Water Spirit: Rover Findings Hint of a Warmer, Wetter Era on Mars

For NASA’s Spirit rover, the days of roaming the Red Planet may now be in the past, but the observations the wheeled bot made in its travels are still paying scientific dividends. A new analysis of geologic data gathered by the rover nearly five years …

Madagascar bird driven to extinction by invasive fish

A bird from the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar called the Alaotra grebe ( Tachybaptus rufolavatus ) has been declared extinct by conservation group BirdLife International. BirdLife contributed to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with a major update on the world’s bird species, which was released on Wednesday.

The grebe, previously found only on Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, was driven to extinction in part by the introduction of snakehead murrel, a carnivorous fish, to the area. Fishermen’s modern nylon gillnets, which caught and drowned the birds, also contributed to their demise. The bird was incapable of long flights, so it had a limited range and was vulnerable to attack.

[More]

Madagascar – Bird – Lake Alaotra – Indian Ocean – BirdLife International

How Many Cancers Are Caused by the Environment?

Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal. [More]

Cancer – Health – Conditions and…

How Many Cancers Are Caused by the Environment?

Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal.

[More]

Cancer – Health – Conditions and Diseases – Research – Human

World’s smallest water lily saved from extinction

Two years ago, the world’s smallest water lily, a plant known as Nymphaea thermarum whose pads reach only one centimeter in diameter, disappeared from its only habitat, a few square meters near a hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. Local agriculture h…

When Ideas Have Sex

In his 1776 work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith identified the cause in a single variable: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Today we call this free trade or market capitalism, and since the recession it has become de rigueur to dis the system as corrupt, rotten or deeply flawed.

If we pull back and take a long-horizon perspective, however, the free exchange between people of goods, services and especially ideas leads to trust between strangers and prosperity for more people. Think of it as ideas having sex. That is what zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley calls it in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010). Ridley is optimistic that “the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all.”

[More]

Short-Chain Chlorinated Paraffins Draw EPA Scrutiny–After 70 Years

An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

Next Page »