MIAMI — An underwater nursery project to restore the struggling coral reefs along Florida’s southern coast and the U.S. Virgin Islands will receive $3.3 million in national stimulus funding, according to an announcement Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The nonprofit Nature Conservancy will oversee the project, which expands four existing nurseries of staghorn and elkhorn coral and establishes two new nurseries. Over the next three years, about 12,000 corals will be grown to enhance coral populations at 34 degraded reefs from the Dry Tortugas - 70 miles west of Key West - to the waters off Broward County. The stimulus money pays for most of the salaries of 57 positions needed for the project. Staghorn and elkhorn, which have been designated national threatened species, have suffered from coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures, diseases, hurricane damage and other threats. But in good conditions, these corals can produce numerous branches and grow four or more inches a year. ‘To conduct restoration of coral on this scale is unprecedented,’ said James Byrne, the Nature Conservancy’s marine science program manager for Florida and the Caribbean.
On a remote Scottish island, the sheep are shrinking, and the cause appears to be the warming of winter. The wild Soay sheep that live on the island of Hirta in the North Atlantic have been under careful scientific observation since 1985, partly because the island ecosystem is a simple one consisting of the sheep and the vegetation they eat. Timothy Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and his colleagues analyzed the sheep data and found that the weight of the average female Soay has slimmed about three ounces a year, or about 5 percent over the past quarter-century. That was somewhat surprising as larger sheep have better odds of surviving, and evolution tends to favor those that are stronger. But thanks to changing climate, the survival of the fittest has become a bit easier, enabling more of the less fit to survive. Fall lasts now later into the year and spring arrives earlier and more of the smaller lambs, which once perished in winter, now survive to their first birthday. ‘As the winters have become shorter, the strength of selection has been reduced a little bit, Dr. Coulson said. […]
President Obama has been urging the public to speak out on healthcare, warning that if they don’t, their voices will be drowned out by special interests. A watchdog group today put some numbers behind that admonition, reporting that health industry groups are vastly outspending consumer groups in lobbying Washington. The Center for Responsive Politics says that consumer groups that favor Obama’s proposals, including a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, are being ‘decidedly outspent and out-lobbied by drug manufacturers, insurers, HMOs, and doctors’ associations.’ In the first three months of 2009, the US Chamber of Commerce, which has spent more money on lobbying since 1998 than any other group, and the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America paid lobbyists a combined $22.5 million to promote their interests. In contrast, Families USA, a consumer group on healthcare has spent $10,000 on lobbying this year after spending only $32,000 total in 2008, the center says.
A new battery, small and thin, weighs almost nothing and can be printed in a process similar to silk-screening shirts. The printable battery is expected to be cheap and easy to mass produce and could be used in disposable receipts or cards, engineers in Germany announced today. ‘Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,’ said Andreas Willert, of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS, where Reinhard Baumann led the battery’s development. The battery weighs less than 1 gram and is less than 1 millimeter thick. It runs at 1.5 volts. Placing several in a row can produce up to 6 volts. A standard AAA battery weighs about 11.5 grams and also runs at 1.5 volts. The newly developed battery has a life span more limited than traditional batteries, however. Here are the technical details: The battery is composed of different layers: a zinc anode and a manganese cathode, among others. Zinc and manganese react with one another and produce electricity. However, the anode and the cathode layer dissipate gradually during this chemical process. Therefore, the battery is suitable […]
Though climate change and human rights are important corporate responsibility issues on their own terms, they are increasingly interrelated. As our global climate destabilizes, there will be an increase in water stress, food scarcity, the prevalence and intensity of diseases, and the loss of homelands and jobs around the world. In turn, climate change is likely to affect several rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), such as the right to life and security, the right to food, and the right to health. Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate climate change are creating new human rights problems. In particular, industrializing countries like China are concerned that regulation may unjustly hamper their economic rights by preventing them from growing. (Indeed, finding common ground on this issue is largely what developing a post-Kyoto global treaty depends on.) Another challenge is that most mitigation scenarios rely on using global finance to lead carbon-reduction activities in communities where the cost of doing so is fairly low. However, this has had unintended human rights consequences for vulnerable populations in those communities. For example, there are forestry protection projects in Uganda designed to earn carbon credits, yet those same activities — aimed […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
