Recent Television Reviews
Well it has been a veritable delight of televisual output from the BBC in recent weeks with “Lost Land of the Jaguar” and “Britain from Above”. If you have missed any of these and are lucky enough to have access to the iPlayer I would recommend a catch-up, otherwise clips have been placed on YouTube…
The Chinese Mitten Crabs US invasion reaches eastern coastline
The Chinese Mitten Crab (Eriocheir sinensis), originally a native of East Asia, quickly invaded the European coastline as well as the western coast of the US. Now it looks as if their pincher movement to invade the US is complete. Within the last week The Marine Invasions Research Lab, Maryland, has reported that the Chinese…
The Plot Thickens
Allotments are hip and trendy at the moment, but for how long? Well, a little longer than it would take to eat £15 worth of food from your local grocery store I hope. I am reliably informed that this is one year’s rent for an allotment in a particular area of South Oxfordshire. So, if…
EU soil maps atlas
As readers will know I have a fondness for the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC) and their publications (see previous post). Well they have produced another corker with the Soil Atlas of Europe. The 128 page Atlas can be downloaded either as a complete or in parts pdf or as individual high resolution pdf or…
Waste no more!
As I was screening publications for the CAB Abstracts database this morning, I came across an environmentally encouraging bit of news – Anglian Water is producing enough biogas from its new advanced digestion system to deliver 980kW of energy at the engine without any further fuel requirements. The article (1) in the July 2008 issue…
Pesticides persist in ground water
Numerous studies over the past 40+ years have established that pesticides & herbicides, typically applied at the land surface, can move downward through the soils unsaturated zone to the water table at detectable concentrations. This downward movement of pesticide degradation products, formed in situ, can also contribute to the contamination of ground water. Once reached…
Beijing in Bloom
The organizers of the Beijing Olympics have much to contend with at the moment – including a massive bloom of blue-green algae that is currently engulfing the Qingdao coastline. The BBC, reporting from the region, say that more that 10,000 recruits from the People’s Liberation Army have been drafted in to clear the blooms. The…
Nutrition at the extremes of life
The Rank Prize lecture yesterday afternoon was a very interesting romp through the world of public health nutrition with Professor Ricardo Uauy. A difficult name to pronounce for many of us non-Spanish speakers (he’s originally from Chile), but a clear message at least. Nutritionists need a common vision, a common mission to work towards. Together.
Go with the flow
This article in the Independent caught my imagination back in March. A company called Marine Current Turbines is using their SeaGen project (pictured) to generate electricity from the tidal movement of water in and out of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland using underwater turbines. This morning I spotted Tom Shelley’s article over at Eureka Magazine…
From cats to sea otters, whales and maybe even humans
You may already have read, in one of the many magazines, news services and blogs that have picked up this story (see here, for example), about some findings presented the other week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, and more recently at the annual meeting of the Pacific division of the…