| Cancer in Wildlife May Signal Toxic Dangers Thirty years ago, a Canadian marine biologist noticed something mysterious was happening to beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Decades of over-hunting had decimated the population, but several years after the government put a stop to the practice, the belugas still hadn’t recovered. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Buying Green: 9 Goods for Sustainable Living [Slide Show] With the holiday shopping season around the corner, don't forget the eco-lover on your list. [More] rss.sciam.com |
How Fast Are Himalayan Glaciers Melting? The village of Brep in Pakistan doesn't exist in the same place anymore. That's because a torrential flood forced the community to move after a lake formed by glacial meltwater burst its bounds and leveled the town. Glacial lake outbursts have become a yearly occurrence across the high mountain region stretching from Afghanistan to Bhutan sometimes called the Roof of the World. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Hey, Is That Me over There? If there is anything about your “self” of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as “you” is here and now and nowhere else.But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions--and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different--in evolutionary and neurological terms--from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin). [More] rss.sciam.com |
In the Market for Pollution: Selling the Blue Sky NEW YORK--There are any number of ways to make money trading, though some prefer the term gambling.That's because the financial world is full of innovation these days--even in the wake of the Great Recession--which primarily means inventing new instruments to trade. One can still trade the mortgage-backed securities that helped derail the global economy or corporate debt repackaged as bonds. Enron helped pioneer the trade in "physical" electricity, actual power available for purchase on the grid and only physical in the sense that the infrastructure to transport it is more visible than an odorless, colorless greenhouse gas. Both are now lucrative markets, but certainly electricity, despite its physics, is more stable. [More] Enron - Greenhouse gas - Trade - Great Recession - Electricity rss.sciam.com |