Biology
Breach
May 18, 2011, from Washington Times
A resounding theme of yesterdays Rally for Food and Farm Freedom on the Hill was that the FDAs recent arrest of Amish farmer Dan Allgyer for selling raw milk was not about food safety; it was about economics and keeping control of the food supply in the hands of big business, instead of giving power to the consumer.
Organizers took power -- and sustenance -- into their own hands by creating an impressive showing at the rally in Upper Senate Park, and by drinking the controversial liquid, milked fresh onsite from Morgan the cow, who was trailered in from a Maryland dairy farm.
May 18, 2011, from Grist
The produce lobby is livid that consumers might be concerned about pesticides. They are taking their fury out on the USDA for its annual report on pesticide use (via The Washington Post):
"In a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 18 produce trade associations complained that the data have "been subject to misinterpretation by activists, which publicize their distorted findings through national media outlets in a way that is misleading for consumers and can be highly detrimental to the growers of these commodities.... There are some organizations with agendas that do want to scare people away from fresh produce," said Kathy Means, a vice president at the Produce Marketing Association, a major industry group. "We don't want anyone eating unsafe foods, of course. But for those products that are grown legally and the science says [the pesticide] is safe, we don't want people turning away."
May 18, 2009, from Salon
Gene Brandi will always rue the summer of 2007. That's when the California beekeeper rented half his honeybees, or 1,000 hives, to a watermelon farmer in the San Joaquin Valley at pollination time. The following winter, 50 percent of Brandi's bees were dead.... Brandi has grown accustomed to seeing up to 40 percent of his bees vanish each year, simply leave the hive in search of food and never come back. But this was different. Instead of losing bees from all his colonies, Brandi watched the ones that skipped watermelon duty continue to thrive.
Brandi discovered the watermelon farmer had irrigated his plants with imidacloprid, the world's best-selling insecticide created by Bayer CropScience Inc., one of the world's leading producers of pesticides and genetically modified vegetable seeds, with annual sales of $8.6 billion. Blended with water and applied to the soil, imidacloprid creates a moist mixture the bees likely drank from on a hot day.... Imidacloprid and clothianidin are chloronicotinoids, a synthetic compound that combines nicotine, a powerful toxin, with chlorine to attack an insect's nervous system. The chemical is applied to the seed of a plant, added to soil, or sprayed on a crop and spreads to every corner of the plant's tissue, killing the pests that feed on it.
May 18, 2009, from Osservatorio Balcani
Erin Brockovich arrived in Greece to save the Asopus river, contaminated with high levels of hexavalent chrome, the same heavy metal that the American legal assistant had fought against in California.... Now, the hexavalent chrome and other heavy metals such as nickel have been detected in quantities as 100 times higher than the legal limit in the Asopus river in Boeotia, in central Greece. The river, once suitable for swimming and fishing, springs up on the slopes of Kitheronas Mountains, believed by the ancient Greeks to be the motherland of the Muses. The river provides drinking water to tens of thousands of people in its high stream areas, but its groundwater also reaches millions of residents of Athens.... The pollution of the clear waters of Asopus began back in 1969, when the colonels' dictatorship declared the area an "industrial park" and permitted many companies to discharge unfiltered waste in the river. The results are visible today. In September 2007, the first big alarm came from the agricultural faculty at the University Athens after an analysis of the groundwater that arrives from Boeotia to Attica, an area of Athens. A recent inspection by the parliamentary environmental commission shamefully found the Asopus river to be "completely pure": clearly the factories were given time to do their "spring cleaning".
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Climate
Chaos
May 18, 2009, from University of Texas, via EurekAlert
Mead Allison, senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study, said Arctic river deltas have been neglected as records of past climate because the far north is a challenging and expensive environment to work in and it only came to be seen as a bellwether for climate change in the last decade or so.... Scientists don't know whether large river deltas are a net source or a net sink of carbon. Do they store more carbon than they produce? That's a critical question because carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas. Large river deltas are the interface between the land and the oceans and they deliver large amounts of carbon carried along in sediments. As humans alter river systems by adding nutrients from fertilizers, damming water for power and diverting water for drinking and farming, they may be shifting the ability of those systems to fix, burn and store carbon.
"It's a glaring gap in our understanding of the global carbon cycle," Allison said. "It's a potential gotcha in the global climate models. Each river system is different, but we have to get a handle on the net effects."
Arctic river deltas are critical to explore, the researchers reason, because the largest changes in climate are projected for the Arctic. Large amounts of carbon are stored in Arctic permafrost. As those soils thaw, rivers will transport much of their organic carbon to the oceans. As global warming speeds up the melting of shorefast ice (ice attached to the shore), it will likely accelerate coastal erosion from storms, providing a further supply of organic carbon to the coastal zone.
May 18, 2009, from New York Times
As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea to retreat.... The geology is complex, but it boils down to this: Relieved of billions of tons of glacial weight, the land has risen much as a cushion regains its shape after someone gets up from a couch. The land is ascending so fast that the rising seas -- a ubiquitous byproduct of global warming -- cannot keep pace. As a result, the relative sea level is falling, at a rate "among the highest ever recorded," according to a 2007 report by a panel of experts convened by Mayor Bruce Botelho of Juneau.... As a result, the region faces unusual environmental challenges. As the sea level falls relative to the land, water tables fall, too, and streams and wetlands dry out. Land is emerging from the water to replace the lost wetlands, shifting property boundaries and causing people to argue about who owns the acreage and how it should be used. And meltwater carries the sediment scoured long ago by the glaciers to the coast, where it clouds the water and silts up once-navigable channels.
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Resource
Depletion
May 18, 2009, from CBC (Canada)
Officials with Kairos, a multi-denominational social justice group, are heading to Fort McMurray to see the impact of development first-hand.
The delegation will spend a week in the region, starting May 21-27.
Church leaders say it's a fact-finding mission, on which they'll speak to a variety of groups with an interest in the oilsands, including the aboriginal community, environmentalists, politicians, the oil and gas industry and those working in the oilsands.... She said the churches have often taken an interest in moral and ethical issues.
"We've tended to look at these in the global picture. We look at what happens elsewhere in the world, [and] in the last couple of years we've really been pressed to say, 'What about what's happening here in Canada?'" she said.
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Recovery
May 18, 2011, from Associated Press
The Interior Department launched a national plan Tuesday to combat a mysterious disease that has killed more than a million bats in the Eastern and Southern United States and is spreading west.
The disease, called white-nose syndrome, is caused by a fungus. The disease has spread to 16 states, including West Virginia, and three Canadian provinces.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the new plan provides a road map for more than 100 federal, state and tribal agencies and scientific researchers tracking the disease and attempting to combat it.
May 18, 2009, from Reuters
President Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday the most aggressive U.S. auto fuel efficiency standards ever, a policy that also aims to resolve a dispute with the state of California over cutting tailpipe emissions.
A senior administration official, speaking to reporters late on Monday on the condition of anonymity, said average fuel standards for all new light vehicles sold in the United States would rise by 10 miles per gallon over today's performance to 35.5 mpg between 2012-16.
May 18, 2009, from CBC (Canada)
Lithium batteries could deliver more than three times their usual power if they contained a new composite material invented by scientists at the University of Waterloo, a study suggests.
The material created by chemistry professor Linda Nazar and her research team contains sulphur, a cheap substance that scientists have been trying to incorporate into rechargeable lithium batteries for a long time, said a news release Monday.
The challenge had been to find a way to keep the electrically active sulphur in intimate contact with a conductor such as carbon, Nazar said in a statement.... "This composite material can supply up to nearly 80 per cent of the theoretical capacity of sulphur, which is three times the energy density of lithium [traditional] transition metal oxide cathodes," Nazar said in a statement.
In addition, the material remained stable when recharged multiple times.
May 18, 2009, from New Scientist
Blooms of algae in lakes and seas, sometimes called red tides, can release neurotoxins into the food chain or suffocate the local ecology by sucking up too much oxygen. When one occurs, the safest option is usually just to wait for the bloom to clear of its own accord, but now scientists at the University of Hull, UK, think they have found a way to put a stop to these deadly algal explosions- by exposing them to blasts of ultrasound.
The use of ultrasound has been explored before, but with mixed results. That may be because the mechanism was not well understood, say Michiel Postema and his colleagues, who successfully used ultrasound to kill off algae. Postema believes it affects buoyancy cells, known as heterocysts, which keep the algae afloat by enclosing a bubble of nitrogen gas. He reckons the ultrasound pressure wave causes the gas in the cells to resonate. At high intensity it bursts the cell, and the algae sink. "Without sunlight they will then die," he says.... The ultrasound could be targeted to specific species of algae, because the resonant frequency of heterocysts varies from species to species in accordance with their size. What's more, such a measure should not damage ordinary water-filled plant cells, which are relatively impervious to pressure waves.
May 18, 2009, from BusinessGreen
Coca-Cola has become the latest firm to step up its interest in the field of bioplastics, with the unveiling last week of plastic bottles made partially from plants.
Dubbed the PlantBottle, the plastic bottle is made from a blend of petroleum-based materials and 30 per cent plant-based materials sourced from sugar cane and molasses.
The company said that the bottle had an edge over some other plant-based plastics, as it can be processed through existing recycling facilities without contaminating traditional PET and as a result it can still be recycled easily without having to be separated from conventional plastics.
Some environmental groups have raised questions about the long-term sustainability of bioplastics, warning that as with biofuels, increased demand for crops could lead to shortages and contribute to deforestation.
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