Environment/nature

What we know, Bill speaks: I already knew, from my own modest experience installing and paying for installation of insulation and other energy-saving upgrades in my house, that such work is highly labor-intensive -- and so employs a lot of people per dollar spent. When we had our basement insulated, the material cost was perhaps $400; the total bill over $3000. Some of the difference was in equipment, but that was probably fairly modest. The big cost was clearly in paying two or three guys to make racket spraying goop in our basement for 3 or 4 days. So it stands to figure that a good way…
SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool. Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…
Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days. So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
Science Progress looks at the discouraging feedback loop between climate change and Western wildfires: New research investigating the impact of climate change on western wildfires presents a bleak picture. CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy covers the latest science in an American Progress column this week, explaining the problematic feedback cycle: higher temperatures from global warming increase the risks of wildfires, and increased fires release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: A new paper in the April 24 issue of the journal Science, for example, concludes that scientists have…
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses: In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses. Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…
Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.) Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities. The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project. His book, called Emotional…
"You couldn't make this up: Cameras are being turned on the people paid to watch CCTV streams, to note which bits of surveillance footage they didn't see." via BoingBoing The beauty of sand, close up -- a photo gallery at Discover. Robots as recruitment to science. "If you stick a robot--I don't care if you're talking about grade school kids or high school students--if you put a robot in the middle of the room, there is something captivating about the technology." from Making Robots Personal - an interview with Tandy Trower of Microsoft Robotics. I find this particularly relevant as my 7-y.…
Kew Gardens (that is, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) is trying to collect and bank the seeds and pollen from 10% of the world's plants -- a nice 21st-century continuation of the stunning collecting effort that started in the 1700s and helped supply evidence, via Joseph Dalton Hooker, that proved crucial to Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. The Guardian has put up a nice photo gallery of some of the seeds they've collected so far. A few: Seed of wild spider flower (or spider wisp) Photo: Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley Himalayan iris pollen. Photo: Rob Kesseler…
Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as the food's quality -- especially if the food is good. His food awards are greatly coveted among chefs, food writers, and others who care about food. So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at…
Were the makers of that sheepherding-art video I put in an earlier post (and further below in this post as well) pulling the wool over our eyes? Can you really get sheep to do that stuff? My sister Ann, who sent me the link to start with and who has spent some time training sheepdogs and watched others do so, says Yes: I think they're being true to "extreme sheepherding". Watch the tiny dots in the Pong game and you'll get a good idea; the tiny dots are the sheepdogs. The walking sheep is speeded up, but yes, it's great sheepdogs and great shepherds, hence the "extreme sheepherding". From…
I've been harping on this for years: To live easy on the earth, live densely -- which is to say, in densely built neighborhoods. This Times Economix column describes a study showing just that. Other studies have shown living more densely creates richer social lives and stronger communities. Yet we continue to spread out willy-nilly. I see this to my dismay here in Vermont, where I live, in Montpelier -- the country's smallest state capital, and the only one without a McDonald's -- in a neighborhood of single- and multi-family houses so densely built that today you couldn't build it here,…
From Cratylus, an intriguing visualization of worldwide air traffic, with notes on carbon impact: This simulation shows the world-wide air traffic over a 24-hour period. Watch as day dawns across the globe: The hubbub of activity created each morning in the skies gradually tapers off in the dead of night, only to come roiling back the following morning. According to NATCA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association: "On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States ... and in one year, [U.S.] controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and…
A European nightcrawler, ready to make trouble Eartthworms, it seems, are the new decimator, at least in Midwestern hardwood forests . Scientific American has the story: Long considered a gardener's friend, earthworms can loosen and aerate the soil. But the story is different in the Great Lakes region. The last Ice Age wiped out native earthworms 10,000 years ago, and ever since the Northeast forest has evolved without the crawlers, Hale says. But now earthworms are back, a product of fishers who toss their worms into the forest, of off-road vehicles and lumber trucks that carry them in the…
Ezra Klein reviews Obama's handling of yesterday's health summit -- a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform. Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family's grueling wrestling match with the health-insurance industry. A timely story -- no pun intended -- as it makes painfully clear that it's not just the 46 million people uninsured (did I just say "just" 46 million people) who fare poorly in the current system. Genetic Future looks at how a Victorian-era height-prediction system…
Despite the rain on my window, it's a fine day indeed, with many wonderful celebrations of Darwin's 200th ringing throughout the blogoshere. Most of these, naturally, focus on Darwin's theory of evolution and its many implications and reverberations. I much admire that theory. But what I find most fascinating about Darwin is not his theory of evolution but his method of empiricism. For as vital as was Darwin's theory of evolution was, his impact on how we view ourselves is rivaled by his impact on how we view and do science. This and many other perverse oddities struck me when I was…
Rolling deadlines have kept me from the blogging desk, but I can occupy it long enough now to call out a few items that either haven't received as much coverage as they might have -- or that have gotten several interesting hits. ⢠At Huffpost, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee offer the FDA a three-step program: Step One: Admit that you are currently powerless over the industry you are supposed to be regulating. You have let Big Pharma take over your life. You have become dependent on drug company money that comes from the Prescription Drug Fee User Act (PDUFA) of 1992, and over the…
William J. Broad's Times piece on the new National Geographic "Ocean - An Illustrated Atlas gives a nice look at both the book -- and gives long-overdue and well-deserved attention to oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who co-authored the Atlas. . Earle's passion extends to the far horizon. In the atlas, she reports that some 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence in their life strategies and that the eerie glows may turn out to constitute the planet's most common form of communication.
Walking Firenze Leon Krier, from "The City Within the City".: THE QUARTERS. A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be A CITY WITHIN A CITY. The quarter must integrate all daily functions of urban life (dwelling, working, leisure) within a territory dimensioned on the basis of the comfort of a walking person; not exceeding 35 hectares (80 acres) in surface…
Atop other Obama appointments, this is one I suspect America's scientists will welcome. From the Washington Post: Report: Holdren to Lead White House Science Policy By Joel Achenbach President-elect Obama will announce this weekend that he has selected physicist John Holdren, who has devoted much of his career to energy and environmental research, as his White House science adviser, according to a published report today. The Obama transition office would not confirm Holdren's selection. Last night, asked by The Post to comment on the science adviser search, Holdren responded by e-mail that…
A teacher in West Virginia rallied her students to fight to keep the right to recycle -- presumably for the civic (and eco) learning experience. John Tierney argues she's missing a better teaching opportunity: If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors? That’s the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop…