environment
gregladen | January 1, 2013A collection of videos ... that you will enjoy.
BBC Wonders of Life Trailer:
Climate 2013: Perspectives of 8 Scientists:
Chasing Ice movie reveals largest iceberg break-up ever filmed:
Kathleen Dean Moore at Nobel Conference 48 on the greatest violation of human rights ever seen:
With all due respect to the introducers, the talk actually starts at 8 minutes. Also, the best line delivered in any talk this year starts just after 42 minutes and 50 seconds (but really, start at 40:40 for best effect). It would be interesting to hear comments about the religious vs. secular approaches both…
esiegel | December 12, 2012"I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man." -Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix, as I told you once before, was almost right. We know of helium, conventionally, as the lighter-than-air gas that we fill balloons, blimps and zeppelins with in order to quickly and easily "defy gravity" here on Earth.
Image credit: Jonathan Trappe.
At least defying gravity is what it appears to do. But what's really going on is that helium is simply a very low-density gas. Our atmosphere, a mix of mostly Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2) gases, has an average…
lborkowski | November 19, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle's Public Health Classics series.
By Sara Gorman
Does cigarette smoking cause cancer? Does eating specific foods or working in certain locations cause diseases? Although we have determined beyond doubt that cigarette smoking causes cancer, questions of disease causality still challenge us because it is never a simple matter to distinguish mere association between two factors from an actual causal relationship between them. In an address to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill attempted to codify the criteria for determining…
jtoney | November 14, 2012Yes, a crisis does bring out the best, and the worst, in people. I consider myself amongst the lucky in New Jersey. Millions of homes were affected by Hurricane Sandy, including damage by severe flooding and fallen trees as well as loss of power and heat. Our home was not damaged, our family was safe, and we endured (only?) seven days and seven long dark nights without power, heat or hot water. Our area in Union County was virtually shut down for a week. Suddenly gas and food became scarce commodities. This dark time inspired many volunteer groups, including our own University students…
jdupuis | October 15, 2012C. Scott Findlay, associate professor of biology at the University of Ottawa and a visiting research scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, had a sobering article in the Toronto Star a few days ago.
It's titled Governing in the dark: Ottawa’s dangerous unscientific revolution and it fits right in with my recent seemingly endless catalogue of how the current Canadian Conservative government is systematically undermining the free inquiry in Canada, scientific and otherwise. In the article Findlay first lays out some of the recent abuses and then gives four reasons why Canadians…
esiegel | September 12, 2012"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes; everybody knows." -Leonard Cohen
As you know, last week I took my first week off of the year, and went on a trip to Glacier National Park, which was my very first time there. Although I've spent a lot of time in the mountains, including some pretty icy and snowy places, I'd never walked on an actual glacier before. All of that was about to change…
jdupuis | September 10, 2012You know the old saying about the weather -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it! Well, the same can be said about climate change -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. And that's partly because of political gridlock, denial and inaction at the highest levels across numerous jurisdictions around the world. But it's also because most of us really don't have a clear idea what we can do about it.
In other words, what actions can we as individuals take to fight climate change?
I think we all have a sense that if we could aggregate millions and billions…
esiegel | August 31, 2012"The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening it, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven." -John Muir, on Glacier National Park
It's always hard to tear yourself away from your day-to-day life, from the things you work hard at building, and remember that there's a whole wide world -- and a whole Universe -- to experience and enjoy. Perhaps the best times in my life involve going off to explore some new and, at…
jdupuis | August 8, 2012I feel a little weird reviewing this book.
It's a TED book, you see.
What's a TED book, you ask. I'll let TED tell you:
Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article -- a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime.
TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words — long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.
TED talks, in other words…
pharyngula | July 29, 2012Richard Muller used to be a doubter — he didn't think global warming was a concern, and he didn't think people were responsible for it. Now he has changed his mind, and he explains why.
Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the…
jhalper | July 23, 2012You’ve heard of the carbon cycle, maybe even the nitrogen cycle. But have you given much thought lately to the sulfur cycle? New research in last week’s Science suggests that we should be paying a bit more attention to the way this element moves through the atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and land. Over the last 500 million years, sulfur seems to have played a fairly crucial role in keeping the oxygen levels in the atmosphere at a nice, breathable 20%.
It is microbes and weather that do the work. Microorganisms in the ocean take in sulfur in the form of dissolved sulfate – that is, in a sulfur…
jtoney | July 2, 2012
Ko Olina Beach (author's photograph)
Could Donald Trump and the Obama "birther" conspiracists be right? Some claim that President Obama is not an American because he was born outside of the U.S. Some begrudgingly acknowledge that he was born in Hawaii less than two years after becoming our 50th state but still characterize the President as somehow distinct from "real" Americans. Having just returned from my first visit to the President's jewel of a birthplace (or is it?), I see how the state of Hawaii - putting aside Kenya - could be viewed by some Americans as foreign for a host of…
esiegel | June 26, 2012"We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut
From hundreds of miles up, the International Space Station speeds around the Earth, completing 18 orbits a day, looking down on us and returning some absolutely fabulous images.
Image credit: Fyodor Yurchikhin and the Russian Space Agency Press Services, of Greenland from the ISS.
But what you may not appreciate is that my favorite images taken from the ISS weren't taken by American Astronaut Don Pettit (better known as @astro_Pettit), but rather by a…
esiegel | June 4, 2012"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.
Image Credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
From diamonds to nanotubes to DNA, carbon is indispensable for constructing practically all of the most intricate structures we know of. Most of the carbon in our world comes from long-dead stars, in the form of Carbon-12: carbon atoms containing six…
esiegel | May 17, 2012"The Earth destroys its fools, but the intelligent destroy the Earth."
-Khalid ibn al-Walid
Usually, when we talk about terraforming, we think about taking a presently uninhabitable planet and making it suitable for terrestrial life. This means taking a world without an oxygen-rich atmosphere, with watery oceans, and without the means to sustain them, and to transform it into an Earth-like world.
The obvious choice, when it comes to our Solar System, is Mars.
Image credit: Daein Ballard.
The red planet, after all, is not a total stranger to these conditions. On the contrary, for the first…
jdupuis | April 27, 2012David Suzuki is a icon for the Canadian environmental movement. He's like our Al Gore and Rachel Carson all rolled up into one. I read and reviewed his memoirs a while back and they are terrific.
When he talks, sensible people listen.
This blog post by Suzuki and Ian Hanington hit my in box this morning: Environmental rules should be better, not easier
Few people would argue against making environmental review processes and regulations more efficient -- as long as they're effective. But changes announced in the recent federal budget don't do that. Instead, they make it easier for the federal…
esiegel | April 16, 2012"Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so." -Mark Twain
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -Richard Feynman
Every day that you set forth in the world is a new opportunity to learn something about it. Every new observation that you make, every new test you perform, every novel encounter or piece of information you pick up is a new chance to be a scientist.
How so?
Image credit: Alan Chen.
You have a conception of how things work in this world…
gregladen | March 30, 2012A commonly used insecticide, and possibly an increasingly widely used form of that pesticide, could be a causal factor in bee colony collapse. It is not 100% certain that this pesticide's effects can be counted as one of the causes this problem, but there is a very good chance that neonicotinoids can cause a drop in hive population, and thus, should be examined to see if there is a relationship in some cases. From the paper's abstract:
Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a…
jtoney | March 26, 2012
Fern Roof (Kathrin Marks)
Imagine that you're a spore nestled on a leaf in a sleepy forest. It's a dry, sunny day. All of a sudden - within 0.00001 seconds, you are flung into the air with an acceleration of 100,000 times the force of gravity. What happened?
The play by play of this extraordinary voyage is now explained:
The whole annulus is thus bent out of shape, much like an accordion in the hands of a musician.
The sporangia open when dehydrating and use the stored elastic energy to power a fast closure motion that ultimately ejects the spores. The beauty of this dispersal…
pharyngula | March 17, 2012James Inhofe, the ridiculous climate change denier, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and made a series of ridiculous claims. Among them was the claim that those wacky environmentalists were greatly outspending the entire energy industry on propaganda. Wait, what? The top five oil companies made $1 trillion in profits from 2011 through 2011, and somehow the Sierra Club and George Soros and Michael Moore are able to outspend them? Where did such a patently absurd claim come from?
Inhofe revealed his source: the "very liberal publication", Nature (yes, reality really does have a liberal bias)…