Here are two things, not of sufficent worth to rate a post by themselves. The last is something that could make a very long post, but which I don’t have the time at present:
Fatal Mushroom
If you promise to never, ever, eat a wild mushroom, you don’t need to read this article. Go here to read […]
With the honeybees disappearing, you thought that the good old bumblebee would help carry the load right? Unfortunately, bumblebees seem to be disappearing as well. This from Fox news…
Thorp, an emeritus professor of entomology from the University of California at Davis, found one solitary worker last year along a remote mountain trail in the Siskiyou Mountains, but hasn’t been able to locate any this year.
He fears that the species — Franklin’s bumblebee — has gone extinct before anyone could even propose it for the endangered species list. To make matters worse, two other bumblebee species — one on the East coast, one on the West — have gone from common to rare.
Amid the uproar over global warming and mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies, concern over the plight of the lowly bumblebee has been confined to scientists laboring in obscurity.
But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crop species.
If this trend continues, it will be just one more thing making food prices expensive.
A while back an anonymous commenter tried to get me to react to this article in Slate. In the words of my anonymous commenter, “I just posted that to see your reaction to the educated class contemplating encouraging species suicide.”
I don’t know why this person wanted to bait me. I have posted numerous posts on Click Here to continue reading.
“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study.
“The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.
Recent samples of virus taken from birds in Africa and Europe all carry the mutation, Kawaoka and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens
“I don’t like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much. But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening,” Kawaoka said in a telephone interview.
Honestly, if a pandemic comes, I doubt it will come from Bird Flu. I don’t really have any good reason for this belief, just Murphy law. Disasters never seem to come from where you expect them.
On a similar vein, why don’t people worry more about the flu strains that already afflict humans mutating into killers? Seems to me that all they would need is a little fine tuning to start killing large numbers of people.
Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.
The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.
I personally think that his claim of creating artificial life is a little bit oversold. It seems to be more a Frankenstein style creation of slapping different pre existing parts together rather then making anything from scratch.
Still, it is an achievement of sorts. So was the atom bomb.
This rant about a lonely widow struck me as being a good complement to this week’s essay of the week.
This week’s essay of the week is not really an essay per say. Rather, it is a slide show on the demographic changes in Europe. If you have been following Europe’s demographic situation, these slides might not tell you anything you do not already know. But even if that is the case, I still think that these charts will bring the reality of the crisis home.
For example, I already knew that the number of people over 65 had overtaken the number of people under 14 in Europe. But to see a chart comparing the growth of the number of the people over 65 with the fall in the number of people under 14 since 1980 really brought home to me how rapid this change has been. Makes you really think about what the next 25 years are likely to bring.
It is like seeing a train wreck in slow motion. Those under 14’s are the only ones who can have the children of the future. Not only are that, but those under 14’s are the ones who are going to have to pay for the retirement of their elders. It’s not going to be pretty.
In the process of getting my refrigerate license, I had it pounded it into my head that the method by which CFC’s (such as Freon) destroyed the ozone hole was well understood. So I got a chuckle of this….
But chlorine peroxide is a difficult molecule to work with. Extremely unstable by sea-level laboratory standards, it’s been hard to isolate in pure form for study. And despite the generally accepted cascade of ozone depletion reactions, it hadn’t even been detected in the Antarctic until 2004, which difficulty had been largely chalked up to its short lifetime. Now, though, a team at JPL has produced the best synthetic samples of chlorine peroxide to date, and they’ve checked how quickly it decomposes in the presence of ultraviolet light. And, well. . .the problem is, the stuff falls apart much more slowly than anyone had predicted – many, many times more slowly. If they’re right, it’s hard to see how the accepted chemistry of chlorine peroxide-driven ozone depletion can be correct.
Cross Posted to the Watching the Trades
9/26 was Petrov Day. A day set aside honor a man who decided not to destroy the world and was remanded by his superiors for his wimpy behavior. Read all about it in this rant.
This can be found on a number of websites…..
Some time back there was a major disaster at The State’s Technology Services Division. Details were sketchy but for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to Click Here to continue reading.