TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Check out UNESCO's newest biosphere reserve ... in North Korea How should the international community punish North Korea after Monday’s nuclear tests? While the Security Council of the United Nations was busy crafting a resolution to admonish the communist nation, the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization gave them their third biosphere reserve. [More] rss.sciam.com |
EPA Looking to Replace Bush-era Pollution Rules U.S. EPA is working to issue replacement rules for Bush-era regulations aimed at slashing power plant emissions of soot, smog and mercury as quickly as possible, the agency's top air official told a Senate panel today.Gina McCarthy, EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, said the agency plans to propose a replacement for the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) in early 2010 and to issue a final rule by early 2011. The agency is also moving forward on a replacement rule for the Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) "as quickly as our understanding of the issues allows," she said. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Need to Sniff Out Water Pollution? Call in the Dogs To the long list of jobs that dogs do for humans, add another: the detection of water pollution.Meet Sable, a German shepherd mix with a nose for sewage . [More] rss.sciam.com |
How City Noise is Shaping Bird Song Did you know birds sing in dialect ? They do. The song of a great tit from the countryside is a far cry from that of his city cousin. And some song dialects can change nearly as fast as human slang--the Indigo Bunting changes tune from year to year. To investigate the cultural evolution of such songs researchers have recently completed a study of adjacent White-crowned sparrow dialects from 1969 to 1998 in San Francisco. Biologist David Luther of the University of Maryland and ornithologist Luis Baptista of the California Academy of Sciences hypothesized that the pressures of urban noise would tend, over time, to eliminate the lower ranges of the bird's song and cause the sparrows to prefer to learn songs at the higher range. Simply put, birds that sang too low would be drowned out by rumbling buses, honking cars, or other typical city noises. [More] rss.sciam.com |
In the 12 Months of 2009 In the first month of 2009, people gave to me: a coal ash spill in Tennessee. (Technically occurred in 2008, but it lingered.) [More] rss.sciam.com |