Africa
eklemetti | July 29, 2010Lots of little pieces of news I've run across ... time to play a little catch up.
Stromboli: A volcano after Don Ho's heart.
Every once in a while, my RSS feeds will dredge up some articles from years gone by ... and this week there were two New York Times pieces that are a few years old, but interesting nevertheless. The first is about research conducted by Dr. Robert Sohn at WHOI on explosive undersea eruptions. The second is work by Corr and Vaughan about finding subglacial volcanism in Antarctica. Both are interesting reads if you missed them (like I did) the first time around.…
pronald | July 28, 2010George Steinmetz began his aerial adventures on leave from Stanford in 1979. Thirty one years later he has accumulated thousands of photographs from his flying machine. He showed us a sample here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute.
The Waw an Namu volcano in S. Libya, A 20K peak in the Himalayas, deserts encroaching on farms in China, immigrant tomato pickers in Saudia Arabia, sand basins in the Sahara- all photographed from a motorized paraglider.
The flying man is determined and creative. He has dodged arrows, fled machine guns,…
pronald | July 16, 2010How do you help people who live on less than a dollar a day?
This is one of the challenges that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is taking on. In preparation for a recent visit there, Raoul and I reread a speech that Bill Gates gave at the 2009 world food prize symposium
It is worth a read.
He points out that three-quarters of the world's poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land. So if we can make small-holder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty.
If we are successful, we can also…
eklemetti | July 6, 2010We'll try again with a finding a good Mystery Volcano Photo!
The last MVP was Mt. Meru in Tanzania, submitted by Michael Dalton-Smith. Now, I thought this image was going to be a little harder than it turned out to be as the shot of Meru on Wikipedia is a very similar shot, but that happens sometimes - and it did take 9 guesses this time! Congrats to MK in Alberta for getting that MVP. As for Meru, the last known eruption from this African volcano was in 1910, a VEI 2 explosive event from the aptly named "Ash Cone". Meru appears to have been relatively active during the late 1800's and early…
laelaps | June 30, 2010
Out on the grassy plains of Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, a group of six female topi antelope (Damaliscus lunatus) walk across the savanna. It is the time of the annual rut - a one and a half month period in which most males control small patches of land and try to attract adult females which, for one day, are in estrus. The small group walks by one of the lone males, but just as they reach the edge of his territory he snorts an alarm. It means that somewhere, out ahead of them, a predator waits to pounce on any topi foolish enough to blunder towards it, and so the females stay close…
laelaps | June 23, 2010
The skeletons of Lucy (left) and Kadanuumuu (right). Both belong to the early human species Australopithecus afarensis. (Images not to scale.)
I never fully appreciated how small Lucy was until I saw her bones for myself. Photographs and restorations of her and her kin within the species Australopithecus afarensis had never really given me a proper sense of scale, and when I looked over her incomplete skeleton - formally known as specimen A.L. 288-1 - I was struck by her diminutive proportions. In life she would have only been about three and a half feet tall. Her physical stature seemed…
eklemetti | June 21, 2010
Africa is threatened by "scorching hot blobs of magma" according to the CSM.
Nothing like some fabulous headlines to make your day.
The first (courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor)
Massive blob of scorching magma discovered under southern Africa
Oh my! Yes, again, it seems that the many people in the media seem to be very confused about the nature of magma when it is underground - always expecting giant vats of swirling, molten magma rising up to destroy us all. Very few have a good sense of the real state of the Earth's mantle - mostly solid. The article is in fact about a recent study…
eklemetti | June 3, 2010The NASA Earth Observatory has been dazzling us with images from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption for months - but they have been dazzling us with volcanoes images for years! Here are two more images for those of you who love seeing volcanoes from above:
Cleveland, Alaska
As I mentioned earlier this week, Cleveland volcano likely had a small eruption over the weekend producing a small ash cloud. Cleveland is already known as an extremely picturesque volcano, both from the ground for its highly conical shape - a textbook andesitic stratocone - and from space. This new June 1 image is from almost…
gregladen | June 3, 2010A leading rights activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been found dead in the capital, Kinshasa.
Floribert Chebeya's body was discovered, partially clothed, on the back seat of his own car.
source
He was last known to have gone to a meeting with the national chief of police, Genral John Numbi. His driver has disappeared.
Amnesty International's deputy Africa director, Veronique Aubert, issued a statement upon hearing of his death: "We are stunned and appalled by the suspicious death of such a prominent and respected human rights defender".
source
gregladen | May 28, 2010Today is the big day!
And not merely because it is TGIF* day.
The theme "everything you know is sort of wrong" is familiar to readers on this blog. It is an underlying theme for much of what happens here. Every now and then that theme is manifest overtly, as in the Falsehoods posts, which are, as we speak, being revised, expanded, and reissued.
Well, starting this evening and running for an indeterminate amount of time (but probably a few weeks or so) "Everything you know is sort of wrong" is not just a phrase to keep in your head all the time as you are walking around doing stuff. It's…
gregladen | May 23, 2010Harakat Al-Shabab is a militant Islamic youth movement engaged in the Somali war. Yesterdaythey mortared the presidential palace in Omgadishu, setting off a fight killing 14 people.
A landslide caused by heavy rains and a flooding river on the slope of Nyiragongo killed over 50 people in the DR Congo.
A gay couple in Malawi has been sentenced to 14 years (max) at hard labo for "gross indecency and unnatural acts."
The judge said he wanted to protect the public from "people like you".
Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, have been in jail since they were arrested in December…
laelaps | May 21, 2010
A Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Outside of the trash-grubbing black bears I occasionally come across when driving to hikes in northern New Jersey, I never encounter large predators near my home. The imposing carnivores which once roamed the "garden state" were extirpated long ago. This is a very unusual thing. For the majority of the past six million years or so hominins have lived alongside, and have regularly been hunted by, an array of large carnivorous animals, but humans have not been entirely helpless. Rather than a one-…
gregladen | May 21, 2010When I was first in the Ituri Forest, I Noticed there were many kinds of plantains grown in the gardens there They varied by size and shape. One version seemed to have numerous black spots on the outside. When asking what it was called, I found its name was the same as the variety without the black spots. Eventually, someone realized that I was asking the wrong question, and gave me the explanation I was unknowingly looking for: "The ones with the black spots were the ones at a certain ripening stage during a storm in which rocks made of water in the form of what you call ice cream, sort…
eklemetti | May 19, 2010
Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Following up on a report earlier this week claiming that an eruption of Mikeno produced an avalanche that killed dozens, it appears that those reports were false. Current news claims that an overflowing river on Nyiragongo in the Congo produced an avalanche on the slopes of the volcano. This avalanche killed 46 people and have wiped out at least 200 homes and UN Peacekeepers in the Congo have been helping with the recovery from the avalanche. So, it seems that the landslide was caused by heavy rains rather than any sort of volcanic eruption…
pronald | May 15, 2010This Op-Ed just published today in the NY TImes.
Here it is with links and a few edits.
A REPORT by the National Research Council last month gave ammunition to both sides in the debate over the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. More than 80 percent of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States is genetically engineered, and the report details the "long and impressive list of benefits" that has come from these crops, including improved soil quality, reduced erosion and reduced insecticide use.
It also confirmed predictions that widespread cultivation of these crops…
laelaps | May 14, 2010
Image via Discovery Press Web.
In his monumental 1945 monograph on mammal classification, paleontologist G.G. Simpson appraised the living species of elephants to be "relicts of a dying group." The living African (Loxodonta) and Asian (Elephas) elephants were all that remained of the past diversity of proboscideans, and human activities put even these large mammals at risk of extinction. Poaching and human development on land bordering game preserves continue to put elephants at risk, and the two-hour BBC special The Secret Life of Elephants, airing this Sunday on Animal Planet in the US,…
gregladen | April 29, 2010I walked into her tent, went immediately to her bed and turned over her pillow. And there, as plain as day, was a stack of hundred dollars bills, a US passport, and a first class plane ticket to New York.
"How the hell did you do that?" she asked, astonished, hugging me, crying.
"Just doing my job, ma'am," I replied in a drawl, which caused her to raise her hand in a mock gesture to slap me.
She was an older (but young of mind and sharp) woman of fame and great means. If I said her name you would surely recognize it, either because you know of her or her somewhat more famous relative…
jgoldman | April 29, 2010What information is contained in the call of a mammal? Some calls might reflect the internal emotional state of the animal, like fear or anxiety, or they can refer to an external object, agent, or event, like the presence of a predator. Rhesus monkeys, lemurs, baboons, and guinea pigs, for example, will produce calls when separated from their conspecifics or in the presence of a stranger. Howler monkeys produce specific alarm calls for avian predators, even when they have never encountered an avian predator for several generations. Vervet monkeys produce different calls in response to…
kthompson | April 21, 2010
Leave your infrared-laser tripped stationary camera to your dad, the whitetail hunting enthusiast, 'cause you're about learn what REAL wildlife photography is.
Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas just wrapped up their first (largely) successful photography expedition using their ingenious BeetleCam, a remote control camera ATV. The brothers have been professional nature photographers since 2004 but really set themselves apart from the wildlife photography hive when they strapped their DSLR camera to four tiny all-terrain tires, and camouflaged it.
After poppin' some major wheelies in the airport…