EcocentricWildlife
There are a lot of perks that come with being a primate. You get to be smart. You get to be social. You get to have opposable thumbs — which are very handy things to have. Most of all, you get to keep living even during hard times. If the history of humans indicates anything, it’s that we’re survivors, and a new study is showing just …
EcocentricEndangered Species
Getting out of harm’s way isn’t easy when you’re a plant. If the water is rising or a fire is approaching, anything that can run, fly or slither can at least move to higher ground. But trees and other vegetation are pretty much stuck. That’s at least true with high-speed, real-time dangers like floods, but a slow motion disaster—global …
EcocentricTechnology
To hear Richard Branson tell it, your next vacation will be in space. On Friday, Branson, the swashbuckling CEO of Virgin Airlines and the newer Virgin Galactic, cut the ribbon on a 2-mi. (3.2 km) runway in La Cruces, N.M., which will be used in as little as 18 months, he promises, to begin carrying paying tourists into suborbital …
EcocentricFood
Bees have had it hard for the past few years. Ever since 2006, entomologists and other scientists in the U.S., Europe and Asia have been trying to figure out what’s causing wholesale deaths of of once-healthy hives—an epidemic that’s wiped out from 20% to 60% of colonies in the affected areas. Now, according to a paper published in the …
EcocentricOil
Sometimes a President can’t catch a break—a lesson the current, beleaguered resident of the Oval Office keeps learning. The latest bit of bad news came from a commission the President himself appointed back in the spring to study the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama announced the creation of the study group on May …
EcocentricUncategorized
It’s not easy to spot an insect from space, but NASA has figured out a way to do it—sort of. Long before the confected debate on whether climate change was real or just a theory was resolved in favor of science, the space agency was turning the eyes of its weather satellites on the problem, looking at global temperature and …
EcocentricWildlife
It just got harder to be a fish—at least a Canadian fish. Or at least a Canadian fish looking for a mate. That’s because more and more of the boys keep turning into girls. As with so many other things, it’s humans who are to blame.
The human household environment is awash in chemicals—preservatives, plastics, drugs, cosmetics and …
EcocentricUncategorized
Enjoying the summer of 2010 so far—with its record-setting heat and stultifying humidity? Hate to see it all come to an end? Not to worry: there should be plenty more like it, and that’s especially true if you live in a big city like those on the east coast that have been so hard-hit by this summer’s sizzlers.
It may be no surprise …
EcocentricUncategorized
Michigan is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of oil spills. But as of Monday, add the state to the list of those laying booms, scrambling cleanup teams and otherwise trying to stanch the flow of thick crude leaking from a busted oil pipe. And add that spill to yet another new gusher the Gulf of Mexico—this one …
EcocentricOil
The numbers tell the story better than anything else could: after 85 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes, oil at last stopped flowing from BP’s busted well in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the evening of April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, between 93.5 million and 184.3 million gallons of crude have been spilled—blowing the …
