EcocentricUncategorized
Will the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a genetically modified salmon for sale in supermarkets around the country? Bet on it. Members of a federal advisory group in Maryland heard testimony on Sunday and Monday from scientists, environmentalists and businesspeople on the safety of AquaAdvantage salmon, a new brand that would …
EcocentricUncategorized
Everybody makes ill-informed decisions. This photograph, taken at a popular tourist stop in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, is a testament to a recent one of mine. Photos like these are the bread and butter of the so-called “Tiger Temple,” a sprawling monastery-cum-wildlife-sanctuary a few hours outside Bangkok, which functions both as a …
EcocentricOil
Looks like Ecocentric may need to find something new to write about. On Sunday morning retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen—who may need to find a new job soon—made it official: BP’s blown Macondo well has now been killed. After the long-awaited relief well successfully intersected the original well a couple of days ago, it was …
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 …
EcocentricOil
In what was possibly the most anticipated intersection between two shafts in U.S. history, the government announced late Thursday that BP’s relief well had finally connected with the company’s original blown well. That will allow BP to go ahead and place a final cement seal on the original well—finally, truly, really killing it. “The …
EcocentricWeather
A new report released by Oxfam this week has some good news and some bad news for the state of world hunger. The good news: last year, the FAO recorded the first significant dent in world hunger in 15 years, with a decrease from a record 1.02 billion people going hungry in 2009 after the global food crisis down to 925 million this …
EcocentricUncategorized
An environmental breakthrough has never sounded so….delicious. Today, candy giant Mars Inc, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and IBM announced that they have mapped a preliminary genome sequence for the cacao plant, which produces the crucial ingredient for making chocolate, and placed it in the public domain.
EcocentricWildlife
Wild tigers are dying. There’s no other word for it. Their numbers have declined in the wild from perhaps 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, to more than 10,000 in the 1980s to less than 3,500 today. Their habitat in India, Russia, China and Southeast Asia has been carved up, their prey has been taken away from them and tigers …
EcocentricOil
If you’re curious about how the endgame of the oil spill is going—it’s still ending—check out a piece I had over the weekend on the Time.com mainpage. Now I’m beginning to think hockey season could get underway before the relief well is finally completed.
EcocentricUncategorized
When we think about the climate, we think about the atmosphere. Changes in the atmosphere—winds, clouds, precipitation, even thunderstorms—seem to give us weather, and it’s the accumulation of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is gradually warming the planet. But the atmosphere is just one part of the climate …
