Biology
Breach
April 26, 2012, from Muncie Star Press
An Indianapolis woman apparently took Sunday's celebration of Earth Day very seriously.
Andrea Jane Ginther, 44, told authorities she was driving on Muncie's south side on Sunday afternoon when she saw a woman "toss a piece of paper on the ground."
Ginther, according to a Muncie Police Department report, said she "does not take littering lightly," and stopped to confront the alleged litterer.
When two city police officers arrived at Memorial Drive and Mulberry Street a few minutes later, they reported finding Ginther punching the other woman in the face.
April 26, 2012, from HuffingtonPost
... The corn has been genetically engineered to be immune to 2,4-D, an ingredient used in Agent Orange that some say could pose a serious threat to the environment and to human health. Approval by the United States Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency would allow farmers to spray it far and wide without damaging their crops, boosting productivity for the agribusiness giant.
Dow and its allies have insisted that their product is well tested, while industry regulators have so far overlooked critics' concerns....
"The scientific community has sounded alarms about the dangers of 2,4-D for decades," wrote opponents in their letter to Vilsack. "Numerous studies link 2,4-D exposure to major health problems such as cancer, lowered sperm counts, liver toxicity and Parkinson's disease. Lab studies show that 2,4-D causes endocrine disruption, reproductive problems, neurotoxicity, and immunosuppression."
Some farmers have argued that the new herbicide, a combination of 2,4-D and glyphosate -- the active ingredient in Monsanto's bestselling Roundup weed killer -- is necessary to combat weeds that have become resistant to glyphosate alone.
April 26, 2012, from ScienceDaily
After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. That meant that decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said....
[D]ata collected from just the surface of the water commonly underestimates the total amount of plastic in the water by an average factor of 2.5. In high winds the volume of plastic could be underestimated by a factor of 27....
Proskurowski gathered data on a 2010 North Atlantic expedition where he and his team collected samples at the surface, plus an additional three or four depths down as far as 100 feet.
"Almost every tow we did contained plastic regardless of the depth," he said.
April 26, 2011, from London Guardian
A consortium of Ukrainian and international scientists is making an urgent call for a $13.5m (£8.28m) programme to prevent potentially catastrophic wildfires inside the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl's ruined nuclear power plant.
The fear is that fires in the zone could release clouds of radioactive particles that are, at the moment, locked up in trees, held mainly in the needles and bark of Scots pines....If there is a catastrophic or "crown" fire (a high-intensity wildfire affecting a large part of the CEZ) radionuclides could be dispersed over a wide area; a big fire could send radioactivity as far as Britain.
April 26, 2011, from Indiana University
Indiana University scientists have found chemical flame retardants in the blood of pet dogs at concentrations five to 10 times higher than in humans, but lower than levels found in a previous study of cats.
Their study, "Flame Retardants in the Serum of Pet Dogs and in their Food," appears this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Authors are Marta Venier, an assistant research scientist in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Ronald Hites, a Distinguished Professor in SPEA. Venier and Hites explore whether pets could serve as "biosentinels" for monitoring human exposure to compounds present in the households that they share. Dogs may be better proxies than cats, they say, because a dog's metabolism is better equipped to break down the chemicals.
April 26, 2009, from Baltimore Sun
Federal biologists checking the upper Potomac River have found that abnormalities in bass there are even more widespread than they'd earlier reported. But they're no nearer to understanding what's causing it.
At least 82 percent of male smallmouth bass and 23 percent of the largemouth bass had immature female germ cells in their reproductive organs, according to a release by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey. Abnormalities also were found in some female fish.... Scientists think the abnormalities may be linked to hormone-like chemicals in medicines and a variety of consumer products. They had theorized that the contaminants, known as endocrine disruptors, were getting in the river from wastewater treatment plants that discharge into it. But the problems are not limited to areas downstream from sewage plants, they found.
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Climate
Chaos
April 26, 2014, from Delhi Daily
Harvard University's Professor Robert Stavins said that around 75 per cent of a section on the impact of international climate negotiations was removed. It is to be noted that Stavins was involved in compiling the report.
Prof Stavins, a leading expert on climate negotiations at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has also written to the organisers of the Berlin meeting last week to express his "disappointment and frustration" at the IPCC's decision to remove the information.
"I fully understand that the government representatives were seeking to meet their own responsibilities toward their respective governments by upholding their countries' interests, but in some cases this turned out to be problematic for the scientific integrity of the IPCC summary for policy makers," he said.
April 26, 2012, from Associated Press
Antarctica's massive ice shelves are shrinking because they are being eaten away from below by warm water, a new study finds. That suggests that future sea levels could rise faster than many scientists have been predicting.
The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren't exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role -- but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air.
April 26, 2011, from Alaska Dispatch
What Americans believe about climate change depends almost entirely on their political affiliation and not their scientific understanding, according to a new national study that found the same dynamic in two regions of Southeast Alaska.
Democrats who claim knowledge of the issue appear to be in firm agreement with the nation's leading scientific organizations -- that human activity and greenhouse gas emissions have become the main drivers behind an accelerating global climate shift.
But Republicans don't buy it. While most do agree that the climate has begun to change, they mostly blame the phenomenon on natural forces that lie beyond human control.
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Resource
Depletion
April 26, 2009, from The East African
Lawlessness off the Somalia coast involving overfishing and toxic-waste dumping is being ignored amidst the uproar over attacks on international shipping, some analysts are charging. For years, Somalis had complained to the United Nations and the European Union "when the marine resources of Somalia were pillaged, when the waters were poisoned, when the fish was stolen, creating poverty in the whole country," Kenyan writer Mohamed Abshir Waldo, told a national radio audience in the United States last week. "They were totally ignored." Beth Tuckey, an activist with the African Faith and Justice Network in Washington, wrote in a recent commentary that focusing solely on one kind of piracy – “holding ships and people for ransom” – distorts the actual situation of Somalis living on the coast.
"Having over-fished in their own oceans, many European, Middle Eastern and Asian fishing companies perceived the 1991 state collapse in Somalia as an opening to begin business in foreign waters," Ms Tuckey said. "Large trawlers appeared off the coast, scraping up $300 million worth of seafood every year, depriving coastal Somalis of their livelihood and subsistence. Foreign corporations also saw it as a great location to discreetly dump barrels of toxic waste, thereby causing death and disease among the Somali population."
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Recovery
April 26, 2012, from Associated Press
In a boost to animal welfare activists looking to get livestock out of cramped cages, Burger King will be the first major U.S. fast-food chain to give all of its chickens and pigs some room to roam.
On Wednesday, the world's second-biggest burger chain pledged that all of its eggs and pork will come from cage-free chickens and pigs by 2017, hoping to satisfy rising consumer demand for humanely produced fare and increase its sales in the process.
April 26, 2011, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology via ScienceDaily
Researchers at MIT have found a way to make significant improvements to the power-conversion efficiency of solar cells by enlisting the services of tiny viruses to perform detailed assembly work at the microscopic level...that's where viruses come to the rescue. Graduate students Xiangnan Dang and Hyunjung Yi -- working with Angela Belcher, the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy, and several other researchers -- found that a genetically engineered version of a virus called M13, which normally infects bacteria, can be used to control the arrangement of the nanotubes on a surface, keeping the tubes separate so they can't short out the circuits, and keeping the tubes apart so they don't clump.
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