The Bee Buzz

Polar Bears in Antartica?

gukurup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:13:21 +0000

They could be pals with the pinguins

Last-Ditch Resort: Move Polar Bears to Antarctica?

So why not pack a few off to Antarctica, where the sea ice will never run out?

Once dismissed as wrongheaded and dangerous, assisted colonization — rescuing vanishing species by moving them someplace new — is now being discussed by serious conservationists. And no wonder: Caught between climate change and human pressure, species are going extinct 100 times faster than at any point in human history.

Supermarkets Throwing Away 2 Million Tons Of Food A Year

gukurup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:56:27 +0000

We visited a dozen stores over several nights last week to check what was being thrown away and discovered hundreds of pounds worth of food dumped.

At a Sainsbury’s superstore next to the Dome in Greenwich, South East London – the chain’s flagship “environmentally-friendly” shop with its own wind turbines – staff said it was standard practice to throw away food before its sell-by date. And they’re not even allowed to take it home.

One said: “Someone just stands there and throws it into the skip. We wish we could buy it – but we’re not allowed.”

Pointing to meat on the “reduced” shelf, he added: “Come midnight, anything that hasn’t been sold will get taken off the shelf… if it’s out of date it will be logged on the computer, put against our losses, then in the skip.”

Four-pint bottles of milk with nine days still to run had been thrown out, along with nine cans of cola with a date stamp of April 2009.

clipped from www.sundaymirror.co.uk

A Sunday Mirror investigation has found major chains dump enough food to feed 6.3million people a year.

And our check of supermarket bins found that much of the grub they chuck out is not even past its sell-by date.

This week Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged families to be more frugal and not waste their food – but our survey shows how stores are the real villains.

Last night Friends of the Earth called for tougher measures from the Government to force supermarkets to clean up their act.

“The true cost of this waste is passed on to customers in prices and the environment in landfill, while the supermarkets’ profits continue to soar.”

According to a report by the Sustainable Development Commission, supermarkets throw away 1.6million tons of food annually.

Workers told our reporters there were simply not enough staff to reduce the prices, so it was sent to landfill, often still wrapped in plastic – which will stop it rotting and take decades to decompose.

500 Billion Tons of Prehistoric Organic Matter May Massively Accelerate ‘Global Warming’

gukurup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:52:08 +0000

While some dismiss the 52-year-old as an alarmist crank, his theory is steadily gaining credibility in the scientific community. “There’s quite a bit of truth in it,” Julian Murton, member of the International Permafrost Association, told Reuters. “The methane and carbon dioxide levels will increase as a result of permafrost degradation.”

clipped from www.dailygalaxy.com

For thousands of years animal waste, and other organic matter left behind on the Arctic tundra, have been sealed off from the environment by permafrost.

Now climate change is melting the permafrost and freeing mass quantities of prehistoric “ooze” from its state of suspended animation.

Russian scientist, Sergei Zimov, has been studying climate change in Russia’s Arctic for 30 years now. He is worried that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will drastically accelerate global warming predictions even beyond some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

“This will lead to a type of global warming which will be impossible to stop,”

microbes that have been dormant for thousands of years will spring back
into action. They’ll begin once again to emit carbon dioxide and
methane gas as a by-product.

“Permafrost areas hold 500 billion tons of carbon, which can fast turn into greenhouse gases

Vertical Garden: The art of organic architecture

gukurup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:50:25 +0000

Growing greenery on walls of all shapes and sizes.

clipped from pingmag.jp

Patrick Blanc overgrows the vertical surfaces of buildings in the most beautiful way. What he creates is far away from any fancy horticultural show, his Vertical Garden could rather be called eco-art, or greener architecture consisting of a variety of plants trailing gently up any interior or outside wall. Imagine the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon but this time on modern concrete buildings. But Patrick is not just simpy putting green on the walls which last for a day or two: set up with a highly scientific background he studies the many ways plants adapt to extreme situations at the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris since 1982. Let’s have a closer look at these organic wallpapers of botanist Patrick Blanc today.

There’s no soil involved at all?

Plants don’t need soil in any situation because the soil is merely nothing more than a mechanic support.

Green Tours

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:24:33 +0000

Award-winning Cutting-Edge Green Tours of London

from EcoStreet by Cate Trotter

Bored of the same old tourist routes around London? Insider London, the brainchild of Ecostreet’s own Cate Trotter, has been set up to show you all the pioneering, modern goings-on in the city. The Cutting-Edge Green Tour is the first of the business’s range of innovative tours, taking in sexy products, gorgeous shops, futuristic architecture and inspiring communities.

The tour has been praised for being a great new way to explore the city, as well as being a crash course in the numerous ways to approach more sustainable living. Customers enjoy the tour’s different, eye-opening take on London and love discovering its new, previously overlooked sides. Foreign visitors also find it’s a great way to orient themselves in the city, being led overground from the East End and along the South Bank…

The Food Insecurity Increases

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:58:47 +0000

Worldwide Hunger and Food Insecurity Rise Dramatically

Friday July 11, 2008

The number people in 70 of the world’s lower income countries who are “food insecure” and live with persistent hunger increased by more than 130 million people between 2006 and 2007—from 849 million to 982 million—according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

People who are food insecure consume less than 2,100 calories daily, the nutritional target set by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In its 2006 Food Security Assessment, the USDA predicted that the number of hungry and malnourished people worldwide would fall to 800 million by 2017. In the 2007 report, however, the agency had to revise its previous conclusion, and now estimates that the number of food-insecure people in developing countries will expand to 1.2 billion within a decade.

Grain prices rose about 50 percent between 2005 and 2007, and USDA long-term projections indicate about 90 percent of the price increase will persist over the next 10 years, thanks in part to the biofuel boom and to increased consumption of grain-fed meat by the rapidly expanding Asian middle class.

Rising food and fuel prices have put pressure on many developing nations—especially those in sub-Saharan Africa—where the cost of food often accounts for more than 50 percent of total household expenses, and where the higher cost of importing energy is making it harder for many countries to import much-needed food.

The Evolution Of Dragon

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:37:19 +0000

The Dragon on Ishtar’s Gate

The

Evolution of

the Dragon

by G. Elliot Smith

[1919]

Contents
Start Reading
Page Index
Text [Zipped]

This is a set of three connected essays on the symbolism
and development of the concept of the dragon in world mythology.
The author, Grafton Elliot Smith (b. 1871, d. 1937), was Australian by birth,
and an anatomist by profession.
Smith wrote this while a Professor of Anatomy in Manchester,
doing ground-breaking work on the evolution of the primate brain.
He also treated veterans of WWI and did some of the earliest
work on ’shell-shock,’ today known as post-traumatic
stress disorder.

His views on the origin of culture have not fared as well.
Smith was a diffusionist, a school of thought popular in the late 19th
and early 20th century which attempted to trace diverse cultural phenomena to
unitary geographic points of origin.
One example of this is Donnelly’s
Atlantis, which Donnelly proposed
was the mother of all cultures.
Smith, a bit more mainstream, traced the development of megalithic
culture to Egypt, radiating out to distant lands, including America.
Today, we know that megalithic culture preceded ancient Egyptian civilization,
in some places by millennia, and developed independently
in widely spaced geographic locations.

In this book, a compilation of three lecture series which he delivered
shortly after WWI, Smith proposed a theory of how the dragon originated
as a representation of the Mother Goddess,
a symbol of the power and mystery of nature, and later evolved into
a symbol of evil, turning into the prototype for the Christian devil.
He uses linguistic, ethnographic, and biological data to bolster his theory.
While in some respects a difficult book, depending on one’s attention span,
it is also a browser’s delight.
We learn about the origin of clothing, the water of immortality which Gilgamesh sought, and the symbolism, folklore and biology of the octopus, mandrake, pearls, cowry shells, etc.
In particular, students of comparative mythology will enjoy this book,
even if they reject Smith’s hyperdiffusionist views…

Odd-Looking Marine Animals (You Never Knew Existed)

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:24:55 +0000

clipped from www.darkroastedblend.com

10 creatures, each one step short of an alien life form

They exist. Don’t ask “why”, just accept their unbelievable strangeness and the
fact that other surreal creatures (who knows how many!) may inhabit the oceanic
depths, of which we have only explored a tiny fraction.

1. Leafy Sea Dragon

Whatever you do, don’t put it in your salad.

2. Umbrella Mouth Gulper Eel

Here is a creature from the underwater gates of hell.

The umbrella mouth gulper eel
(eurypharynx pelecanoides) can open its “umbrella mouth” to pelican-like
proportion, accommodating prey much larger than its size.

3. Firefly Squid

This squid sees the world in color. And it makes deep-blue pretty light itself.

4. Viperfish

Now we come to the section featuring deep sea beauties

The viperfish (chauliodus
sloani) is can grow to over half a meter in size

Here is an angler fish - with its stomach in its mouth

5. Fangtooth, or Ogre Fish

6. Hatchetfish

7. Christmas-Tree Worm

8. Giant Basket Star

9. Furry Sea Cucumber

10. Flamingo Tongue Snail

Dust Storms In Sahara Desert Sustain Life In Atlantic Ocean

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:18:02 +0000

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com

Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Working aboard research vessels in the Atlantic, scientists mapped the distribution of nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen and investigated how organisms such as phytoplankton are sustained in areas with low nutrient levels.

They found that plants are able to grow in these regions because they are able to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan dust storms. This allows them to use organic or ‘recycled’ material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous – an essential component of DNA – in the ocean are low.

“These findings are important because plant life cycles are essential in maintaining the balance of gases in our atmosphere. In looking at how plants survive in this area, we have shown how the Atlantic is able to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the growth of photosynthesising plants.”

An alien’s eye view of the Earth

gukurup — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:15:46 +0000

“The Deep Impact spacecraft recorded the video, which shows the moon passing in front of the Earth, from more than 31 million miles away.”

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk

A Nasa spacecraft has taken the most detailed video footage yet of how the Earth would look to alien species, providing scientists with an insight into how they might be able to spot other planets that may be supporting life.

NASA video: Lunar transit of Earth

The Deep Impact spacecraft recorded the video, which shows the moon passing in front of the Earth, from more than 31 million miles away.

The images provide enough detail to see large craters on the
moon along with the continents on the Earth behind. Michael A’Hearn, principal
investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission, said: ““Making a video of
Earth from so far away helps the search for other live-bearing planets in the
Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would
appear to us.”

A “sun glint” can also be seen in the movie – caused by the
light reflected from the Earth’s ocean.

“Our video shows some specific features that are important for observations of
Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.