An article in Nature (available to subscribers only) proposes an amibitious plan to “rewild” parts of the Plains States in the US, eventually possibly reintroducing extinct megafauna like elephants, tigers, and lions.
Harry Green agrees that this sound might sound a little bit wacky at first. “If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, [...]
The AP is reporting on WHO’s reaction to pollution caused by illegal forest fires in Southeast Asia and China:
A smoky haze that shrouded parts of Southeast Asia this month, forcing schools and businesses to close, is just one element of an air pollution problem that kills hundreds of thousands of people in the region annually, [...]
Smithsonian Magazine (August 2005) features an excerpt from Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land about disposal of technological products.
The Washington Post reports on worldwide gatherings to remember the nuclear bomb blast over Hiroshima, sixty years after the catastrophic event.
Bombing survivor Koji Ueda attended a rally in the Los Alamos park where there were research laboratories when the Manhattan Project developed the world’s first atomic bomb.
“No more Hiroshimas. No more Nagasakis,” Ueda said. “We send this message to our friends all over the world, along with a fresh determination of the ‘hibakusha’ (atomic bomb survivors) to continue to tell about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aiming at a planet set free of wars of nuclear weapons.”
The Times report is available here. Google News connects to over three hundred articles related to the bombing’s sixtieth anniversary.
CNN reports that congressional supporters of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) plan to sneak legislation supporting drilling into an upcoming budget bill.
“If we had put (Arctic drilling) in the bill, we wouldn’t be here,” said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, celebrating passage of the energy bill that Bush plans to sign in a ceremony in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bill never could have mustered the 60 votes needed to overcome a certain Senate filibuster over ANWR, he says.
But drilling advocates have a backup plan that is expected to unfold in mid-September.
Domenici said he will include a provision authorizing ANWR drilling as part of a budget procedure that is immune to filibuster. A similar maneuver is being planned in the House, although the final strategy is still being worked out.
Unlike normal legislation, the budget process is not subject to filibuster, so only 51 votes will be needed in the Senate for it to clear Congress and be signed into law by the president. Just such a tactic was used a decade ago when Congress approved ANWR drilling as part of the budget process, only to see the measure vetoed by then-President Clinton, a drilling opponent.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said her state’s delegation is determined to push for opening the refuge, calling it “the final component” of a national energy plan that she hopes will be put in place later this year.
The full story is available here.
Wired describes a new acoustic-analysis system to detect North Atlantic right whales in a ship’s path. The system looks to prevent far more whale deaths than current aerial surveillance technology.
Only about 350 North Atlantic right whales remain. In the last 14 months, at least eight have been found dead, though scientists recently speculated there could be far more deaths that were never discovered. Four of the known deaths were attributed to ship strikes and one to fishing gear entanglement.
The underwater microphones could allow scientists to pinpoint up to 75 percent of whales in areas they’re known to frequent and reduce collisions, Merrick said.
It would enable scientists to scan for whales all the time, instead of just in sunlight or good weather. Researchers wouldn’t be as dependent on the sometimes dangerous aerial surveys, or the luck needed to be overhead when a whale surfaces.
The article is available here.
Wired has a report on a new study that measures levels of Cocaine by-products in Italian rivers to estimate the extent of Cocaine use in surrounding communities.
Italian scientists discovered that nearly 10 pounds of cocaine residues flow into Italy’s Po River every day.
How is Italy’s biggest river getting all that coke? From urine. Turns out that coke users, like beer drinkers, just rent their substance of choice. Although in the case of cocaine, it’s transformed by the liver into benzoylecgonine, or BE, before being excreted. BE can’t be produced by any other means, so when it’s found in your urine sample, that spells trouble with a big T.
Revealed Friday in the journal Environmental Health, this is the first time the byproducts of illicit drugs like cocaine have been detected in river water.
More surprisingly, the level of residues translates into at least 40,000 daily doses of coke snorted by residents of the Po Valley — a great deal more than official estimates of 15,000 doses of cocaine per month.
Wired’s article is available here. The actual scientific report, from the journal Environmental Health, is available as a pdf document here.
An interesting “Explainer” article in Slate describes methods by which ornithologists identify the calls of birds previously thought to be extinct.
On Tuesday, ornithologists who had expressed doubts about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker said they are now convinced that the bird is alive and well. New sound recordings of the woodpecker—which hadn’t been seen since 1944—brought the skeptics around. “Once everybody hears these vocalizations, you can’t help but be convinced,” said one expert. How do ornithologists know what an extinct bird sounds like?
They use written descriptions of the bird’s call, examples from similar species, and—if they’re lucky—sound recordings. Some of the first successful recordings of birds were made on motion-picture sound film beginning in 1929, when Arthur Allen, the founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, pointed a microphone at birds in a local park. By the mid-1930s, Allen and his associates were using the technology to make audio and visual records of birds in the field, and in 1935, they managed to record the ivory-billed woodpecker. (Click here to listen and here to see.) Until a few months ago, Allen’s audio clip was the only known recording of the bird’s call.
Also of note is a Cornell Ornithology Lab report on their research into the Ivory-billed woodpecker, which utilizes the latest computing technology to analyze the lush sounds of a forest in search of a single bird call.
Russ Charif, a biologist in the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program, the source of some of the world’s most advanced natural-sounds recording and analysis tools, explains: “Think of these recorded sounds–the signature double-rap of the ivory-bill or its kent call–as bread crumbs leading a camouflaged photographer to the base of the tree for that once-in-a-lifetime photo.”
Across the room in the bioacoustics lab, earphone-clad analysts watch intently as sound spectrograms–visual representations of sounds–scroll across computer monitors. The analysts pause every few seconds to listen to an “event” that the sound-analysis software has highlighted from thousands of hours of recordings.
Is that really the kent of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker? Or is it just a nuthatch, or even a Snow Goose, with a similar vocalization? Back in 1831, the ivory-bill’s nasal sound reminded John James Audubon of “a high, false note on a clarinet.” One 21st century birder said an ivory-bill sounds “like a nuthatch on steroids.”
Slate’s explainer article is here. You can read the Cornell report here.
In The Washington Times, Gene Mueller opines on the apparently persistent destruction of rivers in ecoComputing’s home state, Virginia.
But when the state of Virginia talks about a persistent fish kill that has severely reduced the adult smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish population in more than 100 miles of the South Fork and main-stem Shenandoah River, that’s news indeed. Over the years, Virginia has seen more than its share of troubled waters. Sometimes it stands accused of simply looking on in the name of supporting businesses and not doing a whole lot about its polluted waters.
Years ago, a DuPont chemical plant was said to have dumped mercury into the Shenandoah. No one went to jail over this. In the 1970s, a chemical company in Hopewell dumped deadly Kepone into the James River. Did anybody see prison time for this? No.
And there have been whispers over the decades that the historic Rappahannock was the recipient of illegal dumping of questionable liquids. The same holds true of the South Holston River.
The entire editorial can be found here.
Six states in the northeast, including Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, have sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over water use rules for power plants, claiming that they favor business interests at the expense of environmental damage.
Arguments are expected in March, said Mike Rubin, chief of the environmental unit at the Rhode Island attorney general’s office.
The states want the court to throw out a section of the EPA rule they say would allow power plant operators to avoid installing technology that would vastly reduce the amount of water a plant needs to draw. The current regulations let plants continue to take in large amounts of water, as long as they restore any environmental damage they cause.
“It says in effect if it’s an already polluted water body, then there’s not much benefit to stopping since the fish are already dead,” he said.
The report from Newsday is available here.