From the Washington Post: Ransom A. Myers, 54, the world-renowned fisheries biologist whose research showed that the number of large fish in the world's oceans has dropped by 90 percent in the past 50 years, died of a brain tumor March 27 at a hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The journal Science has just published a major paper co-written by Dr. Myers, "Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean," about the importance of sharks in marine ecosystems. There is an abstract of the paper on the Science website. More than any other scientist, Ransom's …

Genetically-engineered mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria could help stop the spread of the illness, according to a report in the The Guardian and other publications. Replacing wild strains of Anopheles with malaria-resistant GM mozzies could make a huge difference in the fight against malaria. Between 300 and 500 million people contract malaria every year, of which about 1 to 3 million die from the disease. Most of them are children, mostly poor, most living in sub-Saharan Africa. Engineering malaria resistance into wild mosquitoes could also reduce the amount of insecticides and repellents currently used in human habitations or directly applied …

Britain's The Independent has got into the spirit of bashing celebrities for their ungreen antics ... Liz Hurley's long-haul wedding has produced a carbon footprint so large that it would take the average British couple more than 10 years to contribute as much to heating up the planet as she and Arun Nayar have done in little over a week. It would take a typical Indian couple a massive 123 years. According to an Oxford-based footprinting consultancy, Hurley's celebrations will result in the release of around 200 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon emissions really do mount when you …

From an article in the Guardian: Divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU's campaign to assume a global leadership role in the fight against climate change at the bloc's spring summit which began last night. [...] But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted carbon-free nuclear power be included within the EU energy mix and rejected [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel's proposal to make a 20 percent target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members. At his swansong summit, the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy …

China will award a contract to build two nuclear reactors in its southeast to France's Areva SA, a Chinese official said according to reports in China Daily and other publications. The deal, covering two reactors for Yangjiang in Guangdong Province, had originally been awarded to Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co., which will get an agreement for two other reactors in Shandong Province. The sources said that China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a 2020 target of increasing the share of nuclear in total power from 2.3 percent to 4 percent. Areva and Westinghouse are competing to …

The Australian opposition Labor Party has selected a new, green leadership team to challenge the long-serving conservative Prime Minister John Howard in national parliamentary elections at the end of 2007. Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, and his deputy, Julia Gillard, decisively defeated incumbent leaders Kim Beazley and Jenny Macklin. But much of the attention is focused on Rudd's Sunday appointment of Peter Garrett, a Greenpeace board member and former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, to take charge of crafting Labor's new policies on climate change. "Climate change represents one of the most significant and important …

I differ strongly with those who argue that environmentalism should embrace the animal rights agenda, but extensive discussions here suggest that this story may be of more than passing interest. This account of how the AR program to stop animal testing may have gone badly awry may also help explain some of the reasons why environmentalism should try to maintain a respectful distance from other causes, however virtuous or pressing they may seem. "Few rules and fewer protesters draw animal testing to China," by Jehangir S. Pocha (originally in the Boston Globe), discusses Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a San Francisco-based company that …

Catching up on a month's backlog of reading, I came across an excellent piece on water shortages by Michael Specter, a former colleague of mine who writes on science and public health issues. It's called "The Last Drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe," in the 23 October issue of the New Yorker. Specter opens the article by introducing us to Shoba, a young mother living with her husband and five children in Kesum Purbahari, a New Delhi slum, where women with buckets and pails line up at dawn to wait for a tanker truck carrying water. Everyone knows …

A government commission has recommended lifting Australia's restrictions on nuclear energy and uranium mining, according to a report by Tim Johnston in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Australia, with 40% of the world's uranium reserves, currently has no commercial nuclear power plants and strictly limits uranium mining. Along with the U.S., Australia refused to join as a signatory to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The panel, commissioned by Prime Minister John Howard's government last June, asserted that developing nuclear power and easing curbs on uranium mining could reduce carbon emissions from coal and lift revenues from uranium …

I'm in the last throes of getting camera and dive gear ready for a longish trip and a million other things, but I had to make the effort to let Gristmates know about this bit of news. This has been a contested issue -- up to now, at least. Perhaps now we can move on towards finding ways to protect wild salmon from the dangers posed by farming instead of arguing about whether those risks are real. They are.