Pollinator Presence Plummets
<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> National Wildlife Week in Canada was from 6-12 April and this year’s theme was pollinators. Hot on its heels was…
The first great ape to go extinct?
A worrying thought indeed that any of our great apes should be facing extinction yet a paper recently published in Oryx reveals the latest figures for orang-utans in the wild …and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading.
Water recycling – bathing in greywater!
Yes, it is happening already! Greywater, which is non-industrial wastewater generated from domestic processes such as dish washing, laundry and bathing, comprises more than 50% of residential wastewater. It gets its name from its cloudy appearance and from its status as being neither fresh (white/clear potable water), nor heavily polluted (blackwaters). Hence it has the…
Why do some countries win more Olympic medals?
Looking at the medal table as the Beijing Olympics enter Day 12, it is clear that while the Olympics include more countries than the United Nations, a relatively small number still dominate the medals. While 76 countries have ‘medalled’ at the time of writing, only 16 of those are into double figures, and the two…
Hide and seek: 125,000 gorillas found in Congo
Thomas Breuer ©WCS-Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology More than 125,000 western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) have been discovered deep in the isolated forests of the Republic of Congo. This new find is a huge boost to their population, at least doubling estimates to between 175,000 and 225,000. The gorillas were found during the…
…get out of the kitchen
One of the implications of all this energy we waste to swap coffee and wheat is that we’re giving climate change a helping hand. The contribution made by today’s food production systems to climate change globally will have tremendous impacts on the food it produces in the future. So this week, in a document much…
If you can’t stand the heat…
We have often encountered the first law of thermodynamics in this blog, or at least as it applies to obesity. This week the Second Law – the law that governs entropy and the movement of heat -has taken centre stage for a change. CABI’s own Peter Baker has dealt with the subject eloquently this week…
How do those Olympic swimmers do it?
With Michael Phelps well on his way to a record haul of gold medals in the Olympic pool, and much discussion in the media about the 12,000 calorie diet he eats in training (don’t try it at home, is the message from most writers), a timely addition to the Cab Abstracts database this week looks…
First PEFC certified construction project
It may look like a large, odd-shaped mud hut but this is actually the Beacon building at the Zaragoza 08 Expo, the water and sustainable development expo running until 14 September in Spain. In July this became the first construction project in the world to be certified to the PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of…
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…