If life were a Michael Bay movie, the moment this week when Russian scientists finally drilled into the subglacial Lake …
Research
Scientists: We Want More Children
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 …
Sticker Shock: What Extreme Weather Costs the U.S.
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, …
Is High-Speed Evolution an Answer to Climate Change?
Maybe, like Al Gore, you believe we are our own worst enemies in battling climate change. You too might think politicians manufacture denial-rhetoric to appease special interest groups, that industries are stubborn and cowardly in their resistance to the facts, and that the media sees science as a playground for concocting deception …
More Warming, More Rain, More Plague
Most of us learned about “the plague” or “the Black Death” a long time ago – reading Boccaccio and Petrarch, sitting in high school history class, and even from that debate about the nursery rhyme “ring-a-ring of roses.” But scientists have uncovered a link between this historic threat to human health and one that only …
How Whale Songs Rocket to Number One
There’s no accounting for musical taste — particularly when the kind of music you’re talking about doesn’t even originate in your own species. Bird songs may be lovely, but whale songs? Say what you will about the combination of whoops, clicks groans and faintly flatulent rumbles that whales use to communicate and woo, the odds are …
Politics: Celebrating the Passage of a Science Bill
For all the complaints about government gridlock, the 111th Congress proved to be incredibly productive, passing health care legislation, an unprecedented stimulus, major tax cuts, allowing gays in the military and vindicating a landmark arms control treaty. When President Obama addressed the press before Christmas, he celebrated those …
Energy: DOE Secretary Steven Chu Talks Up the “Sputnik Moment” for Energy Research
Readers of this blog will know that one of my pet issues is energy research and innovation. The U.S. invests an obscenely low amount of federal money on basic energy research—perhaps $5 billion a year, not counting one-time stimulus spending, compared to $30 billion and north of $70 billion annually for medicine and defense …
