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…
‘Wage war on obesity – not the obese’
Professor Jeffrey Friedman has spent well over a decade researching the biological basis for obesity and has come to the conclusion that we should be fighting a ‘war on obesity, not the obese’. His, name has become synonymous with the hormone leptin the topic of this year’s prestigious Boyd Orr lecture this afternoon at the…
F is for….
Firefighters…fishermen…or farmers? What do you think these three groups of professionals might have in common? All of them save lives, of course. Or they could be doing, as a result of new data presented yesterday in a satellite symposium held as part of the Nutrition Society’s 2008 Summer Meeting. Experts meeting to discuss the latest…
A word to the wise (Aspergillosis)
As I accidentally breathed in the blood, fish & bone powder I was feeding my plants yesterday, I was reminded of a case which made the front cover of The Lancet last week entitled: gardening can seriously damage your health. It highlighted a case report of an unfortunate man who succumbed to aspergillosis, a fungal…
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…
Whales – wanted dead or alive?
Whales are featuring heavily in science and environmental news at the moment, as the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission proceeds in Santiago, Chile. As always, feelings have been running high in both the pro- and anti-whaling camps. In the first vote of the meeting, Greenland has been denied the right to catch 10…
Did you ask for a glass of wine…?
A glass of wine calls for romance, sophistication and pleasure…the unravelling of complex flavours in the mouth. Yes, a simple glass of wine might elevate us from our daily stresses into higher states of mind allowing for a cheerful and relaxed mood to arise instead. Imagine you are getting home after one of those days,…
Living on the edge – A kind of madness!!!
Although we’re enjoying and praising the few sunny days we’ve been experiencing, in Oxfordshire lately, some of us will still remember the downpour and flooding, we experienced recently and, even more recently, in Illinois, USA. I for one remember being a mix of excited and scared about driving through the river which suddenly appeared on…
Will the world fight poverty and eradicate hunger?
The FAO Summit on World Food Security-2008, held at Rome from the 3-5 of June, represented an opportunity for the world leaders to discuss high food prices, climate change and bioenergy. Solutions to the “food crisis” focused on the increase in land productivity through the use of traditional breeding lines and GMOs. While biotech crops…
Getting married? Got butterflies?
While awareness of invasive species and the impact they have on the natural environment is a hot topic, I recently read an article, on a warm and related topic if you will, about butterfly releases at weddings: ‘Are butterfly releases at weddings a conservation concern or opportunity?’ by T. R. New. And it got me…