPCC adopted a landmark report stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."
Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007The first part of this video bugged me — it sounded like Pascal's Wager for global warming warriors — but hang in there. He admits that treating the alternatives as equal in probability is bogus, and what you need to do is rational risk assessment, and it makes a lot more sense.
voltagegate | December 17, 2007
There's been a big windfarm project in the works for Shaffer Mountain in PA, which has met with some of the strongest resistance in the area, including an entire resistance organized by a gentleman named Jack Buchan, a resident of the area. From what I've seen, Buchan and other members of Sensible Wind Solutions, a local group, has been a constant thorn in Gamesa's side, publishing giant full page ads opposing the project in local newspapers (more or less like this).
The latest transgression is a supposed suppression of data obtained by Gamesa on the land designated for development. Two…
gregladen | December 17, 2007The Cost of twenty years of Reagan and Bushes has been very high. In about 1991, I wrote an article for a monthly newspaper in which I summarized the available data for Global Warming, and was very easily able to conclude that it was a real phenomenon with consequences already felt in a number of areas, a reasonably well understood mechanism, and a tangible set of solutions to work on. In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was signed on to by a number of nations (the US not included because of congressional Republican opposition). This month, in Bali, a re-run of something like Kyoto happened, and…
gregladen | December 15, 2007
Planet Hazard produces Google Maps with major polluters. This allows you to look up your own location if you are in the US, by county, state, etc., and to access the data in various ways.
Learn about the unknown hazards around you - the toxins you may be breathing. PlanetHazard uses information from the EPA to map over 86,000 companies throughout the United States that emit hazardous air pollutants.
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
pharyngula | December 13, 2007My university is making a big push for the environment, with an environmental studies curriculum being added, an ongoing effort for energy independence with wind and biomass power, and conservation in the construction of a new green dorm, so this holiday project for everyone is particularly appropriate: apply sustainable building design practices to a gingerbread house. Get to work, you've got until 31 December to submit photos.
I'm thinking we need to take all that sugar and convert it to alcohol…
pharyngula | December 13, 2007IRONY OVERLOAD! The pope opened his mouth again.
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.
You've got to wonder — does the pope think this is a good general rule, that we should use evidence rather than ideology to guide our lives, or is he only going to apply it selectively? There's also a subtle double-irony here, because global warming is an evidence-driven conclusion (there is no ideology that thinks major climate change is desirable),…
voltagegate | December 12, 2007This week I did a little search for Lycaon, one of the many suggestions given to me in the comments of the introductory post. This one came from Brian from Laelaps, who had a brief affair with World of Warcraft that his computer did not particularly like.
Lycaon is a popular name. There are 77 toons named Lycaon on the North American servers, and another 51 in Europe. From the European server Doomhammer, we have a troll hunter named Lycaon who seems to have recently hit level 70 (grats!).
IRL, Lycaon is the genus name of Lycaon pictus, the African wild dog, the beautifully mottled pack…