EcocentricEndangered Species
Whether on television or in the real world, it seems like the Tasmanian devil just can’t catch a break. In Robert McKimson’s Looney Tunes of the 1950s, the devil “Taz” was little more than a dim-witted glutton; in the Australian forest, the animal has been tethered to the endangered species list for over a decade by a deadly …
EcocentricHealth
How do you decide which environmental issues to pursue? I know I definitely put too much store in social context: what my friends, the media, and my favorite politicians – and, embarrassingly, celebrities – are talking about. If people are talking about climate change and factory farming over lunch, then that’s got to be the …
EcocentricWildlife
It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there’s something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren’t actually “flying rodents,” but you likely won’t see them on the …
EcocentricHealth
Over on Healthland, I have a gallery looking at the various ways that unchecked warming might harm human health. It’s pegged to a recent push by the major health organizations in the U.S. to draw attention to climate change. If environmentalism doesn’t work as a motivating force, maybe health will. Check it out here.
EcocentricTechnology
A government-run institute in Malaysia announced this week that it had released 6000 genetically modified mosquitoes into an uninhabited patch of forest in December to combat dengue fever.
The experiment, which is now over, was aimed at controlling the local mosquito population by having altered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes mate …
EcocentricHealth
In this week’s Science, researchers led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona and Preston Marx of the Tulane National Primate Research Center looked at the history of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)—the primate precursor to HIV—and found that the disease may be thousands of years older than scientists originally …
EcocentricEcocentric
As if we needed further proof that chopping down the Amazon was a bad idea, a new study suggests that deforestation in Brazil had led to an increased incidence of disease.
Writing in the current (June 16, 2010) online issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, a team of scientists from the University of …
