EcocentricWaste
So you’re one of the lucky ones who received an iPhone 4 (or iPad, or Kindle, or Android) for the holidays. After you get over your initial excitement and manage to set up your new digital plaything (here’s a tip—buy a protective case), you still have one more task before you: get rid of your old electronics, which suddenly look so …
EcocentricEcocentric
So far 2011 has not treated Australia well. Vast areas of the county’s northeastern Queensland state have been hit by some of the worst flooding on record. Tremendous rains—thanks in part to an unusually strong La Nina weather pattern—fell in late December, triggering floods that have affected half the state’s 715,000 sq. mi. …
EcocentricWildlife
Scientists call it the Beepocalyspe. (OK, not scientists, but I like to call it that.) In late 2006, whole hives of honey bees began dying overnight for reasons that are still unclear. Scientists called it colony-collapse disorder (CCD), and it’s as scary as it is mysterious. Adult bees simply leave the hive, ostensibly in search of …
On the last day of 2010, a miniature panda cow was born on a Colorado farm, the product of years of crossbreeding to create one of 24 known cows with panda-like coloring. TIME takes a look at other animals in miniature form
EcocentricHealth
iPhone users around the world experienced a rude awakening on New Year’s Day. Or rather, they didn’t—because of a glitch in the iPhone’s calendar software, alarms set over the weekend failed to go off, causing tens of thousands of people around the world to be late, at least according to the tweets. It’s unclear just how widespread …
EcocentricRegulation
Over on the Time.com homepage, I have a piece on the coming war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and power sources—the first of which began on January 2. Regulation will be the story for climate politics in the U.S. this year—check out the piece here.
EcocentricUncategorized
Some time late in 2011—at least according to the people-crunchers at the U.N. Population Reference Bureau—humanity will reach a new demographic milestone with the birth of the 7th billion living person. (As a measure of just how fast global population is growing, the 6th billionth living person—Bosnian Adnan Nevic—is only 11.) …
EcocentricWeather
Yesterday afternoon, as we were closing this week’s issue of Time, I ended up in a debate with one of my editors over how the air travel system had responded to a December of terrible weather. I’d written a short piece coming out in the magazine describing the travel Armageddon the storm had created for airline passengers—not just …
EcocentricUncategorized
The AP is reporting that Zhao Lianhai, the father arrested for protesting China’s tainted milk scandal after his son fell ill with kidney stones, may have been released on medical parole.
If it’s true, however, it’s unclear what the conditions of his release are; his lawyer told the news wire that he had been unable to reach Zhao since …
EcocentricOil
Over at the New York Times, resident libertarian-contrarian John Tierney has a column about a bet he took in 2005 with the late energy analyst Matthew Simmons. Simmons—the author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy—was a prominent believer in peak oil, the theory that we’ve reached the end …
