Galapagos Islands need tourism, says Sir David Attenborough
As celebrated by fellow handpicked blogger Dave Hemming last week, this year sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of the 'Origin of Species. In the Galapagos Islands, which more than anywhere else have become associated with Darwin's development of the theory of…
Could ecosystem services save the Amazon?
A new report suggests that the Amazonian rainforest may be worth more standing than cut and cleared for farming. Although the idea is not new, a recent report (Keeping the Amazon forest standing: a matter of values) commissioned by the WWF suggests that marketing the ecological services supplied by the Amazonian forest could hold the…
A future climate that is beyond anything we have considered
GHG emissions are now far higher than even the worst-case scenario envisaged by the IPCC's fourth assessment report published in 2007, according to statement by Christopher Field, a lead author on that report. This statement was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, USA, last…
Roses are Red but are they ‘green’?
The cheap ones aren't green (i.e. environmentally-friendly kind of green) according to an article by Dr. David Harper, from Leicester University, who has conducted research at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, for 25 years. Dr. Harper warned that cut-price Valentine roses exported for sale in the UK were ‘bleeding Kenya's Lake Naivasha dry'. He said the demand…
Bee mine
We’d be hard pressed in this office to pick up a journal aimed at beekeepers, without reading an article on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD); a disaster that has taken the bee world by storm. Writing in the September/October 2008 issue of The IPM Practitioner, William Quarles reviews pesticides and CCD.
Coffee waste: the ultimate biofuel?
Recently, I came across an exciting piece of research which I thought is worth sharing here. Researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, USA, developed an inexpensive process to extract oil from the leftovers of making espresso, cappuccinos and other coffees collected from a coffee house chain. The oil was then converted into biodiesel,…
Pushing Water Higher up the Development Agenda
Scientists estimate that by 2025 more than 50% of the world population will be facing water-based vulnerability. The UN called this situation a water crisis. The water crisis term refers to the status of the world’s water resources relative to human demand. The world population will continue to grow, but water is a finite resource,…
Irreplaceable, Part II
Photo from World Wild Fund for Nature – Indonesian Programme I was slightly taken aback when first reading the 'Irreplaceable' blog from Handpicked author Katherine which started 2009 here on Handpicked. Naturally, I agree with the importance of conserving species such as bees on which so much human food depends – but was she…
Fed up with recycling? Try this instead!
SnaffleUp is an online resource that gives people with unwanted but useful household items an opportunity to donate them to other people instead of throwing them away. I joined this online resource and thought I’d share the contents of their latest newsletter here, including some very useful tips on being green and doing our bit…
The mighty PRION! may be no more!
These distorted pathogens lack both DNA and RNA and are believed to cause fatal brain diseases, such as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions resist almost every method of disinfection from chemical disinfectant and autoclaving to fire, which all…