Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Dig a Hole, Fill It with Water

A new study reveals that UK ponds are in sad shape. One writer decided to build his own

A new national survey conducted by the UK-based organizations Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and Pond Conservation has found that 80% of ponds in England and Wales are in a "poor" or "very poor" condition, a result of farm fertilizer runoff and urban sprawl.

The report has also revealed that there just aren't many ponds left.

"Long valued by conservationists and the public as wildlife havens, recent research has shown that ponds are much more important for the protection of freshwater biodiversity than previously suspected," according to a Pond Conservation press release.

"Ponds support more endangered freshwater plant and animal species than either rivers or lakes and, in a typical patch of English countryside, a wider variety of common species too."

In a recent Daily Mail article, Nigel Colborn wrote about his own experience trying to help out by creating his own pond "on a mad impulse" one Saturday afternoon.

After digging a hole, placing a liner, filling it with water, creating a bog and planting water weed, kingcups, primula and irises, Colborn waited for animals to take refuge in what he called a "modest water feature" in a "low-lying, semi-shaded area."

And take refuge they did.

In the mud he created, he discovered the footprints of birds and hedgehogs.

"Success was confirmed when newts, dragonflies, pond-skaters and frogspawn arrived," wrote Colborn.

"That's the beauty of a wildlife pond."

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image: leopard frog (credit: pdunant)

Monday, February 8, 2010

Father Time

Today in 1879, Sandford Fleming changed the way we keep track of time

In 1876, Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-born Canadian engineer, cartographer and founding member of the Royal Canadian Institute (RCI), missed a train in Ireland because the schedule said p.m. instead of a.m. That missed train helped to change the way we look at time.

Three years later, at an RCI meeting on February 8, 1879, Fleming proposed the adoption of Universal Standard Time, a 24-hour clock that the entire world could use, as it was based on the rotation of the Earth -- not on any particular meridian (one of the imaginary lines running along the planet's surface from the North Pole to the South Pole).

Sandford proposed dividing the world into 24 time zones, each measuring 15 degrees of longitude. All clocks in all zones were set to the same minute -- just an hour off from clocks in neighboring time zones.

At the 1884 International Meridian Conference, England's Royal Greenwich Observatory was chosen as the standard-holder, leading to the worldwide use of Greenwich Mean Time to set local clocks.

In 1964, a new, more accurate timescale based on the atomic clock was internationally adopted -- Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Sometimes, it's good to miss a train.

GET INVOLVED

  • Set your clock to the U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock
  • Get the Greenwich Mean Time
  • Set your clock to the atomic clock
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image: Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, 1892 (1850-1938)

Friday, February 5, 2010

NGC 3603

The ESO has released a striking new image of the star nursery closest to Earth

Most stars are between 1 and 10 billion years old. Our Sun is middle-aged, around 4.6 billion years old.

But about 22,000 light-years away, in the Carina constellation located on one of the spiral arms of our own Milky Way galaxy, lies an extremely active stellar nursery, where baby suns are constantly being born.

It is known as NGC 3603, an open cluster of stars much younger than our Sun: Each is around just 1 million years old. It is the closest region of its kind to our solar system.

Now, the European Space Organization (ESO) has released a stunning new image of this busy cosmic factory, taken by their Very Large Telescope (VLT). Located in Paranal, Chile, the VLT is not only the world’s largest optical telescope array, but also the most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory.

According to the ESO press release, the relatively close distance of NGC 3603 is key in "providing astronomers with a local test bed for studying intense star formation processes, very common in other galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance from us."

GET INVOLVED

  • Visit ESO's Picture of the Week Web page
  • Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
  • Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
  • See what's in the sky tonight
  • Buy a telescope from the Discovery Channel store
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image: ESO

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Ohioans Seek Humane Treatment of Farm Animals

The battlefield between factory farms and animal rights activists continues in the Buckeye State

Every year 10 billion animals are raised and killed in America for food, mostly on large factory farms.

In 2007, one of them -- a hog factory named Wiles Farm in Creston, Ohio, that had about 6,000 hogs at the time -- was engaged in an animal cruelty lawsuit brought by the Humane Farming Association (HFA).

An undercover HFA agent gathered extensive video of the factory's various abuses, such as brutalizing piglets, starvation, shocking with electric prods, drowning in feces and urine, cannibalization, lack of medical care and the "routine hanging and agonizing deaths of fully conscious pigs" -- many of them hung by a chain off a front-end loader until they died.

HFA was able to secure a conviction for the way piglets were brutalized. It was the first successful cruelty conviction of a hog factory in Ohio's history, and Joe Wiles received a $250 fine and one year probation for throwing baby pigs.

However, Wayne County judge Stuart Miller did not find that the strangulation and starvation of pigs constituted animal cruelty, a ruling that surprised legal experts around the nation. (Prior to the trial, Miller actually refused to sign arrest warrants for Wiles Farm defendants. At a preliminary hearing, Miller said, "I'd much rather be doing something else.")

Wiles Farm received $10,000 from the agribusiness lobby to mount their defense. Dick Isler, the executive vice president of the Ohio Pork Producers Council called the verdict a "huge victory."

Dr. Donald Sanders, an Ohio State University veterinarian who observed and confirmed animal cruelty at Wiles Farm, said at the trial, "Sick and injured sows couldn't get up to feed and water.

"All animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food," Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) president Wayne Pacelle wrote in a February 2 blog post.

"Torturing them by hanging or dragging them or permanently immobilizing them in small cages is unacceptable and it should be against the law."

The Wiles Farm case was the subject of the HBO documentary "Death on a Factory Farm."

This week the battle in Ohio continued as several animal welfare and consumer advocacy groups, including HSUS, Farm Sanctuary, the Ohio SPCA, the Consumer Federation of America, the Ohio Sierra Club and the Center for Food Safety, filed an initiative petition containing signatures of Ohio voters from 48 counties with the state's attorney general to direct Ohio's Livestock Board to set minimum humane standards to prevent the worst abuses in industrial agriculture.

The measure would ban the lifelong confinement of veal calves, breeding sows and laying hens in tiny cages that can barely fit them, prohibit strangulation as a method of euthanasia and make euthanasia practices for pigs and cows consistent with standards set by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA).

"Instead of disingenuously defending modern farming practices as 'normal,' it’s about time that farmers own up to it: We, meaning our entire society, have made a 'deal with the devil,'" writes Mark S. Jordan in a review of "Death on a Factory Farm" for Mount Vernon News in Ohio.

"Factory farming is not the way farmers have handled animals for thousands of years. But if farmers are asked to supply a huge population with cheap fast food, meat seven days a week, and bargain prices at mega-stores, while at the same time only using minimal space and running it all on minimal commercial margins, then the desensitized, brutal methods of factory farming will be the inevitable result. It's simple math."

The math will only change at the cash register -- if consumers change their eating habits to eat less meat or decide to purchase meat only from more humane, non-factory farms. Until then, it will take the actions of HFA and other organizations to make it illegal to brutalize the animals raised to feed the meat-eating population.

Pigs are noted for their intelligence. Indeed, they possess a higher intelligence level than dogs, a level equal to that of a three-year-old human child. They are playful, curious, have insight and strong individual personalities. Pigs have been called the smartest domestic animal in the world. It is clear that they are fully aware what is happening to them inside these factory farms.

During the antebellum period, many escaped Southern slaves traversed Ohio's Scioto River on their northward route to freedom.

Perhaps Ohio will once again provide a bridge for the enslaved. But this time, they are not human slaves, but rather enslaved animals killed by the American meat industry. And it's not for their freedom -- just for some measure of humane treatment on their way to dinner tables across the country.

They at least deserve that.

GET INVOLVED

  • Read about the HBO documentary "Death on a Factory Farm"
  • Sign a Care2 petition to stop the castration of pigs without anesthesia
  • Support Ohioans for Humane Farms
  • Support Farm Sanctuary's Ohio initiative
  • Download a PDF of the HFA complaint about Wiles Farm
  • Download an HFA report of the Wiles Farm case
  • Start a Green Foods Resolution in your community
  • Sponsor a Farm Sanctuary animal for Valentine's Day
  • Choose a pork substitute for your recipe
  • Read PETA's "The Hidden Life of Pigs"
  • Sign a PETA letter urging Unilever to stop pig abuse
  • Join the Farm Sanctuary Advocacy Campaign Team
  • Read the Yale College Vegetarian Society's "Top 10 Reasons to Become Vegetarian"
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image: Humane Farming Association

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Forgetting the Forest People

A new study has found that a Copenhagen climate summit deal fails the world's forest people

Deforestation accounts for about 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.

Under the United Nations' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program, wealthy countries would help to combat deforestation (and the global warming caused by it) by paying developing, forest-rich nations like Brazil for every hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest that they leave untouched.

At the Copenhagen climate summit in December, six wealthy nations -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, France and Norway -- committed $3.5 billion to REDD. But they neglected to reach an agreement as to how this plan would be monitored and managed.

Unsurprisingly, "The End of the Hitherlands," a new study by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a US-based forest policy reform think-tank, argues that this multi-billion dollar deal might lead to conflict.

"One of the things that the world has learned over the years is that REDD is far more difficult than many people imagined," said Andy White, coordinator of RRI and one of the lead authors of the report, in a recent BBC News article.

"The forested areas of the world -- by and large -- have very high levels of poverty, low levels of respect for local rights, and a very low level of control among local people to shape and control their destiny."

The report found that "enormous profits" could be made, but warned that because of this, a new, increased competition for forest resources would develop between governments and big investors on one side and indigenous communities on the other.

The authors of the report wrote that "nations and the world at large have a tremendous opportunity to right historic wrongs, advance rural development and save forests."

But those nations -- at least the ones who have committed the REDD funds -- must figure out a how to manage the money and monitor the plan's progress.

Because when governments and multinational corporations compete against impoverished local communities for profit-making resources...well, we know how that story usually ends.

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a RAN letter to General Mills CEO Kendell Powell urging him to make a commitment to source socially and environmentally responsible palm oil to help stop deforestation
  • Download a RAN list of products that contain palm oil
  • Download a PDF of "Do I Dare Eat That Banana," a document created by RainforestRelief.org that outlines rainforest products to avoid
  • Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
  • Donate to the Rainforest Action Network
  • Take these seven steps to help save the Amazon rainforest
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image: a Huaorani village in Ecuador (credit: Kate Fisher)

Monday, February 1, 2010

How Much for That Polar Bear Rug?

The number of polar bear body parts that will legally be traded on the international market will largely depend on Canada

Polar bears are struggling to survive in the face of anthropogenic global warming, which is rapidly melting the ice they need to breed, den and locate food. They have been spotted swimming dangerously far from the safety of the coast; many of them drown looking for something to eat.

In June of last year, the Obama administration released a report entitled "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," which grimly declared, "It is projected that there will be no wild polar bears left in Alaska in 75 years."

But, the loss of their habitat isn't the only thing that polar bears have to contend with. They are also dealing with hunters, who are killing them to supply the international trade in products made from their body parts, such as polar bear skin rugs, skulls and claws.

But on that count, things may change.

According to Rodger Schlickeisen, the president of the non-profit wildlife conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, "Thanks to more than 43,000 Defenders supporters, the U.S. is proposing to increase protections for these iconic bears through CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), the powerful international agreement that regulates trade in imperiled wildlife."

The Obama administration also received messages from over 50,000 supporters of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) urging for increased polar bear protections.

In March, representatives from 175 nations will meet in Doha, Qatar, for a CITES meeting and will vote on the legal status of the polar bear.

Since Canada is home to about 60 percent of the world's polar bears, a strong commitment from Prime Minister Stephen Harper is absolutely crucial.

"Canada’s support for this vital proposal would help save hundreds of polar bears each year -- and give them a chance at a lasting future," says Schlickeisen.

But Prime Minister Harper's support is far from guaranteed. Canada has allowed the killing of 300 polar bears each year for trophy hunting and commercial trade.

However, there are signs of change within the country. On January 1, the Canadian government quietly banned the export of polar bear parts from the Baffin Bay area in the Nunavut territory.

Perhaps one day, these majestic creatures will no longer provide something soft for humans to walk on. And hopefully, it will be because of a successful international ban on the trade of polar bears -- and not because there were just no more around to hunt.

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a Defenders of Wildlife letter urging Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to support an international ban on the trade of polar bear products
  • Sign a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) letter urging American lawmakers to increase conservation funding directed overseas to save global priority species in their natural habitats
  • Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe
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image credit: Alan D. Wilson

Friday, January 29, 2010

Caught on Film: The Cat’s Paw

A stunning new image of a vast star nursery at the heart of our galaxy has just been released by the ESO

In 1837, at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, the English astronomer John Hershel discovered the Cat's Paw Nebula, an emission nebula in the constellation Scorpius about 5,500 light-years away near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Now the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released this striking new image of the Cat's Paw, officially known as NGC 6334.

"NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy and has been extensively studied by astronomers," according to an ESO press release.

"The nebula conceals freshly minted brilliant blue stars -- each nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and born in the last few million years. The region is also home to many baby stars that are buried deep in the dust, making them difficult to study. In total, the Cat’s Paw Nebula could contain several tens of thousands of stars."

"Particularly striking is the red, intricate bubble in the lower right part of the image. This is most likely either a star expelling large amount of matter at high speed as it nears the end of its life or the remnant of a star that already has exploded."

The ESO is the leading intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and known as "the world's most productive astronomical observatory."

GET INVOLVED

  • Visit ESO's Picture of the Week Web page
  • Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
  • Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
  • See what's in the sky tonight
  • Buy a telescope from the Discovery Channel store
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image: ESO

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Remembering Challenger

Today in 1986, seven American astronauts gave their lives exploring the last frontier

At 5:00 p.m. EST on January 28, 1986, President Reagan was scheduled to deliver a State of the Union address.

Instead, he delivered a somber speech about an event that happened barely six hours earlier that shook the nation to its core: the loss of seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.

On 11:39 AM EST, just 73 seconds after lift-off and about 150 nautical miles above the Earth, a ruptured O-ring in Challenger's right solid rocket booster caused an explosion that tore the shuttle apart, killing Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Francis "Dick" Scobee and Ronald McNair.

Mission STS-51-L was the twenty-fifth flight of the America's space shuttle program. It was Challenger's tenth mission, meant to deploy communication satellites, carry our experiments on observing Halley's Comet and give a series of lessons as part of the Teacher in Space Program.

At the time, the American public had become accustomed to viewing the televised launches. Indeed, nothing since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy had gripped the entire country as did the Challenger disaster.

"We've grown used to wonders in this century," said President Reagan in his televised address from the Oval Office.

"It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers."

On February 1, 2003, another space shuttle disaster occurred when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas upon its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. All seven of its astronauts were killed. In 131 missions, 14 lives have been lost along with the two shuttles that carried them.

Exploration is dangerous. But without it, we might still be living in caves. Or perhaps, still underwater.

"The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave," said Reagan.

"The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."

GET INVOLVED

  • See what's in the sky tonight
  • Join the Great World Wide Star Count
  • Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
  • Download SETI@Home to help in the search for extraterrestrial life
  • Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
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image: NASA

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Raft of the Lemurs

A new study reveals that Madagascar's animals arrived there by hitching rides on rafts

Located in the Indian Ocean about 300 miles from Africa's southeastern coast, Madagascar is an island nation whose main island, also called Madagascar, is the world's fourth largest-island. It is home to 5% of the world's plant and animal species, 90% of which are endemic to the island. Lemurs -- all 70 different kinds of them -- are found nowhere else.

Madagascar has been an island for some 120 million years. But animals did not start arriving there until much later -- about 55 million years after the island was born. For generations of scientists, it has been a mystery as to how this extremely isolated island was populated by such a diverse array of life.

One theory was that the animals arrived via a land bridge that has since disappeared from shifts in the Earth's tectonic plates. In 1915, scientists came up with an alternate theory: The animals arrived on rafts. Now a three-year study of ancient ocean currents is giving weight to this idea.

Professors Matthew Huber of Purdue University and Jason Ali of the University of Hong Kong, in a study to be published in the February 4 issue of the journal Nature, have found that "the prevailing flow of ocean currents between Africa and Madagascar millions of years ago would have made such a trip not only possible, but fast, too," according to a Purdue press release.

"Rafting would have involved animals being washed out to sea during storms, either on trees or large vegetation mats, and floating to the mini-continent, perhaps while in a state of seasonal torpor or hibernation."

"Huber and Ali's work supports a 1940 paper by George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists and evolution theorists of the 20th century. Simpson introduced the concept of a "sweepstakes" process to explain the chance of raft colonization events taking place through vast stretches of geological time. Once the migrants arrived on the world’s fourth largest island, their descendants evolved into the distinctive, and sometimes bizarre forms seen today."

Additionally, Huber said that the Madagascar study was also a test case that demonstrated the ability of computer models to mimic the interactions of the ocean and the atmosphere in a greenhouse climate from the distant past.

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image: Black-and-white Ruffed Lemur (Varecia variegata) (credit: jo-h)

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The World's Most Important, Most Destructive Edible Oil

Cookies. Lip gloss. Shampoo. Our taste for products containing palm oil is contributing to climate change, destroying animal habitats and putting millions of people at risk

Indonesia is the world's third biggest greenhouse gas polluter, behind China and the United States. One of the sources of this pollution is deforestation, which represents 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

But climate change isn't the only effect of deforestation. In Indonesia, it has not only destroyed the habitats of orangutans, Sumatran tigers and elephants, but has also put some 20 million of the nation's indigenous and forest-dependent people at risk.

A primary reasons for this rampant deforestation is the need to create space for palm oil plantations.

Palm oil is derived from the fruit of the oil palms, two species of the Arecaceae (palm family), one native to west Africa, the other native to Central and South America.

"Oil palm is now the world’s most important edible oil when ranked by global production and consumption," according to the Australian environmental group PalmOilAction.org.

"In the 2006/2007 year, it held approximately 32% of the market share of all edible oils by production in comparison to soybean oil, which held approximately 29% of the world market for oils."

One of Indonesia's biggest palm oil purchasers is General Mills, a Fortune 500 corporation that markets some of the most popular consumer food brands and products, including Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Nature Valley, Cheerios, Yoplait, Colombo, Totinos, Jeno's, Green Giant, Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs, Lucky Charms and Wanchai Ferry.

Palm oil is found in their Betty Crocker and Pillsbury products, as well as Nature Valley Granola Bars and Yogurt Burst Cheerios.

"Palm oil is a globally traded agricultural commodity that is used in 50 percent of all consumer goods, from lipstick and packaged food to body lotion and biofuels," according to non-profit environmental group Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

"Demand for palm oil in the U.S. has tripled in the last five years, pushing palm oil cultivation into the rainforests and making this crop one of the key causes of global rainforest destruction."

"Indonesia's government plans to convert up to 18 million hectares of land into palm oil plantations by 2020," notes RAN campaigner Ashley Schaeffer, adding that, "While General Mills has expressed concern about recent reports of rainforest destruction for palm oil and has begun to engage its suppliers, this leading company must take stronger action to ensure the protection of rainforests, communities and the climate, as other companies have already done."

"The people driving the bulldozers and excavators told Jamaludin and his family that they were going to build a road," wrote Michael Brune, executive director of RAN, in a recent email describing the plight of an individual in Indonesia whose livelihood depends on a healthy rainforest.

"Instead, they burned down the Indonesian rainforest Jamaludin's community had called home for centuries. In its place: a sprawling palm oil plantation that has ravaged the local and global environment."

"The forest provided us with many ways to earn money: fish, honey, pigs, rattan vines," said Jamaludin.

"Now, everything our grandparents left us is gone."

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a RAN letter to General Mills CEO Kendell Powell urging him to make a commitment to source socially and environmentally responsible palm oil
  • Download a RAN list of products that contain palm oil
  • Download a PDF of "Do I Dare Eat That Banana," a document created by RainforestRelief.org that outlines rainforest products to avoid
  • Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
  • Donate to the Rainforest Action Network
  • Take these seven steps to help save the Amazon rainforest
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image: oil palm (Elaeis_guineensis)

Monday, January 25, 2010

The Fall of the Giants Down Under

It seems that climate change didn't push Australia's prehistoric megafauna to extinction. It was probably humans

Forty thousand years ago, Australia's megafauna -- giant-sized mammals, reptiles and flightless birds -- went extinct.

"Debate about the possible cause of these late Pleistocene extinctions has continued for more than 150 years, with scientists divided over whether climate change or the arrival of humans has been responsible for their demise," says Barry Brook from Australia's University of Adelaide in recent press release.

According to a study published last week in the journal Science by Brook and Richard Roberts from Australia's University of Wollongong, new evidence adds weight to the theory that humans pushed these massive creatures to their extinction.

The scientists used improved dating methods on the bones and teeth of extinct animals to show that megafauna existed for only a short time after the arrival of humans.

"Given that people arrived in Australia between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, human impact was the likely extinction driver, either through hunting or habitat disturbance," Roberts says.

It seems that animal extinctions caused by human activity is not a modern story. We've been doing it for millennia.

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a petition to the United Nations to show your support of biodiversity
  • Sign a World Wildlife Foundation petition to support the protection of the penguins and other wildlife of Antarctica with the establishment of Antarctica as an actual animal sanctuary by 2018
  • Support the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Countdown 2010 to save the world's biodiversity
  • Download the Environmental Defense Fund's "Pocket Eco-Friendly Fish Selector" to make choices that help prevent overfishing
  • Support the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
  • Support BirdLife International's "Preventing Extinctions" Program
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image: Palorchestes azael, an extinct Australian giant marsupial which was similar to a ground sloth

Friday, January 22, 2010

Ring of Fire

Last week, some people looked in the sky and saw the moon upstaging the sun

On January 15, the Moon's shadow raced across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, giving the thousands of people caught in it a rare treat: an annular solar eclipse, a partial eclipse in which the moon's diameter appears to be contained completely within the Sun's edge, creating a dramatic ring of fire.

A slideshow on the Washington Post Web site includes images of the eclipse itself, as well as photographs of people in India, China, Kenya, Jordan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and South Korea who viewed the event.

The eclipse lasted a little over 11 minutes, the longest such eclipse for the next 1,000 years.

GET INVOLVED

  • Join the Great World Wide Star Count
  • Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
  • See what's in the sky tonight
  • Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form
  • Download Google Earth 5.0, which has an interactive map of the entire surface of Mars
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image: the Moon's silhouette just before mid-eclipse taken within the eclipse path from the city of Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India; the telescopic image was made through a filter that blocks most visible light, but still transmits light from hydrogen atoms (credit: Mikael Svalgaard)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Vanishing Penguins of Adélie

One hundred and seventy years ago today, a land full of penguins was discovered. It's not so full anymore

On January 20, 1840, French explorer and naval officer Jules Dumont D'Urville discovered a 350 km stretch of Antarctic coast covered mostly in ice. He named it Adélie Land after his wife, Adélie Pepin.

Since 1956, Adélie Land has been the home of a permanently staffed French research station.

This frozen landscape was the filming location of the 2005 French nature documentary March of the Penguins, which followed the grueling yearly journey of Antarctica's emperor penguins.

In the late 1970s, a prolonged period of increased temperatures caused a significant loss of sea ice. As as result, the population of Adélie penguins was cut in half.

In the last quarter of a century, 65% of the Adélie penguins have disappeared in northern Antarctica due to overfishing, the loss of sea ice due to anthropogenic climate change and the negative impact of tourism in the area.

Emperor penguins can live for up to 50 years. But not at the rate that their habitat is being threatened by man.

"We show that if the sea ice shrinks, as projected by climate models, the population will decrease -- we show a dramatic decrease -- by the end of the century," said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution ecologist Stephanie Jenouvrier in a recent episode of Science Nation, the online magazine of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

"The population will decline from about 3,000 breeding pairs to date to 400 breeding pairs by the end of the century."

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a World Wildlife Foundation petition to support the protection of the penguins and other wildlife of Antarctica with the establishment of Antarctica as an actual animal sanctuary by 2018
  • Adopt a penguin from Defenders of Wildlife for $20
  • Find out how you can help keep Antarctica cool and prevent global warming
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image: Samuel Blanc

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The World's Least Known Bird

An enigmatic little bird has eluded ornithologists for over a century. Not anymore

The large-billed reed warbler is known as "the world's least known bird," a title it received from BirdLife International in 2007.

The first specimen was discovered in India in 1867. The second time a single bird was discovered was more than a century later in Thailand in 2006.

But earlier this year, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found a breeding area in the Wakhan Corridor in the remote and harsh Pamir Mountains in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

They managed to capture, study and release almost 20 of the birds, using field observations, DNA sequencing and the first known audio recording of its call. These birds represent the first known breeding population of the species.

"Practically nothing is known about this species, so this discovery of the breeding area represents a flood of new information on the large-billed reed warbler," said Colin Poole, executive director of WCS’s Asia Program, in a January 10 press release.

"This new knowledge of the bird also indicates that the Wakhan Corridor still holds biological secrets and is critically important for future conservation efforts in Afghanistan."

According to the press release, "WCS is currently the only organization conducting ongoing scientific conservation studies in Afghanistan -- the first such efforts in over 30 years -- and has contributed to a number of conservation initiatives and activities in partnership with the Afghanistan Government, with support from USAID (United States Agency for International Development)." (The Wakhan Corridor also supports a wide array of mammal species, such as Marco Polo sheep, ibex, lynx and wolf.)

In being found, is the large-billed reed warbler losing its slippery touch?

Perhaps it can take some notes from another famously elusive animal that shares its habitat -- the snow leopard.

GET INVOLVED

  • Support the Wildlife Conservation Society
  • Sign a BirdLife International petition to stop the killing of protected birds in Malta
  • Support BirdLife International's "Preventing Extinctions" Program
  • Join the Great Backyard Bird Count, a 4-day "citizen-science" project taking place across the United States starting on February 12, 2010
  • Check out these 15 ways to attract birds -- and birdsongs -- into your backyard
  • Read "What You Can Do to Help Birds" (StateOfTheBirds.org)
  • 25 Things You Can Do to Help the Birds in Your Backyard
  • Sign an Audubon petition urging Congress to take action on global warming based on Audubon's "Birds and Climate" report which clearly shows that climate change is affecting birds
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image: Wildlife Conservation Society

Monday, January 18, 2010

It Came from Outer Space

A decade ago today, a rock that probably contains the stardust that created our Sun landed on a quiet lake in the Yukon

Over 60 miles long, a little over a mile wide and situated in a pristine wilderness of vast spruce forests in Canada's sub-arctic Yukon territory, Tagish Lake endures long, dry winters. Lake trout, jackfish and arctic grayling ply its chilly waters.

But this placidity was broken at 4:43 PM on January 18, 2000, when a massive fireball streaked across the sky and crashed into Tagish's frozen surface.

It was a meteoroid, a piece of cosmic debris.

Meteoroids range in size anywhere from a tiny speck of dust to a massive boulder. The one that exploded in the upper atmosphere on that particular Tuesday a decade ago -- somewhere between 20 and 30 miles above the surface of the Earth -- was a big one.

The Tagish Lake meteoroid is estimated to have been about 13 feet in diameter and weighed about 56 tons before it entered our atmosphere.

The explosion created 1.7 kilotons of energy -- about a tenth as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Though 97% of it vaporized during entry, the meteoroid produced countless fragments, about 500 of which have been recovered.

The resulting Tagish Lake meteorites (those remnants of the meteoroid that survived the fiery entry into the Earth's atmosphere), are carbonaceous chondrites, a rare group of meteorites that represent less than 5% of all known meteorite falls and include the most primitive ones ever found.

The Tagish Lake meteoroid was most likely a piece of 773 Irmintraud, a D-type asteroid or "minor planet" that orbits the Sun between the orbital paths of Jupiter and Mars.

It contains primitive and unchanged stellar dust that most likely was a part of the stellar cloud that created our Sun and solar system.

A 2006 NASA study of globules from the meteorite found that they "resemble cometary carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (CHON) particles, suggesting that such grains were important constituents of the solar system starting materials."

Tagish Lake is famous for being a part of the Alaska-Yukon corridor that gave passage to some 40,000 frenzied fortune hunters on their way to the gold fields near Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.

While the Tagish Lake meteorite wouldn't fetch a dime for a gold trader, it might fare well on the diamond market: It has more nanodiamonds than any other meteorite ever found.

But its real value is its ability to give us a look into the birth of our particular corner of the universe.

GET INVOLVED

  • View the 2010 meteor shower calendar
  • Download this month's free night sky map and calendar from Skymaps.com
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image: a piece of the Tagish Lake meteorite, recovered from the ice in British Columbia (credit: Mike Zolensky, NASA JSC)

Friday, January 15, 2010

Earthquake in Haiti: The Animals

As humanitarian aid arrives in Haiti, animal welfare groups are ready to do their part

Few words can fully express the grief, the shock, the sadness caused by the earthquake in Haiti.

And when humans experience the terrible effects of natural catastrophes such as this, so do animals.

As various national governments and humanitarian groups mobilize aid to help the people of Haiti, several animal welfare organizations are working to help the animals affected by the disaster.

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association (HSVMA), Humane Society International (HSI), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the World Society for the Protection of Animals are among the groups responding.

"Fortunately, one of our veterinary teams had been conducting a program at a veterinary school in the neighboring Dominican Republic when the quake struck," writes HSUS president Wayne Pacelle on his blog. "We are looking to determine if they can get into Haiti to conduct an on-the-ground assessment.

The WSPA Web site states, "Our Disaster Liaison Officer from Panama, Jorge Alcidez Gonzalez who also works as the Head of the K9 unit of Civil Defence, is now travelling out of Panama with a team of specially trained staff and will assess the destruction and welfare needs of the animals. Jorge and his brave team will be treating as many animals as they are able to help."

"Our teams will be working out of a mobile clinic which has been donated to us by the Antigua and Barbuda Humane Society," writes WSPA USA executive director Cecily West in an email.

"WSPA and IFAW have pledged funds to fully outfit this mobile clinic, and it will be shipped from Antigua to our member society, Sociedad Dominicana Para la Protección de Animales (SODOPRECA), in the Dominican Republic for them to drive across the border into Haiti."

"As always with disasters like this, the humanitarian rescue efforts will be the focus in the first week or so," according to IFAW's Web site.

"The immediate priorities will be getting food, clean water, shelter and medical attention to the survivors. After those immediate human needs are met, IFAW's Emergency Response team will be ready to assist the animal victims in any way that we can."

It will take trained search dogs to locate some of the people trapped in the rubble.

And it will take people to help save dogs and other animals in Haiti.

GET INVOLVED

  • Support the WSPA Disaster Animal Fund
  • Support the HSUS International Disaster Fund
image: a rescue dog searches for survivors in Haiti (CNN)

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Freeing Our Family Members

American lawmakers have an opportunity to prohibit testing on great apes. That would be a highly evolved decision

Chimpanzees are our closest relatives. Humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor in Africa over 3 million years ago.

But we have not been such great relatives.

There are an estimated 1,000 chimpanzees trapped in laboratories around the United States.

But four lawmakers have been trying to do something about it.

On March 5, 2009, representatives Edolphus Towns (D-NY), David Reichert (R-WA), James Langevin (D-RI) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) reintroduced the Great Ape Protection Act of 2009, H.R. 1326 (GAPA) to end invasive biomedical research and testing on chimpanzees as well as bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons.

Technically, "great apes" are members of the family Hominidae. Humans are in this family.

The GAPA bill has been referred to committee and has already received the support of 141 members of Congress as co-sponsors, a development that is being hailed by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS) as an indication that there is significant momentum behind this legislation.

According to the bill, "Great apes are highly intelligent and social animals and research laboratory environments involving invasive research cannot meet their complex social and psychological needs."

If passed, the bill would also retire about 600 federally owned chimpanzees currently in American laboratories -- many of whom have been trapped in labs for more than 40 years.

"Chimpanzees have been poor research models for human illness, so most of these animals aren't even being used in active research, but instead are warehoused at great taxpayer expense," according to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).

"While they languish, it costs about $20-25 million a year to keep them in eight federally-funded labs. H.R. 1326 is expected to save taxpayers nearly $200 million over the lifespan of the chimpanzees."

"Like human children, young chimpanzees learn life skills via observation and imitation," according to NEAVS. "They in turn pass these lessons on to their children, resulting in a complex socio-cultural system."

What lessons are we teaching the chimpanzees that are confined and being tested on?

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a (HSUS) letter urging your representative to support the Great Ape Protection Act
  • Volunteer with the Great Apes Project, which defends the rights of the great primates to live in liberty in their natural habitats
  • Sign a PETA petition urging President Obama to ban military trauma exercises on animals
  • Support the Fauna Foundation chimp sanctuary
  • Sign a petition to stop the bushmeat trade and hunting of primates
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image: McDreamy, a former laboratory chimp in the Netherlands who has been rescued (research using apes is no longer allowed in the Netherlands), now living in a safari park (credit: patries71)

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Under Attack: Clean Air

America's Senate considers an amendment that would make it easier for polluters to pollute

Born in 1955 as the Air Pollution Control Act, the United States Clean Air Act has been the government's main tool in controlling air pollution on a national level.

The act aims to deal with the problems of acid rain, ozone depletion and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).

Now, this cornerstone of America's environmental protection law is under attack.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has introduced an amendment that would reduce the Clean Air Act's ability to regulate harmful pollutants, giving the country's biggest polluters more freedom to pollute.

The Washington Post reported recently that industry lobbyists have helped to craft the scheme.

"These lobbyists were high-level officials at EPA under former President Bush who were responsible for some of the worst environmental rollbacks of his administration," according to the American environmental law firm Earthjustice.

"The Supreme Court has already ruled that the EPA has the power to determine whether global warming pollutants are a danger to public health and welfare," said Kathy Kilmer of the Wilderness Society. "And now the agency is preparing to write rules that require the reduction of these harmful pollutants over time."

"The Murkowski amendment would limit the EPA from regulating global warming pollutants -- despite the risks these pollutants pose to public health."

The amendment will be considered for a vote when Congress returns on January 20.

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a Wilderness Society letter urging your senator to vote "no" on the Murkowski amendment
  • Sign an Earthjustice letter urging your senator to oppose the amendment
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image: Dori

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Castrato Oinks

Torturing pigs on their way to the dinner table

Pigs are castrated so that they can carry more fat.

Castration also prevents boar taint, an offensive odor or taste present when cooking or eating pork caused by two substances -- androstenone and skatole -- that begin to accumulate in male pigs at puberty.

It is a painful process that involves making two incisions in the scrotum with a sharp blade, pulling out the nerve-rich testicles, cutting off the spermatic duct and blood vessels and then leaving the wound open to heal on its own.

In an effort to reduce the suffering of pigs, Norway and Switzerland have banned castration without anesthetic.

But they are in the minority: According to a new study by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), 77 percent of 125 million male pigs killed each year in Europe are castrated without the use of anesthetic.

Pigs are curious, playful and possess a higher intelligence level than dogs. Pig intelligence has been compared to that of a three year-old human child.

President Harry Truman once said, "No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs."

It seems that most of the heads of Europe, at least, have a lot to learn.

GET INVOLVED

  • Sign a Care2 petition to stop the castration of pigs without anesthesia
  • Choose a pork substitute for your recipe
  • Read PETA's "The Hidden Life of Pigs"
  • Sign a PETA letter urging Unilever to stop pig abuse
  • Join the Farm Sanctuary Advocacy Campaign Team
  • Read the Yale College Vegetarian Society's "Top 10 Reasons to Become Vegetarian"
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image: Titanium22

Monday, January 11, 2010

Not Your Average Hole in the Ground

Today in 1908, the Grand Canyon became a national monument. That was a pretty good idea

The Grand Canyon is one of the most complete geologic columns on Earth, a colossal rift carved by the Colorado River that reveals rock layers that are a record of the much of the early geological history of the North American continent.

The Vishnu Schist is the oldest visible part, dating back 2 billion years.

Recent estimates date the beginning of the canyon to around 17 million years ago (though there is some controversy over its age, with previous estimates placing it around 4 to 5 million years old. The Colorado River basin, of which the Grand Canyon is a part, began its development around 40 million years ago.

On January 11, 1908, the Grand Canyon was officially named a national monument by the United States.

But for the next 11 years, landowners and mining claim holders tried to block efforts to upgrade the classification of the Grand Canyon from national monument to U.S. national park, a designation which would have provided more funding and wildlife protection for the site.

Though it took over a decade, those business concerns failed and on February 16, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act of Congress into law that officially made the Grand Canyon the 17th U.S. national park, protecting the home of over 2,000 species of plants and 34 species of mammals.

Around 5 million visitors make the pilgrimage to see this magnificent view of Earth's deep history every year.

In 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt first laid eyes on Grand Canyon, he said:

"The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison -- beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world...Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see."

GET INVOLVED

  • Send a Sierra Club thank-you message to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who announced that the agency will temporarily place 1 million acres of public lands surrounding the Grand Canyon off limits to new uranium mining claims, as well as exploration and development of existing, unpatented claims
  • Sign a Defenders of Wildlife letter urging your U.S. representative to cosponsor the America’s Wildlife Heritage Act, federal legislation that provides for a balanced, common-sense approach to wildlife management on our U.S. national forests and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands (U.S. citizens)
  • Take an eco-tour of the Grand Canyon
  • Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe
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image: view from Grandview Point (credit: Doug Dolde)

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