Monsanto’s losing bet on GM sugar beets has bitter repercussions. Knotty problem: A sugar beetPhoto: GrabeIn 2008, the USDA approved planting of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready sugar beet, equipped with a gene that allows them to withstand unlimited doses of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The sugar trade promised to be a big money maker for genetically modified (GM) seed giant Monsanto, as these beets — a special super-sweet variety, not the kind you find at the farmers market — account for 44 percent of U.S. sugar production. Sure enough, Monsanto rapidly conquered the market. By this year’s spring planting, Monsanto’s patented GM seeds covered a jaw-dropping 95 percent of sugar beet fields. (Monsanto has managed to quietly turn the American sweet tooth into a gold mine — it also dominates the seed market for corn, the source of the number-one U.S. sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup.)
But back in August, Monsanto suffered yet another of a continuing line of setbacks, when a federal judge effectively nixed the USDA’s approval of GM sugar beets. Farmer's feral rice comes from paddy rife with life. NAGOYA – A 70-year-old farmer grows high quality rice on a 7-hectare paddy in Chiba Prefecture that does not require cultivation as he uses plants developed like those in the wild. Compared with other rice fields in the area, Yoshihide Fujisaki’s paddy has many more living creatures, including loaches and frogs. Even birds that prey on them have come to settle on the field. Living creatures tend to be seen as natural enemies of farmers, but to me, they are lovely,” said Fujisaki, proudly holding golden ears of rice ahead of this year’s harvest.
Conserving dynamic ecosystems such as Fujisaki’s paddy is a main item on the agenda at the COP10 international conference taking place in Nagoya through Friday, with negotiators trying to come up with ways to prevent further loss of biodiversity worldwide. Fujisaki’s business shows the value of this diversity. He came up with a “primitive” farming method of making the rice plants wild. Fishermen say the crabs were abundant in the area in the past.
Earthquake. Brazil flood toll: Death toll from flash floods and mudslides tops 400 in Brazil - latimes.com. From Sao Paulo, Brazil, and San Agustin, Colombia — Emergency crews were working feverishly to reach survivors of flash floods and mudslides in Brazil that have killed at least 470 people and left nearly 14,000 homeless after torrential summer rains, authorities said Thursday. Massive mudslides in the heavily damaged mountainous area north of the city of Rio de Janeiro could take until Saturday to clear, increasing fears of a rising death toll as rain remained in the forecast, authorities said.
Many residents were without electricity. Roads were blocked. Cmdr. "The aftermath of the rains was disastrous," Miranda said. Officials said hundreds of people were killed in three Rio state towns after slides occurred about 3 a.m. Aerial television footage showed much of Nova Friburgo covered in mud and detritus. President Dilma Rousseff observed the region by helicopter Thursday and promised "firm action" to bring relief and reconstruction aid to victims. Forget the chill, 2010 was India's hottest year on record. Platform Tracks Dangers to World's Historic Sites. The Global Heritage Fund has launched a web-based global tracking platform that identifies, monitors and communicates threatened sites in developing countries to scientists, governments and local activists.
The Global Heritage Network brings data from Google Earth, Esri, DigitalGlobe together with social networking information to identify at-risk sites in places where the resources for such surveys are in short supply. As Discovery News points out in their coverage, destroyed sites are marked with black spots, sites at immediate risk of destruction (rescue-needed) are red, at-risk sites orange and stable ones are marked with green. So far, 40 of the 80 sites identified as rescue-needed have been supported with threat-and-planning support documents. Those sites include Great Zimbabwe, the old city of Damascus in Syria, Samarra in Iraq and Antigua Guatemala. The value of saving and stabilizing these sites is not strictly intellectual and cultural.
How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick. Anchor Press ConsumptionBy Kevin PattersonPaperback, 400 pagesAnchorList Price: $14.95 Robertson hated what he had been called here to do, and he hated the place where he had to do it. Layers and layers of gray Toronto skyline stretched out from the meeting room windows, devoid of any contour or texture except asphalt, yellow haze, and carefully aligned rows of nursery-planted and regularly replaced trees. He had flown through here in 1967 when he had immigrated, and had spent a week staying in a boardinghouse on Bathurst Street.
In each of the interviews he had had with immigration officials, he was advised to stay on in the city— it was where the future lay, the jobs, the careers. It was a different place now, more different each time he returned. As he had ridden in the taxi from the airport, Robertson found himself resisting his own reappraisal of the place and realized that he had become, in an important way, old.
Resentment is inherited as reliably as an accent. “Well, they might.” Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.: 8 Surprising Facts About Parenting, Genes and What Really Makes Us Who We Are. In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota published a striking finding: About 70 percent of the variance in IQ found in their particular sample of identical twins was found to be associated with genetic variation.
Furthermore, identical twins reared apart were eerily similar to identical twins reared together on various measures of personality, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes. Bouchard's study, along with many others, has painted a consistent picture: Genes matter. The studies say nothing about how they matter, or which genes matter, but they show quite convincingly that they indeed do matter. Genes vary within any group of people (even among the inhabitants of middle-class in Western society), and this variation contributes to variations in these people's behaviors. Let's be clear: Twin studies have received much criticism. Genes, By Themselves, Can't Determine Anything Parents Matter, And Will Always Matter.
Fungus kills bats: White-nose syndrome sweeps across the country, killing bats - latimes.com. Reporting from Ruidoso, N.M. — More than 100 hibernating bats hang from the vaulted ceiling of a chilly gallery in central New Mexico's Fort Stanton Cave, seemingly unaware of the lights from helmet lanterns sweeping over their gargoyle-like faces. The mood is heavy with anxiety as biologists Marikay Ramsey and Debbie Buecher search for signs of white-nose syndrome, a novel, infectious and lethal cold-loving fungus that digests the skin and wings of hibernating bats and smudges their muzzles with a powdery white growth.
"These bats look fine, which is a relief," U.S. Bureau of Land Management endangered animal specialist Ramsey said as she prepared to log the humidity and temperature of the cave in a hand-held computer. "But we still worry that the disease could hit New Mexico this winter or the next. If that happens, we may have to close every cave and abandoned mine in the state. " Biologists across the nation are facing a similarly grim scenario. Scientists keep raising estimates of how much oil is still in the Gulf. How much oil do YOU think is gone from the Gulf? Your guess is as good as the federal government’s.Photo: U.S. Coast GuardWe’re making progress. The big question about the BP leak is no longer the lame “Where’s the oil?”
Now it’s “How much oil is still out there?” The answer? Well, pick a number. Crude math: Today, we have a new estimate, this one from Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer from Florida State University. Judging from past spills in the Gulf, this material will remain potentially harmful for decades. Another expert witness at the hearing, Lisa Suatoni, senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the feds also have some explaining to do on exactly how they’re testing the seafood coming out of the Gulf: Much of the data on contamination in Gulf seafood are not publicly available, so scientists cannot independently review the findings.
But Barack Obama doesn’t want people to forget everything about the BP leak. . … but this is no longer an environmental battle. This is a test. This is only a test. Posted by Ambar Pansari, Product Manager, Search User Experience, and Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience From time to time, we run live experiments on Google — tests visible to a relatively few people -- to discover better ways to search. We do this because there’s no good substitute for understanding how real people, in real-world situations, actually operate. Theories are fine, but “improving the user experience” really happens best when we understand what people do online. So to learn more, we sometimes randomly select a group of people to see a possible improvement to search options. Or we may select a group of people and try out a new element while they're searching.
We are currently testing new ways to refine searches so that, for example, a search for jobs might offer a choice of job location or function, rather than forcing you to continually narrow the terms you type in to a standard Google search. What problems will Chilean miners face? Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter What mental and physical challenges will the trapped Chilean miners face? The 33 miners trapped in a copper and gold mine near San Jose were feared dead until they began tapping on a rescue drill that was boring down to look for them on 22 August. Rescuers are drilling a hole 68 centimetres in diameter - enough to pull a person through - proceeding slowly using diamond tipped drills. It typically takes 10 hours to bore every 300 metres using conventional rotary drills, and the rate slows when drilling through granite or other hard rock.
At the current rate, it could take as long as four months to free the miners. Superdrill technology currently under development, which is capable of drilling through 150 metres of rock per hour, could aid future rescue attempts. Rescuers have drilled two boreholes to pass items down to the trapped miners: food to keep them alive, and letters from family. An additional problem the miners will have to solve is waste disposal. Galicians demand answers over 2002 Prestige oil spill.
27 August 2010Last updated at 00:45 By Sarah Rainsford BBC News, Galicia Galicians want reassurance that the Prestige disaster could never be repeated The coastline of Galicia is green and rugged, dotted with deserted, sandy coves. But this enticing landscape was the site of one of Spain's worst environmental disasters. On 13 November 2002, the Prestige oil tanker ran into trouble just offshore.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote We'd never seen anything that big before... End QuoteFrancisco Iglesias A week later, it broke up, spilling more than 60,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. Now, a 266,000-page report into the accident is finally complete, paving the way for what has been dubbed a "mega-trial" later this year. Unlike the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP is having to foot a huge bill for compensation, the complexities of international shipping meant Spain only recovered a small percentage of the estimated 660m euros ($832m; £541m) worth of damage caused by the Prestige.
Just How Toxic Is That Hungarian Sludge? | 80beats. Ever since the wall burst on a reservoir of industrial waste at a Hungarian alumina plant last week–killing eight people and deluging the countryside with red muck–shocked environmental officials have been scrambling to determine how dangerous the sludge is. It’s common knowledge that the initial torrent was highly basic in pH, which caused hundreds of people to suffer from chemical burns. But once the material was neutralized, the thinking went, the danger should be past. However, Greenpeace activists have been on the ground in Hungary over the past week, and the red mud they’ve collected and analyzed contained twice as much arsenic as expected, as well as surprisingly high levels of mercury and chromium.
The study has met with scepticism from Hungarian chemists, partly because bauxite, the ore from which most aluminium oxide (and ultimately aluminium) is derived, contains neither mercury nor much arsenic. Hopefully a new influx of experts will bring firm answers. Kids who stare at screens have psych problems. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children spend two hours or less at a screen—either computer or television—a day. And, to a large extent, that advice has been supported by studies that show screen time associated with both sedentary behavior and some emotional problems.
But since screen time is generally associated with sitting still, and most studies have relied on self-reported measures of physical activity and media consumption, teasing apart cause and effect has been challenging. Now, a new study indicates that screen time is associated with psychological issues; sitting isn't. The authors recognize the challenges of performing this sort of study up front: self-reported measures of any activity, from exercise to TV viewing, tend to be biased, and there are a set of interconnected factors that influence childhood behavior that can be extremely difficult to untangle.
However, the UK researchers designed their study to avoid as many of these as possible. The world as the eagle and the wild goose see it. One-hundred and fifty years ago today, on October 13, 1860, James Wallace Black shot the earliest still-existing aerial photograph in the U.S. He took the picture from a hot air balloon suspended above Boston Common, and the result, titled "Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It," is truly beautiful. The photo is part of the archive at the venerable Boston Public Library, along with other important historical images of the Boston area, and is particularly significant because most of the area visible in the photo was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1872. James Wallace Black, Balloon View of Boston, 1860.
From the collections of the Boston Public Library, Print Department, Boston Pictorial Archive. Flash forward 150 years: Aerial imagery is widely available and used in countless professions, from archaeology to conceptual art. We at Google owe James Wallace Black a debt of gratitude; without his early experimentation with aerial imagery, Google Earth may never have come to be.
Alcohol in the Brain. Alcohol has two principle actions in the brain . First, it enhances the widespread inhibitory effects of the neurotransmitter GABA and acts as a depressant on the entire central nervous system. For this reason, in the 19th century, alcohol was widely used as a general anesthetic. Unfortunately, the duration of its depressant action on the brain was too long and could not be controlled easily or safely. The effective dose for surgical analgesia using alcohol is very close to its lethal dose. In ancient times, there is ample evidence that alcohol was tested for its potential benefits beyond being a source of nutrition .
Second, alcohol inhibits the brain's principle excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate. The impairment in the function by GABA and glutamate also explains why our most complex behaviors are lost first. As the alcohol concentration in the brain increases, more and more neural systems are turned off. BBC - Earth News - Mountain gorilla numbers have increased, census reveals. High court won't stop start of NJ bear hunt. Targeting Practices: How Can Online Advertising Companies Be Kept from Tracking Web Surfers?