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Umbra on cane toads
Dear Umbra, I’m currently studying in Australia. I was recently in Queensland, where as you probably know, cane toads are a huge problem. There are over 200 million of the toxic toads, and this invasive species has been killing off native wildlife and just in general causing lots of problems. In fact, they have huge […]
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Friday music blogging: Dolorean
You know what’s nice on a sleepy Friday afternoon? A love song. Here’s one of my favorite love songs of the last decade: “Dying In Time,” by Dolorean. (They have a fantastic new album called You Can’t Win, but this is from their last one, Violence in Snowy Fields.)
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‘Close your eyes’
Don’t miss Tom Engelhardt’s elegiac graduation speech. I cringe to think what I might have to tell a graduating class in 10 or 20 years.
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So That’s Why Their Little Hearts Beat So Fast
New hummingbird species discovered, imperiled by cocaine trade It’s hard out here for a gorgeted puffleg. The hummingbird species with the fabulous name was just discovered in southwestern Colombia, where farmers slash and burn 1,235 acres of cloud-forest habitat every year to grow coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine. That’s bad news for a species […]
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U.S. dilutes G8 climate draft, and more
Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Not Talk About Friday Never Felt So Right Sheddy Mercury Doin’ What Comes Unnaturally So What’s Plan C? Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Thinking Outside the Fox Tassel Talk Senior Moments
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Umbra on graduation gifts
Dear Umbra, The recent question about a senior gift to the school got me wondering: what are some green gift ideas for graduates? Misty Boyd Tahlequah, Okla. Dearest Misty, Cash. You could help them set up a retirement account. With this answer, I think Grist will have covered most gifting opportunities: Valentine’s Day, weddings, babies, […]
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Encyclopedia of Life off to a slow start
A couple of emails and an article in the latest issue of Science have roused me to post on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) website. The site is not functional yet but has a whiz-bang demo (completely fake) put together by a company called AvenueA|Razorfish that is well worth checking out.
However, that was the only thing that impressed me about the site. The article in Science just inflamed my skepticism:
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Satellite images reveal scale of destruction
To you, this picture may look like ants marching in a desert, but among ocean experts, it has gone as viral as Britney's shaved head. What you're seeing is an image of shrimp trawlers off the coast of China, taken from space. Those teeny tiny specs are responsible for destroying huge swaths of seafloor, and thanks to these images, which appeared in the prestigious journal Nature yesterday, scientists now have irrefutable visual evidence to prove what they could only conceptualize before.
