A team of scientists on an expedition to study frogs has found the “rarest frog in the world” in Costa Rica. Thought to be extinct for over 20 years, last year hope was renewed when an individual male from the species was found by one of the team’s researchers. Last week the team found a pregnant female, suggesting that this species is still reproducing and has not been made extinct by a deadly skin fungus that is decimating amphibian populations.Read the rest of this entry »
A Quebec think-tank, the Montreal Economic Institute, recently released a report encouraging bulk water exports from Canada to the United States. The report concludes that Quebec could sip on a cool $65 billion a year by selling just 10% of its ”renewable blue gold” to its thirsty and heavily urbanized southern neighbor. However, the report’s not just making waves in small economic circles, it’s rocking the already-unsteady boat of Canadian public opinion on US export policy.
Since the 1960’s, when Canadians learned of plans to privatize and divert large quantities of Canada’s water, many in the country have been wary that the US will view Canada as a “great, green sponge” and come after its water resources. They may not be far from the mark. Since he came into office, President Bush began using his dry home state of Texas in talks to push then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to turn on the tap of Canada’s water. Past US Ambassador to Canada, Paul Celucci, also made regular attempts to convince Canada that water should be a trade commodity, like oil. Moreover, in a time when much of the American public seems to rely on South Park for information about Canada, there’s very little understanding in the US about Canadians’ sensitivity over the issue of resource exports (and water exports in particular) to the United States.
This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.
What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.
This week from our friends at ZapRoot: The most notorious bicycle thief is caught in Canada. Find out how Green is Joe Biden? Check out a new batch of Alternative Autos.
Christopher and Kerri are a couple and social justice teachers out on a mission. Since the beginning of September 2008, they have been on a unique 30-day experiment on food choices, consumerism, waste, poverty and social psychology - trying to live on a one dollar a day diet.
But this insightful challenge - in their own words - to help us better understand and teach about a variety of concerns, could have been more interesting if it was broader in perspective.
Instead of trying to spend just a dollar on food daily from their comfort in Encinitas, California, where a tub of toothpaste costs $4.99, they should have enlisted a family in, say, Chittagong, Bangladesh or Turkana, Kenya, and asked them to survive on a dollar a day.
After posting a green sex guide this past month to their website, Greenpeace Mexico has seen a notable rise in visitor traffic. Of the 95,000 hits they received last month, almost 9,000 were from people exclusively seeking out the sex guide. While 9,000 does not seem like a big number, the green love-making guide was the article that attracted the most interest on Greenpeace Mexico’s website. Could this be the beginning of a new focus for Greenpeace?
While their sex guide is currently no more than a list of 10 ways to have sex in ecologically friendly ways, perhaps Greenpeace Mexico and the larger organization should keep developing a more substantial resource. Perhaps they have found a strategy that could expand the number of people interested in their mission. Will mixing sex with hardcore conservation pay off (or should it be the opposite way around?)
While in all honesty some of the tips in the guide are a stretch (translation: lame), some of the more interesting green sex guide tips are as follows:
Biofuels war has broken out in Africa. Newspaper headlines have not proclaimed it but the gist of it is already out. Big money profiteers from Europe and United States are rushing to Africa in a new scramble for the continent, transforming large swathes of arable land into massive biofuels plantations.
Local but poor populations in many parts of Africa are increasingly being driven deeper into economic obscurity yet 60% of them still depend on agriculture for survival. Another 60% of that eke out a living by subsistence farming and animal husbandry.
The World Bank has been sitting on a secret report since April that says biofuels are responsible for the global food crisis; food prices have risen 75% because of the impact of the search for alternative fuels through the use of food products.
African civil society is calling for a moratorium on new biofuels investments in Africa amid concern that that the biofuels revolution will bring more food insecurity, higher food prices and hunger to the continent.
Americans are Reportedly Inhaling 10 billion Pounds of Chinese Toxic Fumes Annually
It was reported a few days ago that some 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach within the borders of the US annually, quoting numerous scientific estimates.
But the pollution figures that scientists studying the impact of Asian, and mostly Chinese, environmental waste in the atmosphere have suggested are more than alarming.
The real impact of the Asian Tigers, helped by their giant brother, China, which is now thought to have overtaken the US in emissions of greenhouse gases, may amount to a kind of colonization of the United States, and by extension, North America, potentially destabilizing weather patterns across the North Pacific and masking the effects of global warming.
Dogs have long been accepted as man’s best friend. But nosy ones have provided inspiration to a laser research team working on early cancer detection methods to devise a breathalyzer-type tool that could significantly improve survival rates for suffering millions.
Researchers at University of Oklahoma are reportedly working to create a sensor to detect bio-marker gases exhaled in the breath of a person with cancer, picking up on earlier studies showing that dogs can detect cancer by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.
In a study published two years ago, it was found that dogs identified breast and lung cancer patients with accuracies of 88% and 97%, respectively by smelling breath samples.
It has been proven elsewhere that gas-phase molecules are uniquely associated with cancer but the team will use nanotechnology to improve laser performance and shrink laser systems, which would allow battery-powered operation of a hand held sensor device.
The two tribes lived there in a plum lakeside community when the Sahara Desert, as we know it, was a lush, green country, but were separated by effects of climate change over a time line of 1,000 years.
The mystery of the lost tribes of the green Sahara has been unraveled by a joint team of archaeologists and palaeontologists who were out on a dinosaur-hunting expedition in the Ténéré Desert in present-day Niger but instead stumbled on a large, Stone Age graveyard.
Now whatever little may be known about the Kiffian and Tenerian tribes, thought to have lived in the Sahara between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago are bone harpoons, earthen pots, among other artifacts.
EcoWorldly brings you news on sustainable successes and ecological failures in other countries that offer lessons for green progress in America. Find perspectives and news on the environmental movement from around the world.
A team of scientists on an expedition to study frogs has found the “rarest frog in the world” in Costa Rica. Thought to be extinct for over 20 years, last year hope was renewed when an individual male from the species was found by one of the team’s researchers. Last week the team found a pregnant female, suggesting that this species is still reproducing and has not been made extinct by a deadly skin fungus that is decimating amphibian populations. Read the rest of this entry »
