Archive for February, 2008A fifty-foot-long Jurassic predator known as “The Monster” and powerful enough to bite a car in half is the largest marine reptile known to science. A rare Amur leopard cub has finally ventured out into the world at a British zoo today. WASHINGTON (February 8, 2008) — In a move that could prove disastrous for America’s forests, open lands and wildlife, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) introduced a bill late Wednesday to strip environmental safeguards from the recently signed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, according to scientists and policy experts from leading environmental and conservation organizations. The organizations committed to fighting the attack on clean biofuels joined together with this statement: “But the Herseth bill would strip critical environmental protections from the Energy Bill and turn biofuels done right into biofuels done dirty.” The Grand Canyon will be flooded artificially in an attempt to revive a fragile ecosystem that was altered by the construction of a dam more than four decades ago. Bovine TB must be tackled by all methods available, including a badger cull, or the taxpayer could face a bill of ?1bn by 2013, MPs have said. In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics–in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting–had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls. Have the sneaking suspicion that the daffodils (or fritillaria) are cropping up earlier in your yard? Prove it.Project BudBurst–a joint effort of several national science organizations, including the USGS and UCAR as well as institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden–aims to enlist “citizen-scientists” to monitor blooming, or to give the activity its scientific name, phenology.Starting today (which is good because there are already buds on my cherry tree, I cannot lie) citizen scientists can record their observations online at www.budburst.org. For those journalists who have been monitoring “clean coal” technology over the last few years, it was no surprise to hear that the U.S. A last we can store vast amounts of wind energy and use it when we need it, as New Scientist reports The International Energy Agency calls for limits on growth of energy demand for the first time |
