Environment

This post goes into that age old category of ‘learn something everyday’.  As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that we must do everything we can to both find alternative sources of energy and slow down the accelerating global warming trend. One of the key ways to accomplish both of these is through technological innovation.   A while ago I read an article in the New York Times that was nothing less than thrilling regarding technology and global warming.  Six years ago the architect Richard Meier designed a church in Rome.  The dominant design element was…

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has become a bane of modern society, may have saved Earth from freezing over early in the planet's history, according to the first detailed laboratory analysis of the world's oldest sedimentary rocks. Scientists have theorized for years that high concentrations of greenhouse gases could have helped Earth avoid global freezing in its youth by allowing the atmosphere to retain more heat than it lost. Now a team from the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder that analyzed ancient rocks from the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in…

How is it that I didn’t hear about this sooner?  It appears that this year Daylight Savings Time is starting earlier, and ending later, than its traditional first-of-April to end-of-October run.  It will begin this year on March 11th, and end on November 4th – a bonus four weeks for no additional cost.   The thing is… no one seems to be aware of this fact!  Chatting with my fellow coffee connoisseurs at Java Nation today (where I went to purchase my first of 4 coffee beverages that I have been allocated for the day per Garth’s whiz-bang formula), no one that I spoke to was…

As humans exert ever-greater influence on the Earth, their preferences will play a substantial role in determining which other species survive. New research shows that, in some cases, those preferences could be governed by factors as subtle as small color highlights a creature displays. In the case of penguins, mostly black-and-white flightless birds that live predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, those most popular with humans appear to be the ones that display markings of warm colors such as red, orange or intense yellow, said David Stokes, a conservation biologist at the University of…

Demand from rich Chinese for Indian tiger pelts and parts used in traditional medicine fuels poaching and may lead to the extinction of the species in the wild, conservationists have warned. Trade of tiger pelts from India into Chinese-ruled Tibet was flourishing despite laws banning the move, a report released in New Delhi by two conservation groups said Wednesday. The Wildlife Protection Agency and Environment Investigation Agency estimate only 1,500 to 2,000 wild Royal Bengal Tigers are left in India. Collusion between poachers, government officials and buyers could lead to their rapid…

Researchers working in Australia have discovered ways in which fruit flies might react to extreme fluctuations in temperature. Short-term exposure to high heat stress ("heat hardening") has been known to have negative effects on Drosophila. But Loeschcke and Hoffmann discovered that it can have advantages too. Flies exposed to heat hardening were much more able to find their way to bait on very hot days than were the flies that were exposed to cooler temperatures, but the heat hardened flies did poorly on cool days. Loeschcke and Hoffmann did field releases with colored flies exposed to…

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace. As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, "If you send us money, we will protest for you." I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn't much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman. I've always believed…

A new survey by researchers at Oregon State University and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of more than 600 rivers and streams in the western United States found widespread mercury concentrations in fish. Though few of the more than 2,700 fish analyzed in the study contained alarmingly high levels of mercury, the prevalence of the element throughout 12 western states caught the researchers somewhat by surprise.

You can absolutely bet when a marketing department uses the word "ethical" - about its lingerie - someone is out to make a buck at your expense. And they think you will believe anything, my environmental friends.   But French designer Sophie Young's g=9.8 company is doing it with a straight face. In yet another blatant product placement on treehugger.com they claim the kinds of things only the well-meaning but gullible among us will believe; namely that the company is producing a line of lingerie which will make your hippy chick girlfriend quiver with environmentally friendly…

Sacred flaming temples, gas-guzzling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed - The Exxon-Mobil National Convention, you are thinking? Not at all. It's the Burning Man Art Festival in Nevada and it causes global warming. For 21 years this ecological disaster has been using gas-powered generators, up to 37,000 of them, so that smelly hippies can gorge themselves on wasteful fossil-fuel consumption. San Francisco scientists are unsure how much this contributes to global warming but they intend to find out.   They created Cooling Man, an online calculator…