A Message from the Universe's More Youthful Days

The most distant object ever seen offers some clues about the early universe

Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest known electromagnetic events in the universe.

A typical burst will release as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun will release in its entire lifetime (estimated to be around 10 billion years).

In April, NASA issued a press release about the detection of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or about 5 percent of its current age (the universe is currently 13.7 billion years old).

The burst is the most distant -- and thus, oldest -- cosmic event ever seen.

The remarkable event was dubbed -- in NASA's rather un-catchy lexicon -- GRB 090423.

"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."

Now, the October 29 issue of Nature presents analyses of this Ur-explosion and its afterglow, offering some clues as to what it must have been like in the early days of our universe.

"These are spectacular discoveries, and open up unprecedented new windows on the early Universe," said Edison Liang, an astrophysicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, one of the lead scientists working on characterizing the ancient burst, said, "We're now starting to approach the time when we think the very first galaxies turned on."

"It's one thing to explore such remote recesses of time in theory. It's something else again to witness their afterglow," according to a New York Times op-ed.

"GRB 090423 is an invitation for all of us to unfetter our imaginations. We imagine looking outward from that distant point knowing that our own exploration still lies some 13 billion years in the future."

GET INVOLVED

• Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
• Participate in the International Year of Astronomy 2009
  
• 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

RELATED POSTS

• Galaxy IC-10 (October 9, 2009)
• Planet Hunters (October 6, 2009)
• Reclaiming the Night Sky (October 2, 2009)
• Star Light, Star Bright (September 25, 2009)
• Seeing the Mother of Mars (September 18, 2009)
• Hubble Captures a Butterfly (September 11, 2009)
• Looking Into Space from the Coldest Place on Earth (September 3, 2009)
• Viewing Victoria (August 31, 2009)
• Let There Be Light (August 19, 2009)
• Where Stars Are Born (July 16, 2009)
• Kepler and the Gate to the Black Forest (February 15, 2009)
• A Smashing Reunion for the Galaxy Twins? (February 9, 2009)

image: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

A Bacteria for All

A sinister new effect of globalization and industrialization has arrived -- and it's microscopic

Humans first domesticated animals about 10,000 years ago.

Since then, there has never been a strain of bacteria that has jumped from human to another animal and spread, until recently.

Scientists from the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh have found that a strain of bacteria known as Staphylococcus aureus has moved from humans to chickens, according to an October 26 press release issued by the institute, an international center for research on molecular and quantitative genetics of farm animals.

It is believed to be the first evidence of a bacterial pathogen crossing from Homo sapien to another species and then spreading.

Genetic testing revealed that the crossover event occurred about 40 years ago, which coincided with the rise of industrial poultry farming.

The strain found in humans was isolated to one area. However, the chicken strain was found to be global in scope.

"Half a century ago chickens were reared for their eggs, with meat regarded as a by-product," said Dr. Ross Fitzgerald of the Roslin Institute. "Now the demand for meat has led to a poultry industry dominated by a few multinational companies which supply a limited number of breeding lines to a global market -- thereby promoting the spread of the bacteria around the world."

GET INVOLVED

• Take the GoVeg.com "Pledge to Be Veg" for 30 days
• Sign a PETA petition urging McDonald's to stop supporting chicken suppliers that use cruel and inhumane methods
  
• Sign the MakeOurFoodSafe.org petition urging the US Congress to pass strong food safety legislation (US citizens only)
• Sign a petition to boycott Kentucky Fried Chicken for animal torture until they adopt a comprehensive animal welfare plan
• Find out how green your diet is with the Eating Green Calculator

RELATED POSTS

• If We Really Are What We Eat, Most of Us Are A Bit Disturbing (October 17, 2008)
• How Green Is Your Meal? (June 28, 2009)
• These Little Piggies Didn't Go to Market (May 2, 2009)
• Animal Farm (April 10, 2009)
• The Gloomy Dean (January 30, 2009)
• Eat Healthy and Save the World, Simultaneously (January 23, 2009)
• California Passes Landmark Anti-Cruelty Act (November 7, 2008)
• Californians to Vote on Landmark Anti-Cruelty Act (September 22, 2008)

image: Staphylococcus aureus. (Credit: Agricultural Research Service / United States Department of Agriculture)

We're Not the Only Ones Capable of Suffering

There is no reason that the United Nations should not adopt the Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare

There is only one animal on Earth that has been granted "universal" rights: Homo sapien.

On December 10, 1948, we granted ourselves those rights when the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It states, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

Unfortunately -- and to some, shockingly -- there is no similar international protection afforded to the other animals with which we share the planet.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) is trying to change that.

They have started a petition urging the U.N. General Assembly adopt international policies on animal welfare with their Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare (UDAW) campaign.

"Animal welfare is not some unaffordable luxury. It's an essential part of solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing us today,” said Mike Baker, WSPA’s director general.

The draft UDAW states that "animals are living, sentient beings and therefore deserve due
consideration and respect" and that member nations would agree that "all appropriate steps shall be taken...to prevent cruelty to animals and to reduce their suffering."

According to the WSPA's Web site:

• Around 60 billion farm animals are used each year globally to produce meat, milk and eggs. The majority are raised in industrial farming systems where their welfare needs are not met.
• Globally, there are some 600 million dogs, and a similar number of cats, of which an estimated 80% are stray or unwanted.
• The illegal and often inhumane trade in wildlife and wildlife parts is a soaring black market worth $10 billion a year, exceeded only by arms and drug smuggling. Millions of wild animals are killed, captured or traded inhumanely in this shady business.
• An estimated 80% of power input on farms in developing countries is supplied by draught animals, however the resources made available are often woefully inadequate, leading to significant welfare issues.
• Animals are also affected on a huge scale by natural disasters, though seldom considered.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a direct result of the horrors that were experienced during World War II.

How many more horrors must billions of other animals endure day after day before they receive a similar statement?

GET INVOLVED

• Sign the Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare

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• Over 30,000 Dogs Slaughtered in China (June 17, 2009)
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• Death Row Baby Seals Find A Friend in Canada's Senate (March 15, 2009)
• The Gloomy Dean (January 30, 2009)
• Songs for the Brumbies (August 6, 2009)
• Tracking Australia's Wildlife Smugglers (February 8, 2009)
• Protecting Great Apes (August 13, 2009)
• Taiwan's Typhoon Dogs (August 17, 2009)
• Killing Congo's Chimps (March 29, 2009)
• The Fast and the Furious (August 5, 2009)
• Napoleon Complex (July 13, 2009)
• The Korean Taste for Dog (September 6, 2009)
• A Real Killer: The World's Toughest Dog Race (April 18, 2009)
• Where Man's Best Friend Is on the Menu (October 24, 2008)
• South Korea Pushes to Legalize Dog Meat (July 18, 2008)
• Black Beauty (May 15, 2009)
• Heaven or Haven for Horses? (February 22, 2009)
• America's Dirty Little Secret (December 23, 2008)
• Use of Lab Animals on the Rise in UK (July 26, 2008)
• America's Wild Horses in Peril (June 27, 2008)
• Thoroughbred Rescuers Face Uphill Climb (June 7, 2008)
• Kentucky Derby Horse Death Raises Questions (May 6, 2008)
• Horse Fighting in the Philippines (April 4, 2008)
• South Africa's Shark Tale (June 24, 2009)
• New Film Exposes Japan's Dolphin Slaughter (January 18, 2009)
• Singapore's Dolphin Deal with the Solomons (December 8, 2008)
• Massive Dolphin Slaughter in Japan (June 23, 2008)

image: Drew Leavy

Happy Birthday TR, and Thanks

Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, was born today in 1858

When American president William McKinley was assassinated on September 14, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became, at 42, the youngest person to have assumed the office of the president, a position he held until March 4, 1909.

During that 2,729-day period, "TR" (as he liked to sign his letters) gave official and enduring protection to over 234 million acres of American wilderness.

"It is hard to believe today that there was a time when securing Pelican Island, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were controversial decisions denounced as a federal land grab inimical to states’ rights and economic growth," writes Jonathan Rosen in a New York Times review of Douglas Brinkley's recent Roosevelt biography, "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America."

"Of course every generation has its own idea of progress, beauty and necessity," writes Rosen. "What made Theodore Roosevelt a conservationist hero was his conviction that pelicans, 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rock formations belonged to future generations of Americans as well as to the past. Weighed against eternity, what were the arguments of mining magnates, plume hunters, local businesses and assorted congressmen?"

As America remembers the birth of this conservationist hero, a very relevant bill sits on the docket on Capitol Hill -- America’s Wildlife Heritage Act, federal legislation that will help to protect public lands and the wildlife that lives there.

"The America's Wildlife Heritage Act is a commonsense bill that will bring the management of our federal public lands into the 21st century," said Michael Francis, the national forest program director of the non-profit conservation organization The Wilderness Society.

"For too long, our national forests and public lands have been managed without adequately considering the health of the fish, wildlife and plants found on those lands or the people whose livelihoods and traditions depend on them," he said.

Together, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administer 449 million acres of land. "Unfortunately," according to a statement by the non-profit group Defenders of Wildlife, "a growing population and associated development, energy exploration and production on public lands, as well as a changing climate all combine to threaten our fish and wildlife populations and the abundant natural treasures to be found on America’s public lands."

On August 31, 1910, at the dedication ceremony of the John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie, Kansas, and surrounded by a throng of 30,000 rapt listeners, Roosevelt gave an impassioned speech later known as the New Nationalism Speech, in which he outlined his conservationist philosophy about the preservation of the nation's wild lands:

"Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part."

As Congress ponders America’s Wildlife Heritage Act, they would do well to remember President Roosevelt's foresight, his commitment to future generations and how at one time, even the Grand Canyon was up for grabs.

GET INVOLVED

• 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)
  
• Sign a Defenders of Wildlife letter urging Congress to permanently protect the Arctic refuge (U.S. citizens)
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe

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• From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream Waters (March 26, 2009)
• President Bush: The Biggest Ocean Protector Ever (January 7, 2009)
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• Gone in 75 Years: Polar Bears (June 29, 2009)
• Polar Transcendentalism (May 11, 2009)
  
• Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Is A Time Bomb (July 5, 2009)
• Ashley Judd to Congress: Commit Some Cap and Trade Revenue to Help Wildlife (April 25, 2009)
• Selling the Arctic's Future to the Oil Industry (March 6, 2009)
• Canada Takes Big Step in Forest Protection (August 1, 2008)
  

image: Theodore Roosevelt at Osawatomie, August 31, 1910

Taming the Mighty Colorado River

Seventy-three years ago today, the first electric generator at Hoover Dam went into full operation

"This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind," said American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 30, 1935, upon visiting the Hoover Dam.

"Ten years ago the place where we gathered was an unpeopled, forbidding desert. In the bottom of the gloomy canyon whose precipitous walls rose to height of more than a thousand feet, flowed a turbulent, dangerous river...The site of Boulder City was a cactus-covered waste. And the transformation wrought here in these years is a twentieth century marvel."

President Roosevelt went on to remark that the dam -- located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada -- held enough water "to cover the whole State of Connecticut to a depth of ten feet."

When massive arch-gravity dam was was completed in 1936, it was the world's largest electric-power station as well as the world's largest concrete structure. Currently, it ranks as the world's 35th largest hydroelectric generating station.

Hydroelectric plants produce significantly lower amounts of carbon dioxide emissions than their fossil fuel counterparts.

Hydroelectric power supplies the world with about 20% of the world's electricity and represents almost 90% of electricity from renewable sources.

The Hoover Dam is a mighty feat of human engineering and a very smart way to harness nature's power. But though the dam is sight to behold, the majesty of its environs is not something one would easily miss.

The American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell (famed for his Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869, a three-month river journey down the Green and Colorado Rivers that included the first passage through the Grand Canyon), once remarked on the area that would become the future home of the Hoover Dam: "The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock -- cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock--ten thousand strangely carved forms...cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored."

GET INVOLVED

• Take an eco-tour of the Hoover Dam
  
• Join the Greenpeace "Energy [R]evolution"
• Sign the EnergyPetition.com petition in support of a "citizen-based effort to encourage a U.S. government alternative energy program"
  
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe

RELATED POSTS

• Four Degrees (September 29, 2009)
• Gore: "Shake Off Complacency" (January 29, 2009)
  
• The Arctic Has a Hotseat, and Man Is Behind the Wheel (September 17, 2009)
• The Pot Is Boiling (July 2, 2009)
• Congress Tackles Climate Change (June 24, 2009)

image: Hoover Dam by Ansel Adams, 1942

Time For Your (Wild) Close-up

The results for this year's best wildlife photographs are in

Jose Luiz Rodriguez had planned the photograph for years.

"I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting - or predation - but without blood," he told BBC News. "I didn't want a cruel image."

Rodriguez captured his shot, and it won the prestigious Veolia Environment Wildlife Photograph of the Year Award, beating out 43,000 entries.

The competition, now in its 45th year, is run by BBC Wildlife Magazine and the Natural History Museum, London.

An exhibition of the best images from this year's competition opens today at the Natural History Museum.

GET INVOLVED

• See the image galleries for this year's Veolia Environment Wildlife Photograph of Year
• Sign a Care2 petition urging Alaska to end the wolf killing
  
• Sign a Defenders of Wildlife letter urging your representative to co-sponsor the PAW Act to help stop the Alaska wolf massacre (U.S. citizens)

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• A Second Chance for Alaska's Wolves (July 20, 2009)
• Obama Approves Bush's Wolf Plan (March 8, 2009)
• Ashley Judd on Sarah Palin: "We Will Stop Her" (February 10, 2009)
• Palin's Wolf Slaughter Reaches Record Numbers (December 31, 2008)
• Darker Days for Gray Wolves? (November 1, 2008)

TELEVISION ALERT

Watch Cloud: Challenge of the Stallions, the newest installment of Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ginger Kathren's documentary series about America's wild horses, airing on PBS Nature on Sunday, October 25 at 8 p.m. Click here for a sneak preview.

image: Jose Luiz Rodriguez

Low Country

The Maldives cabinet dives deep to highlight climate change

Spanning about 35,000 square miles (90,000 square kilometers) in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives is a nation comprised of 1,192 islets.

On average, these islands rise a mere 7 feet (2.1 meters) above sea level, making the Maldives the lowest country on the planet.

Considering some predictions about the rise in sea level due to the melting ice caps, the country could be underwater if the effects of climate change are not mitigated.

President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet made that sentiment when they recently met underwater to call attention to his country's situation.

"We're now actually trying to send our message, let the world know what is happening, and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change is not checked," President Nasheed said, according to a recent BBC News story.

When asked what would happen if the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen would fail, he replied, "We are going to die."

GET INVOLVED

• Watch the BBC News video of President Nasheed's underwater cabinet meeting
  
• Subscribe to the United Nations Climate Change Conference newsletter
  
• Sign the "We Can Solve It" petition for a global treaty on climate change
• Join the Greenpeace "Energy [R]evolution"
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe

RELATED POSTS

• Four Degrees (September 29, 2009)
• The Arctic Has a Hotseat, and Man Is Behind the Wheel (September 17, 2009)
• The Pot Is Boiling (July 2, 2009)
• Gone in 75 Years: Polar Bears (June 29, 2009)
• Congress Tackles Climate Change (June 24, 2009)
• EDITORIAL: Polar Transcendentalism (May 11, 2009)
• North Pole May Be Ice-Free in Five Years (August 12, 2008)

image: BBC News

Bullfighting vs. Rodeos

Exporting a more American brand of animal cruelty

"In the municipal bullring in Guadalajara, a small city near Madrid, a bilingual emcee tries to fire up the crowd as 'Miss Rodeos' waving the Stars and Stripes ride out on Harley-Davidsons," writes Jerome Socolovsky in "From Bullfighting to Rodeos: Culture Shock in Spain," a recent story on NPR.com.

"The cowboys rope, steer and ride broncos, as the high-decibel sound system shakes the arena's foundations."

As animal rights activists in Spain have been working to put an end the country's cruel bullfighting industry (Copperwiki.org estimates that more than 30,000 thousand bulls are killed annually), American entrepreneurs have descended in an effort to give Spaniards a more humane alternative -- rodeos.

"All it takes is one visit to the SHARK Web site, including the Rodeo Cruelty section, where you can find far more reports and videos from rodeo investigations than you ever want to see, to know instantly that there is nothing humane, nothing honorable, about rodeos," writes Stephanie Ernst in a story on Change.org.

"Animals are shocked, taunted, and tortured with pain -- and that's even before they're released to be chased down, jerked and yanked around, broken (in the literal sense), and tied up or "dominated" for the crowd. The animals don't run and thrash because they're wild or because they too are engaging in some sort of competition. They run and thrash because they are terrified, because they are trying to escape pain, because their abusers are chasing after them to cause them even more pain, while lights flash and sound systems blare and people scream and laugh all around them."

As they don't involve the actual killing of an animal, rodeos may be construed as more humane than bullfights. But to really answer that question properly, fans of these so-called "sports" should ask themselves, "Would I rather be tortured day in and day out, or be tortured and then killed?"

For Conchita Ruza, who was interviewed by Socolovsky, rodeos just don't have what it takes.

"I'll stick to the bullfights. They're a lot nicer. First of all, you don't have all this racket. Secondly, the bull is a beautiful animal. And lastly," she says, "I'm Spanish."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign the World Society for Protection of Animals petition to ban bullfighting
• Sign the RodeoCruelty.org petition to ban rodeos
• Sign a Care2 petition urging the Cheyenne Frontier Day to ban steer busting, the most cruel rodeo event
  

RELATED POSTS

• Breeder of Fighting Bulls to Clone Aging Sire (March 24, 2009)
• Horse Fighting in the Philippines (April 4, 2008)

image: (left: WSPA, right: Change.org)

Of People, Pachyderms and Peppers

A brokered peace between the villagers and elephants in Cambodia

Elephants rarely attack humans and livestock. But when human development destroys elephant habitat, the likelihood of attacks increases.

In Cambodia, elephant population numbers are looking much better after suffering losses through many years of war and deforestation.

In an attempt to maintain a healthy population on both sides of the equation, the conservation group Flora and Fauna International has stepped in with a multi-pronged plan that hopes to keep the peace, according to a recent BBC News story.

The organization has funded programs to help villagers start businesses that do not require deforestation -- such as chicken farming.

The conservationists are also helping to keep the elephants away from crops by planting rows of chillies around farms.

Apparently, elephants don't like spicy heat -- at least not in their food.

GET INVOLVED

• Support Flora and Fauna International
• Send a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is accepting public comments on the living conditions of captive elephants in the United States (U.S. citizens)
• Adopt an elephant from the World Wildlife Fund for $25
• Sign a PETA letter urging U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to immediately seize the elephants in the Ringling Red Unit (U.S. citizens)

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• 2,000 Elephants Missing in Chad (December 15, 2008)
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image: Barbara Piuma

Numbers Don't Lie

Counting down -- and up -- to the end, whenever that may be

In 1983, British author and futurist Peter Russell published a book entitled The Global Brain, coining a term with the title that Wikipedia defines as "a metaphor for the worldwide intelligent network formed by people together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into an 'organic' whole."

One easy way of seeing the impacts of this "global brain" is Russell's "World Clock," which tells much more than the time.

It counts the increases in the various stressors on the planet, such as human births, species going extinct, hectares of forests cut down, barrels of oil pumped and military expenditure.

It also counts human deaths and their various causes, such cardiovascular disease, AIDS, cancer, diabetes, suicide, war and violence.

Thanks to Russell's clock, we are able to know that the following happened in the past ten minutes:

• 2,458 babies were born
• 238 hectares of forests were cut down
• 110 hectares of land has turned into desert
• 555,041 barrels of oil were pumped
• 503,833 tons of CO2 were emitted
• $22,058,749 was spent on the military

"The real crisis we are facing is not an environmental crisis, a population crisis, economic crisis, a social crisis, or a political crisis," says Russell on his Web site.

"It is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness. A crisis is an indication that the old mode of operating is no longer working, and a new approach is required. This is true of a personal crisis, a family crisis or a political crisis. In the case of the environmental the old way that is no longer working is our self-centred materialistic consciousness. It may have worked well in the past, when we needed to provide ourselves with the basic commodities necessary for our individual well-being -- but it clearly no longer works today."

No species went extinct during our 10-minute observation of the World Clock. For that, you'd have to wait at least 12 minutes.

GET INVOLVED

• Monitor the growing devastation with Peter Russell's World Clock
• Feel some optimism with Peter Russell's book The Global Brain
  
• Sign the "We Can Solve It" petition for a global treaty on climate change
• Support the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Countdown 2010 to save the world's biodiversity
• Join the Greenpeace "Energy [R]evolution"
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe
• Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
• Take these seven steps to help save the Amazon rainforest

RELATED POSTS

• Bye Bye Biodiversity (October 15, 2009)
• A.H. (After Human) (October 8, 2009)
• Four Degrees (September 29, 2009)
• The Arctic Has a Hotseat, and Man Is Behind the Wheel (September 17, 2009)
• The Pot Is Boiling (July 2, 2009)
• Happy Markets, Happy Forests (April 27, 2008)
• Plight of the Penan (September 14, 2009)
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• Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud (May 30, 2009)
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• Dismembering the Earth's Heart and Lungs (January 25, 2009)

image: Peter Russell's World Clock

The World of the Small

The winners for the 35th Annual Nikon Small World Competition are in

Since 1974, Nikon has been given annual awards to the best photomicrographs -- that is, photographs of things taken through a microscope.

From flower stems to fish ovaries, from cotton fibers to magmatic rock, the winning images of the 35th Annual Nikon Small World Competition give just a "tiny" indication of the vastness of the microscopic world.

GET INVOLVED

• Enter next year's competition
• Get a digital microscope camera

RELATED POSTS

• Reclaiming the Night Sky (October 2, 2009)

image: This photo by Dennis Breitsprecher of fluorescent actin (protein) bundles growing from the surface of coated beads won first place in the popular vote contest

Bye Bye Biodiversity

An international commitment to stop biodivesity loss will not be met

In April 2002, over a hundred world ministers made a commitment at the 6th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at the Hague to "achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth."

Well, that's not going happen.

"We will certainly miss the target for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 and therefore also miss the 2015 environmental targets within the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to improve health and livelihoods for the world's poorest and most vulnerable people," says Georgina Mace of Imperial College, London, and Vice-Chair of Diversitas, according to a press release issued by the the international biodiversity science program.

This week, Diversitas is convening a landmark biodiversity conference in Cape Town.

"It is hard to image a more important priority than protecting the ecosystem services underpinned by biodiversity," says Prof. Mace. "Biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate."

"Yet changes to ecosystems and losses of biodiversity have continued to accelerate. Since 1992, even the most conservative estimates agree that an area of tropical rainforest greater than the size of California has been converted mostly for food and fuel. Species extinction rates are at least 100 times those in pre-human times and are expected to continue to increase."

The United States has spent a good deal of money trying to protect endangered wildlife -- in 2007, that sum was over $1.5 billion, according to John Platt in a Scientific American article. The Chinook salmon alone received $165 million towards its conservation.

But, as Platt points out, "This is all just a drop in the bucket of the total funds required to protect endangered species."

Professor Mace believes however that "the situation is not hopeless. There are many steps available that would help but we cannot dawdle. Meaningful action should have started years ago. The next best time is now."

GET INVOLVED

• Support the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Countdown 2010 to save the world's biodiversity
• Support the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
  
• Sign a petition to the United Nations to show your support of biodiversity

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• Slowing Human Population Growth May Stop Species Extinction (August 13, 2008)
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• A Six-Step Plan to Save the Oceans from An Extinction Crisis (August 17, 2008)
• Elephant Extinction Possible by 2020 (August 3, 2008)
• One-Third of Coral Reefs Face Extinction (July 11, 2008)
• Seal's Extinction Caused by Humans (June 13, 2008)
• Last Days for the Leatherbacks (September 5, 2009)
• Last Chance to Save the Saola (September 4, 2009)
• Exit the Mangrove Dwellers (August 25, 2009)
• Atlantic Salmon Dying in Chile's Pacific (August 4, 2009)
• Extinction Crisis in Oceania (August 3, 2009)
• Exclusive Interview with Francois Hugo, Founder, Seal Alert-SA (July 15, 2009)
• Farewell from Christmas Island (September 10, 2009)
• Exit the Mangrove Dwellers (August 25, 2009)
• Mangrove Activists Ask Consumers to Eat Less Shrimp (June 15, 2008)

image: Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (credit: Zureks)

The World's First Shark Sanctuary

They've been around for 400 million years. Now, they have a place in the wild where they won't be hunted down

Palau was recently in the news for deciding in June to accept all 17 of the remaining Uyghurs that were held at Guantanamo Bay.

And now, it is also providing sanctuary for another species that is also unfairly judged to be dangerous: sharks.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly last month, President Johnson Toribiong said that his tiny Pacific island nation will create the world's first shark sanctuary.

The country will protect an area of 230,00 square miles (600,000 square kilometers) -- almost the size of France.

President Toribiong also called for an end to the brutal practice of shark-finning, in which the fins are brutally cut off live sharks, their bodies then dumped back into the ocean, where they sink to bottom, unable to swim. They die, often being eaten alive by other predators. The fins are used to supply the global demand for shark fin soup.

He also called for an end to bottom trawling, a destructive form of commercial fishing in which huge nets dredge up the ocean floor, catching a lot more than just the intended fish and causing extreme damage to marine ecosystems.

Scientists estimate that half of the world's sharks face extinction. About 100 million sharks are slaughtered each year.

"Economics is clearly an incentive for the Palau government, which derives most of its income from tourism," writes Richard Black in a BBC News story. "Sharks are themselves a big attraction for scuba-divers, and may also play a role in keeping coral reef ecosystems healthy."

Thankfully for sharks, Palau has figured out what so many other nations have not: Wildlife is more valuable alive than dead.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a Shark Angels Alliance petition urging the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board to work on a plan to abolish the nets and work on a zero-kill plan
• Sign the Coral Reef Care petition supporting an EU Plan of Action for the protection of sharks
• Sign a petition against bottom trawling
  

RELATED POSTS

• South Africa's Shark Tale (June 24, 2009)
• Ghosts in the Water (May 10, 2009)
• 13.7 BILLION YEARS EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Philip Renaud, Executive Director, Living Oceans Foundation (March 16, 2009)
• Singapore's Dolphin Deal with the Solomons (December 8, 2008)
• Sharks Get a New Best Friend in Galapagos (October 23, 2008)
• A Shark's Immaculate Conception (October 13, 2008)
  

image: Great white shark. Photo by Terry Goss, copyright 2006. Taken at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, August 2006. Shot with Nikon D70s in Ikelite housing, in natural light. Animal estimated at 11-12 feet (3.3 to 3.6 m) in length, age unknown.

Of Whales and Shrimp

The demand for a tiny crustacean is harming the biggest animal of all

An island nation off the southeastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar got its name from the Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who wrote of an island of riches called "Madeigascar" in his memoirs.

Its isolation has played a role in some of those riches, namely a unique array of biodiversity. Indeed, ninety percent of the nation's 10,000 plant species are found nowhere else.

Humpback whales like the area as well. Each year, about 7,000 of them migrate to Antongil Bay in northeastern Madagascar to breed and calve.

But at the same time, huge shrimp trawlers -- many of them unregulated -- dredge up the bottom of the sea floor, damaging this fragile ecosystem and harming a critical habitat for the whales.

The humpback was once hunted to the brink of extinction. Hopefully, our taste for shrimp cocktail won't put them back there.

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a Wildlife Conservation Society pledge to reduce your shrimp consumption to help protect an important whale habitat

RELATED POSTS

• Exit the Mangrove Dwellers (August 25, 2009)
• Mangrove Activists Ask Consumers to Eat Less Shrimp (June 15, 2008)
• On Myanmar, Mangroves and Shrimp (May 9, 2008)
• The Shrimp Effect: Does Eating Shrimp in Canada Kill People in Myanmar? (May 8, 2008)
• The Whale Warrior (July 31, 2009)
• Denmark: Humpback Whales Are Tasty (June 23, 2009)
• Silencing Whale Songs (May 31, 2009)
• Illegal Whale Meat Still on Japanese Menus (April 14, 2009)
• Bloody Waters in the Faroe Islands (February 19 , 2009)
• Gray Whales, Meet Big Oil (November 22, 2008)

image: Protected Resouces Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, La Jolla, California

Gone Bananas

The "lungs of the Earth" are having trouble breathing. As World Rainforest Week kicks off, consumers should take a stand at the register

Rainforests once covered 14 percent of the Earth's land surface. Today, they cover only 6 percent.

More than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in tropical rainforests. But not for long: One-and-a-half acres of rainforest are lost every second.

Prince Charles has called for an end to the deforestation of the planet's rainforests, citing it as the best solution to combating climate change. These trees stores vast amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when they are cut down.

And they are being cut down at alarming rates (Argentina recently announced that it has lost almost 70% of its forests in the last hundred years) in order to make a wide variety of products, such as tropical hardwood, beef, bananas, coffee, chocolate, paper, aluminum, gold, oil, palm oil and steel.

In May of last year, the prince told the BBC that rainforests are the world's "air conditioning system," adding that it was "crazy" the rainforests were worth more "dead than alive" to some of the world's poorest people.

"Halting deforestation would be the easiest and cheapest way in helping in the battle against climate change," he said.

With a recent study showing that the United States must cut carbon within a decade, consumer choice can be a powerful tool for change in the coming years.

The banana is "the most popular fruit in the world...responsible for massive degradation of the land, chemicalization, worker poisoning and oppression," according to RainforestRelief.org.

"Currently, no fresh banana available in the US is grown in a way that is not detrimental to the rainforests."

As World Rainforest Week kicks off today, perhaps consumers -- when comparing apples and bananas -- will choose the one that allows the world's trees to breathe a little easier.

GET INVOLVED

• Download a PDF of "Do I Dare Eat That Banana," a document created by RainforestRelief.org that outlines rainforest products to avoid
  
• Participate in World Rainforest Week
  
• Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
• Donate to the Rainforest Action Network
• Take these seven steps to help save the Amazon rainforest

RELATED POSTS

• Don't Cry for Trees Argentina (September 28, 2009)
• Prince Charles Urges Halt to Rainforest Logging (May 20, 2008)
• Happy Markets, Happy Forests (April 27, 2008)
• Plight of the Penan (September 14, 2009)
• Lost World (September 9, 2009)
• The Trees of the Maya (July 29, 2009)
• Environmental Showdown in the Amazon: Big Oil vs. Native People (July 21, 2009)
• The Rare Animals of the Amazon (June 13, 2009)
• Trade Carbon, Save Orangutans (June 8, 2009)
  
• Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud (May 30, 2009)
• Blowing Noses Into Dead, Ancient Trees (February 29, 2009)
  
• Dismembering the Earth's Heart and Lungs (January 25, 2009)

image: "The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s original 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres, an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas) has been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.

"By the beginning of this decade, the frontier had reached the remote northwest corner of Rondônia, pictured in this series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). Over the span of eight years, roads and clearings pushed west-northwest from Buritis toward the Jaciparaná River. The deforested area along the road into Nova Mamoré expanded north-northeast all the way to the BR-346 highway.

"Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern in these images. The first clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture." (credit: NASA)

Galaxy IC-10

A view of the closest known starburst galaxy

According to the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site:

"Lurking behind dust and stars near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, IC 10 is a mere 2.3 million light-years distant. Its light dimmed by the intervening dust, the irregular dwarf galaxy still shows off vigorous star-forming regions that shine with a telltale reddish glow in this colorful skyscape. In fact, also a member of the Local Group of galaxies, IC 10 is the closest known starburst galaxy. Compared to other Local Group galaxies, IC 10 has a large population of newly formed stars that are massive and intrinsically very bright, including a luminous X-ray binary star system thought to contain a black hole. Located within the boundaries of the northern constellation Cassiopeia, IC 10 is about 5,000 light-years across."

GET INVOLVED

• Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
• Participate in the International Year of Astronomy 2009
  
• 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

RELATED POSTS

• Planet Hunters (October 6, 2009)
• Star Light, Star Bright (September 25, 2009)
• Hubble Captures a Butterfly (September 11, 2009)
• Where Stars Are Born (July 16, 2009)
• A Smashing Reunion for the Galaxy Twins? (February 9, 2009)

credit and copyright: Mike Siniscalchi

A.H. (After Human)

In some crystal balls, we're not around

In his 2007 book The World Without Us, American journalist Alan Weisman ponders the state of the planet after the last humans have gone, from deteriorating buildings and overgrown cities to the lasting quality of such man-made things as Mount Rushmore and radioactive waste.

Time ranked the book #1 on its top 10 non-fiction list for that year.

In January 2008, the History Channel offered its own view, with the documentary Life After People, which detailed a span of 10,000 years beginning with the sudden disappearance of the entire human race.

Months or even years after we're gone, the show's writers hypothesize that the lights of Las Vegas would be the only surface light seen from space, as the city would continue to be powered by the Hoover Dam, which can automatically supply electricity as long as Lake Mead had water.

With 5.4 million viewers, Life After People was the History Channel's most-watched program.

In March 2008, the National Geographic Channel joined the growing chorus of soothsayers with Aftermath: Population Zero, which started with Day 1 A.H. (a new time designation for "After Humans") all the way to 25,000 years A.H, when the last vestiges of New York City disappeared under the weight of a new ice age.

Now, New Scientist reporter Bob Holmes offers his own apocalyptic future view in "Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us."

"In two or three hundred years," Holmes imagines an "ecological collapse and a mass extinction" from man's "orgy of global warming and overconsumption."

Holmes interviewed several scientists, including paleontologist Tony Barnosky from the University of California at Berkeley, who says that after fossil fuels have run out, effectively bringing agriculture to a halt, "a lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people."

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says geophysicist David Archer from the University of Chicago.

For a clue as to what might happen, many scientists have been looking to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when the Earth's temperature rose rapidly concurrent with a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a situation that caused numerous extinctions.

But James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says that those kinds of geo-historical studies won't tell us too much, as the Sun is much brighter now that it was back then.

Climate predictions are tough to make. What we do for certain is that the planet can withstand dramatic changes in its atmosphere. For the living things that call Earth home, it's an entirely different story.

GET INVOLVED

• Subscribe to the United Nations Climate Change Conference newsletter
  
• Sign the "We Can Solve It" petition for a global treaty on climate change
• Join the Greenpeace "Energy [R]evolution"
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe
• Find out how you can help keep Antarctica cool and prevent global warming

RELATED POSTS

• Four Degrees (September 29, 2009)
• The Arctic Has a Hotseat, and Man Is Behind the Wheel (September 17, 2009)
• The Pot Is Boiling (July 2, 2009)
• Gone in 75 Years: Polar Bears (June 29, 2009)
• Congress Tackles Climate Change (June 24, 2009)
• EDITORIAL: Polar Transcendentalism (May 11, 2009)
• North Pole May Be Ice-Free in Five Years (August 12, 2008)

image: Reynard Loki