EcocentricEnergy
There are many questions surrounding the practice of shale gas drilling—and especially the hydraulic fracturing methods used to get the gas. But it really all boils down to one issue: trust. Do Americans trust gas companies to drill in a responsible way and minimize the risk of any accidents or contamination? And perhaps more …
EcocentricWater
I have a piece in the dead-tree TIME this week on the months-long drought in the South—subscribers of the print and digital versions of TIME can access it here. (And the rest of you can go buy a magazine—or at least an iPad app.) The photos that went along with the piece—by the photographer George Steinmetz—are brilliant, …
EcocentricWater
As I wrote in this week’s Going Green column, the American South is gripped by a terrible dry spell, one lasting for months. In Texas alone, 99.93% of the country is in some state of drought. These are extreme times—and they call for extreme measures. Like drinking urine—sort of.
In a sense, that’s what one Texas town is ready …
EcocentricWildlife
It’s easy enough to get the public interested in the great apes when you plaster James Franco’s handsome face on a movie poster and promise visual effects on the level of Lord of the Rings and King Kong. But these animals get other types of attention too – the wrong kind. On Sunday a baby mountain gorilla named Ihirwe was …
EcocentricWaste
Keizo Ishii grabs a dosimeter from a table and strides over to a lump of uprooted grass. It’s a blazing August day in Fukushima City. The professor of nuclear engineering, an with the aura of a mad scientist as sweat drips from his brow and gray hair wisps out from under his baseball cap, has come from Tohoku University in Sendai to …
EcocentricUncategorized
We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around – we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other incarnations of the weird and wonderful. But sometimes it’s easy to overlook the hardworking folks behind these discoveries, and it …
EcocentricWildlife
Flirting is fun, but it can be costly – at least, when you try too hard. In the case of one rather unfortunate North African bird, too much flirting actually causes faster aging. The more the spunky male Houbara bustards use their flamboyant mating tactics – which involve flared-up feathers and somewhat manic running around – the …
EcocentricHealth
Call it slipper security. To get clearance into the food radiation testing center at Fukushima Agricultural Technology Center, you have to change shoes three times. The first time, you get a black pair. The second time, after your heels are scanned by a Geiger counter and deemed radiation-free, you change into a pair of plastic house …
EcocentricWildlife
The new film The Rise of the Planet of the Apes—a title with way too many prepositions—asks us to accept an absurd premise: James Franco as a genius neuroscientist. Oh, and it also expects us to accept the possibility that apes could become super-smart, enabling them to overthrow humanity as the dominant species on the planet, …
The tiny Lego figurines aboard the Juno spacecraft are just the latest in a long line of bizarre items sent to the final frontier
