Environment/nature

Carl Zimmer faces the wrath with cheerful good humor. The source of his troubles:
From Knight Science Journalism Tracker: Phil. Inquirer: Four part series disembowels the Bush White House version of the EPA Many reporters have dived pretty deep into the legal and regulatory changes wrought at the EPA in the last eight years and into the scientist-administrator Stephen Johnson who imposed them at the behest of the George W. Bush administration... But no other newspaper that the Tracker knows of has torn into the agency with as thorough, focussed and full-hearted a pummeling as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer for four days this week. .... Sometimes it’s good to let one’s…
CBC Radio | Ten Ways the World Could End : From the wonderful radio program Quirks & Quarks: Despite what you may think, the universe is not necessarily a friendly place. Sure, things here on Earth have been pretty stable over the past few millennia, allowing human civilization to gain a foothold. But that could change at any time. Disaster lurks everywhere, from the deepest reaches of space to the very bowels of our planet. We've recruited nine prominent Canadian scientists (and one science fiction writer) and asked them to imagine how they think the world might end. We bring you The…
Eva Sollberger of Seven Day has posted a charming video feature about the Christmas tree farm run by Jim and Steve Moffatt, of Craftsbury, Vermont -- a family that occupies a major part of my first book "The Northern Forest," which I wrote with my friend Richard Ober. I spent a lot of time with the Moffatts, some of the finest people I've ever known. This video captures their wonderful combination of humor, intelligence, and virtue. Short, sweet, and just the thing for the season. Technorati Tags:Jim Moffatt Technorati Tags:Steve Moffatt, Eva Sollberger, Christmas tree farms, Vermont,…
photo: E. Leslie, via New Scientist As Science News reports, drawing on a paper in the Nov 6 Nature (paid subscription required), climate change -- in particular a lack of the fluffy snowpack that lemmings depend on as cover for ground-level foraging -- appears to be putting the hurt on lemming populations in Norway. This crimp in their diet has left some to starve to death and may be the reason that a particular area in south-central Norway has not seen one of the famous lemming population booms since 1994. Lemmings are famed for their population booms: Occasionally, across small regions,…
The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff. The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor level. Impressive enough in itself: Even more riveting, however, is the second video, which can't be embedded but which can be seen on YouTube. It mixes from-the-ground footage with aerial shots taken with infrared cameras to show how a team of five chimps -- a driver, three blockers, and an…
A friend asked me the other day why he hadn't heard more this year about the question of whether global warming was driving more and bigger hurricanes. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker suggests he's just not reading the right papers. It brings a good round-up of how coverage on that question has shifted: The debate over the effect of a warmer climate on tropical cyclones has undergone a nuanced shift in the last year or so, as illustrated in a brace of news stories today. The natural, first question was whether the world is seeing more hurricanes and their kin. That turns out to be…
Via the invaluable Knight-Ridder Science Journalism Tracker comes woeful news from the L.A. Times: One of the few remaining success stories, the Alaskan salmon fishery, is under threat by a parasite whose expansion seems related to climate change. I'm trying to finish an unrelated story myself, so will simply post the Tracker's write-up below the photo, which comes from a first-rate photo essay that accompanies Kenneth Weiss's full story at the LA Times. There's also quite a nice video version at the Times' site. (I can't figure out how to embed it here, but it heads the main story. http://…
I've been remiss in tracking here the farmed salmon issue I wrote about in the April/May Eating Well. Much has transpired; here a few tidbits and updates. Soon after my feature ran, news broke that the Sacramento king (aka chinook) salmon run -- traditionally fairly robust, and the base of both the California salmon fishing industry and the main supply for many California restaurants -- went completely snuff this year. The California salmon fishery was closed for the first time in 160 years. A stunning blow to the fishing industry and all fans of salmon in general. This has had some…
Suddenly it's salmon everywhere -- or in some cases, nowhere. My story on "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at Whether Eating Farmed Salmon is ... Well ... OK," was published a couple weeks ago in Eating Well. You can see the Eating Well web version here or download a pdf here. The story describes why I came to swear off eating farmed Atlantic salmon because of their impact on wild salmon fisheries, which have enough troubles as it is. I’m increasingly convinced that the larger issue of farmed versus wild salmon poses a similar choice. The withering array of injuries that salmon farms…
This one's getting a lot of play: There are traceable levels of prescription drugs in many public water supplies. The Times includes the AP story, which is both long and good. I bumped into it first on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog: Health Blog : Big Pharma is in the Water Big Pharma is in the Water Posted by Sarah Rubenstein It's not so expensive to get pharmaceuticals after all: Just drink water. An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas…
The amazing counting mosquitofish. Image courtesy Wikipedia Eight years ago I published a book about a fight over how to count fish. Now it turns out that fish themselves can count. The account below comes from the BBC's natural history site, loveearth.com -- which is a well worth visiting anyway, full of visual and scientific wonders. The original paper is in Animal Cognition -- unfortunately, behind the usual absurdly expensive firewall ($32 for this article). Luckily there are science writers at the BBC to write this up: Researchers find fish that can count up to four Fish can count. We…
A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature a story about climate change and Atlantic cod, an old love of mine from my time on the Gulf of Maine. Atlantic cod, Gadus callarius Linneaus, by Goode, from the magnificent Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, 1953, the best field guide I've ever read, now online. Cod aren't doing terribly well, because of overfishing and decimation of inshore spawning stocks, though some pockets…
There were a mess of interesting items in the New York Times Magazine annual "Ideas" issue last December 9, but I keep thinking of this one every time a) I wait to make a left-hand turn or b) see a UPS truck. Short v: Avoid left turns and save ... Here's the whole thing: Left-Hand-Turn Elimination By JOEL LOVELL Published: December 9, 2007 It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful -- of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton…
McClure Strait, long the bottleneck in the Northwest Passage, has been opened by warming seas. A warming globe has created what a lot of very cold explorers could not find: Arctic melt has opened the Northwest passage, as described in good stories at ABC.com, ScienceMode, and in Nature: The most direct shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, connecting Asia and Europe, is fully navigable for the first time since records began, data show. Warming has led to a record retreat of Arctic sea ice, which covers about 16 million square kilometres during March each year and melts to a…
A recent study in the American Geophysical Union'sJournal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres confirms that it really is getting hotter. The study found heat waves in Europe have doubled in length and that extremely hot days are three times as common as a century ago. From the AGU press release: The new data shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events in western Europe by approximately 30 percent. Paul Della-Marta and a team of researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland compiled evidence from 54 high-quality recording…
A splendid -- and to parents and young'n's, painfully relevant -- bit of research news from Science : Every parent can use a little help now and then, and birds are no exception. Some species even use nannies to feed and care for chicks. These 'daycare' babies don't seem to do any better than offspring raised by mom and dad alone do, however, and researchers have struggled to figure out how birds benefit from the assistance. A new study has cracked the mystery: The nannies apparently allow mother birds to save their strength so they can lay eggs later on. If you've a Science subscription…
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the excess carbon (via carbon dioxide intake). Why not? Because warming temperatures, contrary to previous thought and hope, were found to actually slow tropical forest growth in this 25-year study in Panama and Malaysia. As Feeley notes in the article's abstract, "these patterns strongly contradict the…
At this week's Mind Matters (the expert-written blog seminar I edit for sciam.com), Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania ponder how stimulating environments (read: better digs) and (of all things) fatherhood can build brains and make you smarter, at least if you're a marmoset. The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner…
my fiddle, trying to get atop a Beethoven Trio__________________________________________________________________The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in Montpelier, which is the nation's smallest state capital and generally one of its coldest. (Also the only one without a MacDonald's). It's should be damn cold here by now -- it should have been cold weeks ago -- but we've had four months of autumn. Too many ways to count it. Take your pick: â¢First…