| Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding In June the famed Lucy fossil arrived in New York City. The 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis could attract hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of her four-month engagement--part of a six-year tour that began in 2007.Before this tour, Lucy had never been on public display outside of Ethiopia. One might expect scholars of human evolution to be delighted by the opportunity to share the discipline’s crown jewel with so many members of the science-interested public. But news reports announcing her New York debut included the same objections that aired when she first landed in the U.S.: namely, that the bones could sustain damage and that the tour takes a key specimen out of scientific circulation for too long. Indeed, some major museums turned the exhibit away in part for those reasons. [More] rss.sciam.com |
House and Senate Prevent "Cow Tax" House and Senate conferees on the appropriations bill funding U.S. EPA for fiscal 2010 approved an amendment yesterday to block agency efforts to require Clean Air Act permits for greenhouse gases emitted by livestock.The amendment was agreed to last night as part of the $32.2-billion House–Senate conference package to fund EPA , the Interior Department and the Forest Service for fiscal 2010. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Can the World's Telecoms Slash Their Energy Consumption 1,000-Fold? The unbridled success of wireless networks for Internet access and beyond has brought mobile telecommunications to remote areas of Africa , safety to many a driver stranded roadside, and worldwide mobility to professionals who were once deskbound. Yet all of this has come at a steep environmental cost: The global network and technology required to run it produce 250 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, roughly the same as is produced yearly by 50 million automobiles (20 percent of all the autos in the U.S.), according to Green Touch , a new international consortium of businesses, government agencies and academics formed to address this problem. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Truffles Serve Up Environmental Info Quality truffles can sell for more than a $1000 a pound. They’re also valuable in environmental research, work that’s discussed in an article called The Hidden Life of Truffles in the April issue of Scientific American magazine, by Oregon State University’s James Trappe and Andrew Claridge, visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia. [See http://bit.ly/9IDzGF ]Claridge is getting better estimates of Australian endangered species populations, thanks to truffles. Some marsupials are as crazy for truffles as some humans are. Claridge soaked foam pads with olive oil infused with the scent of European black Perigord truffles, and left the pads near motion-sensing cameras. The animals came in droves, with 50 times as many individuals counted as with other techniques. Claridge used the European truffle product because it was easy to get--his team will next see the reaction of native animals to native truffles. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Dammed if they don't: Cost to protect endangered sturgeon in South Carolina could be $100 million, utility says How much will it cost to protect an endangered fish in South Carolina? The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wants local utility Santee Cooper to make several changes to its dams on Marion and Moultrie lakes, which would help endangered shortnose sturgeon ( Acipenser brevirostrum ) to pass through the dams and breed. But Santee Cooper says the changes NMFS wants will cost more than $100 million. [More] National Marine Fisheries Service - South Carolina - Santee Cooper - Endangered species - Fish rss.sciam.com |