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Meet the male pill

This news is a few weeks old (I've been uncharacteristically busy lately), but for those of you who missed it, listen up. Researchers have stumbled on the fact that drugs used to treat hypertension and schizophrenia have the potential to become a male contraceptive pill.

It may actually be on the market some time in the next five years. Other than its capacity to alter the course of human history, reduce world poverty, and save the biodiversity of the planet, this really isn't a big deal.

According this source:

The pill, a single dose taken a few hours before having sex, affects contraction of the muscles that control ejaculation, but wouldn't interfere with performance or orgasm sensation, researchers at King's College London say. The result is a dry ejaculation.

No, I don't know what a dry ejaculation is, and I'm not sure I want to. If you click on the video at this site you will be forced to sit through an ad before being treated to a clip of Woody Allen running around in a sperm suit.

Protesters head to court next week

The two folks arrested in the NOAA protest -- profiled in Mike Tidwell's piece last month -- go to court next week. Ted Glick and Paul Burman have been charged with disorderly conduct after they climbed onto a ledge over the entrance to the NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. on Oct. 23. They face up to five years, five months in jail and a $6,000 fine if convicted on Tuesday.

Toward a community-owned, decentralized biofuel future

President Bush visits the Virginia Biodiesel Refinery in 2005. Photo: whitehouse.gov Biofuels won’t single-handedly solve the climate crisis, nor will they deliver energy independence. But a base of widely dispersed, farmer- and citizen-owned biofuel plants can displace significant amounts of fossil fuels — while also building local economies. What follows is a strategy for tweaking […]

To fulfill its environmental promises, biofuel policy needs a kick in the pants

As war simmers in the Middle East and oil prices rise along with global temperatures, Midwestern farmers and politicians aren’t the only ones banging the drums for biofuels. Now big-time investors, security hawks, environmentalists, and even George W. Bush have joined their ranks. But is environmentally responsible bioenergy a real possibility, or are we bio-fooling […]

They don’t go well together

I've been meaning to write about a recent story in Time on risk perception -- in particular, on how badly we suck at it.

The basic theme is familiar by now:

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

And the culprit is also well-identified: a nervous system that evolved in radically different circumstances. Thanks to a jumpy little clump of tissue called the amygdala, nestled right above the brain stem, humans are finely tuned to short-term dangers. Snakes in the grass, glowering faces -- these things stimulate the amygdala and prompt a fight-or-flight squirt of hormones. That's how we survived on the savanna.

Science magazine weighs in

Yesterday I came across a head-turning new biofuels study by researchers at the University of Minnesota that found that planting a mixture of native grassland perennials produces biofuels more efficiently than corn and soybeans (no surprise) and even more efficiently than any single-grass plots (hmm, interesting).

Consumer Reports finds chicken riddled with bacteria

I didn't catch this two-day-old story until now, but it's causing me to reheat my homemade chicken broth to boiling. Consumer Reports found a stunning 83 percent of all chickens it tested harbored campylobacter or salmonella, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease. And that was up from 49 percent of chickens tested just three years ago.

Even more troubling, it found much of the bacteria was resistant to antibiotics. Why is this an issue? Because the Centers for Disease Control estimates 40,000 people get sick and 600 die each year from salmonella. Campylobacteriosis is estimated to affect over 1 million persons every year, or 0.5% of the general population.

Movie, music bring awareness to conflict gems

A diamond is forever. A diamond is a girl's best friend. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Neil Diamond.

Call it bling, call it ice, call it the most beautifulest piece of sparkly you've ever seen and yes-yes-yes-I'll-marry-you. Diamonds are more than just super-polished rocks. They symbolize true love and economic status. They adorn everything from ring fingers to pierced ears, gangsta grillz to bra straps.

But a recent string of films, music, and media coverage is beginning to shed light on the, shall we say, less-than-sparkling reputation of the industry that produces these gems. The New York Times has even called it "Hollywood's multifaceted cause du jour."

A new UN report

Bjorn Lomborgian FUD aside, it's becoming clearer and clearer that protecting the environment is not an alternative to fighting poverty and disease, but a necessary prerequisite. The latest bit of evidence comes in a new UN report:

The key Millennium Goal of halving poverty in a decade cannot be met without better environmental protection, according to a new report.

Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla chats about the promise of ethanol

Venture capitalist and ethanol booster Vinod Khosla. Billionaires are piling onto the biofuels bandwagon. Bill Gates is doing it. Richard Branson is doing it. The Google guys are doing it. Less well-known is the billionaire who kicked off the whole trend: Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and former partner with Kleiner Perkins, the […]