Africa is home to spectacular migration events. Large mammals ranging from Grant’s gazelles to blue wildebeests pound their hooves across vast tracts of land as the seasons change. New research suggests, however, that migrations across the continent might be going extinct. For the first time, scientists have compiled and analyzed data on all of the world’s largest and definitive migrating land mammals. The researchers looked at the migration history for a group of ungulates, all of them hoofed mammals, weighing more than 44 pounds. The data suggest that one-quarter of these mammals no longer migrate, and human development is responsible for the decline, said Grant Harris, co-author of the study. In many cases, data on these animals is simply nonexistent. ‘I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s nothing here at all,’ and if there’s nothing here for these large mammals, this bodes poorly for other species,’ Harris told LiveScience. Harris, a conservation biologist, conducted the research while with the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He is now at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque, N.M. The report was published in the April edition of […]
As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one. Often I’ll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner’s nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one’s merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems. Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes. Yet, the debate rages on. Indeed, it has reached a fever pitch since President Barack Obama took office, with Americans either dreading or hoping for the dawn of a single-payer health care system. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, while proponents laud that very same Canadian system as the answer to all of America’s health care problems. Frankly, both sides often get things wrong when trotting out Canada to further their respective arguments. As […]
WASCO, Ore. — For decades, most of the nation’s renewable power has come from dams, which supplied cheap electricity without requiring fossil fuels. But the federal agencies running the dams often compiled woeful track records on other environmental issues. Now, with the focus in Washington on clean power, some dam agencies are starting to go green, embracing wind power and energy conservation. The most aggressive is the Bonneville Power Administration, whose power lines carry much of the electricity in the Pacific Northwest. The agency also provides a third of the region’s power supply, drawn mostly from generators inside big dams. The amount of wind power on the Bonneville transmission system quadrupled in the last three years and is expected to double again in another two. The turbines are making an electricity system with low carbon emissions even greener - already, in Seattle, more than 90 percent of the power comes from renewable sources. Yet the shift of emphasis at the dam agencies is proving far from simple. It could end up pitting one environmental goal against another, a tension that is emerging in renewable-power projects across the country. Environmental groups contend that the Bonneville Power Administration’s […]
Census of Marine Life historians reconstruct images of past sea life that boggle today’s imagination Before oil hunters in the early 1800s harpooned whales by the score, the ocean around New Zealand teemed with about 27,000 southern right whales – roughly 30 times as many as today – according to one of several astonishing reconstructions of ocean life in olden days to be presented at a Census of Marine Life conference May 26-28. At about the same time, UK researchers say large pods of blue whales and orcas, blue sharks and thresher sharks darkened the waters off Cornwall, England, herds of harbour porpoise pursued fish upriver, and dolphins regularly played in waters inshore. Using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies, Census researchers are piecing together images – some flickering, others in high definition – of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations. They are also documenting the timelines over which those giant marine life populations declined. For example, Census scientists say the size of freshwater fish caught by Europeans started shrinking in medieval times. […]
In 1965, the American astronaut Edward White dropped a glove, and ever since it has been orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour. This sounds like a quirky Trivial Pursuit answer — what is the deadliest garment in history? — but it could be about to give us all a galactic slap in the face. That glove is now joined by so much space trash that scientists are warning it could be poised to take out the satellites we depend on every day — and trap us here on a heating earth. In just fifty years of exploring space, humans have left 600,000 pieces of rubbish in space, all circling us at super-speed. When it is whirring so fast, a one millimetre fleck of paint hits you as hard as a .22 caliber bullet fired at point blank range. A hard-boiled pea is as dangerous as a 400-lb safe smacking into you at 60mph. And a chunk of metal the size of a tennis ball is as explosive as 25 sticks of dynamite. We are adding to this junk faster than ever before. There is no international agreement to not leave trash in the skies — […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
