bcohen | April 5, 2007This is an article from the Christian Science Monitor: "What's happening to the bees?: Suddenly, the bees farmers and growers rely on are vanishing. Researchers are scrambling to find out why." Worth a read.
Here's why we might care:
While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops - from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons - rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study.
Here's why it's happening:
For many entomologists, the bee…
bcohen | April 4, 2007So, like most of us, I'm reading over back issues of The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and I stumble upon an article I'd dog-eared some time back. It's an "Analysis of Boston Waters," from their April 1846 issue. You know, page 362? The one that has Benjamin Silliman warning against lead poisoning. You know Silliman, leading light of the early years of American science, founded and editor of the American Journal of Science, incorporating member of the National Academy of Science? Yes, that Benjamin Silliman. Well, he's saying "it is the course of safety to avoid, as far as…
worldsfair | April 4, 2007I've talk about Pokemon before (in the context of biodiversity), but here's an interesting bit about how it sideline hundreds of kids, who happened to have watched an episode where the aggressive animation manage to mess with heads.
Here's how it panned out:
Anyway, the short version is that the animation in that particular episode led to somthing called "Photosensitive Epilepsy." The long version (i.e. a pdf of the first page of the scientific publication) can be found today at the SCQ.
If you're really dying to see the offending scene, you can actually check it out here.
worldsfair | April 4, 2007This is more a hat tip to a great article by the New Yorker's Michael Specter. In a recent issue, his piece "The Denialists" was published and it does a great job of providing the exasperating context to what is really a sad state of affairs in countries like South Africa.
Zeblon Gwala is a 50-year-old South African who sells ubhejane, an untested herbal remedy he claims will cure AIDS. On a typical day, as many as 100 people come to his clinic. Ubhejane has been endorsed by South African President Thabo Mbeki's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and by Herbert Vilakazi, the head of…
bcohen | April 3, 2007So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press Service News Agency reports it here.*
A few snippets:
[The] Czech President asked the congressmen not to yield to pressure from environmentalists and abandon the principles of free society: "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants.…
bcohen | April 3, 2007Honestly, I didn't intend to barrage the site with this series of MTR posts, but a lot of news came through in the past few weeks.
One is this New York Times Editorial on Mountaintop removal legal action (I'm also pasting it under the fold). Another is the court case that the editorial refers to (here in full, as an 89 page pdf). This link is a third resource, an Audubon Magazine photo essay. Then we have the postcards I just added earlier today, as a fourth example. Go download them, post them, advertise. Plus, fifth and finally is the post I offered last week about other updates (…
worldsfair | April 3, 2007
Well, despite the political fallacies inherent in drafting such reports, the answer is an unequivocal "hell yes!" But a piece at the SCQ by Sarah Burch (which constitutes the second part of an FAQ about the IPCC reports) is better at telling you why:
Given the deluge of noble mandates and far-reaching policy proposals emanating in ever-increasing numbers from that devious hub of sycophants and climbers that we call Ottawa, we must (being the ever-so-enlightened socio-scientific critics that we are) carefully evaluate the straw that broke dear Stephen's back: that is, the most recent IPCC…
bcohen | April 3, 2007Check these out: "postcards" from Appalachia have been placed as ads on Washington DC Metro. The new ad campaign --from the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC and at this new website, Stop Mountaintop Removal.org) -- takes the issue of visibility as its premise: if we can see/are forced to see the connections our consumption patterns have to the natural environs being consumed, we might re-envision those connections.
Another sample. (The link above has four posters.)
bcohen | April 2, 2007The Michael Pollan interview I did for The Believer is at long last on booksehelves at fine retailers near you. For those not familiar with that publication, it was recently nominated for two National Magazine Awards, was last year nominated for a few, and will next year be nominatd for some. It's run out of San Fransisco, a monthly cultural and literary periodical edited by the writers Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida. Although called "The Believer," it has no religious bent. They've been gracious enough to publish two prior interviews of mine as well (on Darwin, on Sex and…
worldsfair | April 2, 2007Great White*
Tiger*
Hammerhead*
Thresher*
Leopard*
Megamouth*
- - -
Not sure if there are any academic papers that monitor the decline of heavy metal, but there is certainly a wealth of research that examines the decline of shark populations. Thanks mostly to the work of Ransom A. Myers, who sadly passed away last week. Condolences to his family and colleagues.As an aside, I can't help but think that (in keeping with the above list), "Ransom Shark" sounds pretty good as well.
worldsfair | April 2, 2007I dunno. I'm curious what the verdict is and how much of depends on whether the phrase Boots the Monkey means anything to you.
worldsfair | April 2, 2007Last week, I managed to catch one of last year's Massey lectures on the radio. These are basically a high profile lecture series that is sponsored by both the CBC and the House of Anansi Press. In essense, they usually involve a prominent Canadian cogniscenti who attempts to cover a topic pertinent in the realm of citizenship at both the Canadian and, indeed, the global level.
The 2006 series was authored by Margaret Somerville, a noted ethicist out of Montreal, and the byline of the accompanying book reads:
What does it mean to be human today, when mind-altering scientific breakthroughs…
bcohen | March 30, 2007Peter Melchett writes in The Guardian (on-line) that the scientific evidence for organic food's healthier claims is clear and persuasive. (Melchett is "policy director of the Soil Association, a UK organic food and farming organisation.") But will that sway governments to encourage organic over their preferred GMO or pesticide-based ag systems? Probably not.
It's a commentary on the relationship between macro-political influence and agricultural habits. More closely it's a commentary on food and politics, and science and politics, and science and food.
But to say it's just "politics…
bcohen | March 30, 2007Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, writes today in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the lessons and conduct of that pyschological test.
The conclusion of his updated reflections on the good-v-evil pairing:
Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies that enable spurious ends to justify immoral means, lack of surveillance, and other situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters,…
worldsfair | March 30, 2007
Recently, I read an interesting piece on something known as "Darwin's Delay." Briefly, this is a mystery which queried why it took 20 odd years for Darwin to take his theory of evolution from his own private musings in the late 1830's, to its publication as the Origin of Species in 1859.
Essentially, the buzz right now, is that a Darwin historian, Dr. John van Wyhe out of Cambridge, has been making a case that the reason wasn't due to Darwin fearing reaction to his work, but simply because he was,.. well... kinda busy.
Most historians argue that Darwin kept the theory secret because he was…
worldsfair | March 29, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKETKAPOW!!KA-CHING!WHUPAH!BADA-BING!COWABUNGA!KUNG-POW!
(Images from Chemsoc, wiki, and Accelrys)
bcohen | March 29, 2007Grist has been posting many excellent links, discussions, and interviews about Mountaintop Coal Removal in the Appalachians. It's been a while since we added to our MTR posts (one, two, three, four), so allow me to do so now.
photo source: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
First is an article in Blue Ridge Country by Peter Slavin.
Slavin reports on the anti-MTR movement over the past year, with successes in Tennessee, large protests in West Virginia, with sit-ins, congressional action, and with new popular press articles ("Features have appeared in 2006 in Orion (January), National…
bcohen | March 29, 2007Lots of future Nobel Laureates had their groundbreaking work rejected by scientific journals. Juan Miguel Campanario, a Physics Professor in Madrid, writes an article about it called "Rejecting Nobel class articles and resisting Nobel class discoveries." But he can't get it published.
Hmmmm. Do I smell a future Nobel Laureate?
-- -- --
The abstract, for your benefit:
I review and discuss instances in which 27 future Nobel Laureates encountered resistance on part of scientific community towards their discoveries and instances in which 36 future Nobel Laureates encountered resistance on…
worldsfair | March 28, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
GAMES TO BE PLAYED NEXT WEEK (April 2nd to 6th, 2007)