February 2012
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EPA misses dioxin deadline (Nature) →
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has missed a self-imposed deadline to release recommendations for the regulation of dioxins. The 31 January cut-off was part of a reassessment process that has stretched out for 20 years, but the agency has promised to finalize its guidelines “as expeditiously as possible”, although it gave no new deadline.
December 2011
3 posts
Dust Up (Scientific American) →
One fine afternoon last may, Jayne Belnap drove north out of Moab, Utah, in her beige Lexus SUV when the highway vanished. In an instant, a 100-foot-tall cloud of dust had swallowed up her vehicle. She wanted to brake, but she worried about another car slamming into her from behind. She tried to pull over, but she couldn’t see the shoulder. So Belnap split the difference: “I figured if I just...
Cornell to build New York science campus (Nature) →
Lost and found: How great nonfiction writers... →
In June 2010, Michael Finkel needed a new idea. The Bozeman-based author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa and writer for GQ, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal wasn’t satisfied with the stack of print-outs in the two-inch deep brownie pan on his desk. And none of the hundreds of ideas in a Word document on his computer struck his fancy. So, he opened up his web browser and typed a...
November 2011
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The Gloucester Fish War (Bloomberg Businessweek) →
The bidding starts early at the seafood auction in Gloucester, Mass. Each day about 30 tons of fish—mostly cod, haddock, and flounder—come in by boat on Cape Ann, a fist jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. Fishermen motor up to the concrete docks behind the beige-and-white warehouse, then wait while workers in rubber boots hoist their catches and weigh them out on a stainless-steel digital scale....
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Speaking Out on the "Quiet Crisis" (Scientific... →
When Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms...
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Sequencing projects bring age-old wisdom to... →
Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert died in September. She was a lifelong New Yorker, a former television talk show host and Cornell University’s oldest alumna. She was 109. Despite her death, however, Reichert’s memory may live on through her genome sequence.
On 26 October, the nonprofit X-Prize Foundation—best known for its attempt to spur the development of private...
October 2011
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The Medical Sleuth (Scientific American) →
The patient had endured 20 years of pain: her calves had turned into two bricks, and she now had trouble walking. A slew of doctors had failed to treat, let alone diagnose, her unusual condition. So when her x-rays finally landed on William A. Gahl’s desk at the National Institutes of Health, he knew immediately that he had to take her case.
Gahl is the scientist and physician who leads the...
September 2011
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The Great Pumpkin (Smithsonian) →
Quinn Werner’s backyard pumpkin patch overlooks a wooded creek. In the winter, when the maples and oaks stand like toothpicks and snow coats the western Pennsylvania valley, Werner gazes out his kitchen window and caresses his prizewinning seeds. The topsoil is frozen solid and his orange Kubota tractor gleams in the garage like a showroom floor model. He is not a big talker, but every...
August 2011
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Free-Ranging Market Would Save Wolves, Ranchers... →
Get your rifles ready: Wolf season opens at the end of August, and for as little as $11.50 you’ve got a better chance than ever of bagging this toothy predator.
In July, Montana doubled its kill quota to 220, and Idaho, well, it has declined to set a quota. Wyoming plans to treat wolves as predators in most of the state, allowing them to be killed on sight. If all goes according to plan, the...
July 2011
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The Transplanted Forest (Discover) →
Last year wood and paper products made up nearly a third of British Columbia’s total exports and brought in about $9 billion. Leaving nothing to chance, the government is now embarking on the largest assisted-migration project in history by moving some 250,000 larch seedlings up to 200 miles outside the species’ native range. The hope is that even if its old territory eventually becomes...
April 2011
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Scientific spat stalls sea-turtle conservation... →
A disagreement within the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Fisheries Service has meant that the service is delaying making a decision over whether to elevate the status of a threatened population of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) to endangered. The six-month delay means that the loggerheads will have to spend another summer migrating through...
March 2011
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Food Fight (Scientific American) →
Roger Beachy grew up in a traditional Amish family on a small farm in Ohio that produced food “in the old ways,” he says, with few insecticides, herbicides or other agrochemicals. He went on to become a renowned expert in plant viruses and sowed the world’s first genetically modified food crop—a tomato plant with a gene that conferred resistance to the devastating tomato mosaic virus. Beachy...
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What will Japanese near reactors face long-term?... →
February 2011
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Recovery Artist (Nature Conservancy Magazine) →
Lotus Vermeer downshifts into first, and the brown Landcruiser lurches up another steep dirt track on Santa Cruz Island, on a Nature Conservancy preserve three times the size of Manhattan off the coast of Southern California. After seven years navigating the island’s accordion-fold topography as director of the Conservancy’s work on Santa Cruz, Vermeer has earned solid four-wheel-drive...
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Every bite you take (Nature) →
A decade ago, as part of a study on diet, psychologist Tom Baranowski was asked to recall everything he had eaten the previous day. A chicken dinner, he said confidently, remembering that he had prepared it for himself and his wife Janice. The thing was, he hadn’t made chicken that night. It was only later that he realized he’d treated himself to a hamburger.
If Baranowski, who...
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A Friend to Aliens: Are Invasive Species Really a... →
Plant ecologist Mark A. Davis will not participate in this year’s “Buckthorn Roundups” around his St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood. Davis will not tag along as these intrepid crusaders set out to eradicate the common and glossy buckthorn, two ornamental shrubs imported in the 19th century from Europe. The nonnatives have now taken over some Midwestern forests, prairies and wetlands. That is why...
January 2011
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Where eagles die (Nature) →
Misjudgements made two years ago during a rat-eradication programme on Alaska’s aptly named Rat Island, which led to the death of more than 420 birds — including 46 bald eagles — have now been detailed.
A report by the Ornithological Council — an association of ornithology organizations in the Americas — documents flaws in the eradication programme carried out by the US Fish a
nd...
December 2010
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Saving the Rhino Through Sacrifice (Businessweek) →
In June 1996 a game rancher named John Hume paid about $200,000 for three pairs of endangered black rhinos from the wildlife department of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. Among them was a male who would come to be called “Number 65,” and whose death would play a central role in the debate about conservation.
South Africa did not start the auctions because it had a...