TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Carbon capture success in Wisconsin Capturing the carbon dioxide that wafts up the smokestack after burning coal (or any other fossil fuel) has been identified by everyone from President Obama to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a critical technology to help keep the lights on while combating climate change. And now there has been yet another successful demonstration that the technology to capture that CO2 from flue gas might actually work: chilled ammonia can capture more than 88 percent of the greenhouse gas before it goes up the smokestack. [More] Presented By:You Need the Speed of Norton 2009Introducing the revolutionary Norton Internet Security 2009. With a one-click, one-minute install, under 7MB of memory usage and fewer, shorter scans, it?s the fastest security suite anywhere. Get your FREE trial today!Click to Learn More www.norton.com/speed Ads by Pheedo rss.sciam.com |
Forensic Tools Battle Ivory Poachers In 1983 while exploring a small forest called Malundwe on the edge of the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, one of us (Wasser) came across two elephant skulls lying side by side. One, from a female, was big, and the other was small--it had molars just a quarter the size of the female’s and they had not yet been used enough to show any signs of wear. The poachers had first shot the young elephant, a ranger explained, so that they could draw its grieving mother close enough to kill her for her enormous tusks. This exploitation of familial ties in the sophisticated social system of elephants has been repeated thousands of times in Africa.The Selous Game Reserve is the largest protected area in Africa but was nonetheless among the most heavily poached during the well-publicized slaughters that occurred between 1979 and 1989. At least 700,000 elephants were killed during this period--70,000 in the Selous alone. Then, in 1989, Tanzania’s new director of wildlife launched a major antipoaching initiative called Operation Uhai. The combined effort of wildlife rangers, police officers and the military rapidly brought an end to most poaching in the country. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop Research? Advances in agricultural technology--including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops--have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech com­panies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Obama's Nuclear Arms Agenda Helps Him Win 2009 Nobel Peace Prize U.S. President Barack Obama's efforts advocating for a world without nuclear weapons, as well as his support for international diplomacy and institutions such as the United Nations, have earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize , the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism I am, by nature, an optimist. I almost always think things will turn out well, and even when they break I am confident that I can fix them. My optimism, however, has not always served me well. Twice I have been hit by cars while cycling--full-on, through-the-windshield impacts that were entirely the result of my blissful attitude that the street corners I had successfully negotiated hundreds of times before would not suddenly materialize an automobile in my path. Such high-impact, unpredictable and rare events are what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swans.” Given enough time, no upward sloping trend line is immune from dramatic collapse.A bike crash as a black swan is, in fact, an apt metaphor for what the investigative journalist and natural-born skeptic Barbara Ehrenreich believes happened to America as a result of the positive-thinking movement. In her engaging and tightly reasoned book Bright-Sided (Metropolitan Books, 2009), she shows how the positive-psychology movement was born in the halcyon days of the 1990s when the economy was soaring, housing prices were skyrocketing, and positive-thinking gurus were cashing in on the motivation business. Academic psychologists, armed with a veneer of scientific jargon, wanted in on the action. [More] rss.sciam.com |