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Rising-Sea Levels Wants All of the Land It Can Swallow

When age-old border disputes become resolved, peacefully, there is cause for celebration. At the very least, you can count on some sense of relief. But the end of the wrangle between India and Bangladesh over a tiny island located in the Bay of Bengal actually spells cause for concern on a global scale.

Disappearing Island of dispute
Neither side was victorious because there is no island left to fight over. Instead it was claimed by a third contender: rising sea levels.

The small and uninhabited island, New Moore by India and South Talpatti by Bangladesh, has all-together dropped out of sight in the Bay of Bengal.

Scientists are ascribing the disappearance to climate change and erosion. For many years, the roughly two-square mile island was claimed by both India and Bangladesh, but perhaps more ironically than tragically, climate change has erased the dispute.

The submerged island is not the first to be swallowed by rising sea levels in the region, nor will it be the last. Another, larger island, Lohachara, disappeared from the Bay of Bengal around 1996, forcing thousands of residents to flee from their homes as “climate refugees”.

As concern accumulates for these and other islands and low-lying coastal regions around the globe, it is important that responses to climate change address not only future plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also practical approaches to immediate threats.

To find out what you can do to help, click here.

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Obama Decides to go ahead with Offshore Drilling

US President Barack Obama is allowing oil drilling 50 miles off of Virginia and is considering opening up significant additional stretches along the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts in a reversal on a formal ban on drilling.

The plan offers but few concessions to environmentalists, who have been vociferous in their opposition to more oil platforms off the nation’s shores. The Los Angeles Times, summed up the four biggest elements of the plan, citing administration officials:

Eventually open two-thirds of the eastern Gulf’s oil and gas resources for drilling.

Proceed with drilling off Virginia, provided the project clears environmental and military reviews.

Study the viability of drilling off the mid- and southern Atlantic coasts.

Study the viability of drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas — areas hotly defended by environmentalists — but issue no new drilling leases in either sea before 2013. The New York Times conversed with officials who indicated:

“the first lease sale off the coast of Virginia could occur as early as next year in a triangular tract 50 miles off the coast that had already been approved for development but was held up by a court challenge and additional Interior Department review.”

Obama went to announce the new drilling policy Wednesday at Andrews air base in Maryland. White House officials pitched the plan as a way to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs – but the president’s choices also could help secure support for a climate change bill languishing in Congress.

The Interior Department has also prepared a plan to add drilling platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico if Congress allows the existing moratorium to expire. In 2008 lawmakers permitted a similar moratorium to expire; at the time that President George W. Bush lifted the ban, which opened the door to Obama’s change in policy.

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Solarex to Downsize Its Maryland Operations

solar panelsSolarex was once a solar energy firm which opened shop in Frederick, Maryland in the 70’s. It was very much a pioneer company and far ahead of its time. Its high visibility plant located next to an interstate highway leading to and from Washington, DC, was partially powered by solar electric energy.

Today, what used to be Solarex is now part of the BP Solar chain of solar production facilities found scattered around the planet. Today, Solarex is beginning to fade into the sun.

BP Solar announced it has ceased silicon casting, wafering, and cell manufacturing at the facility. It has laid off approximately 320 out of 430 positions at the site. Research, sales and marketing personnel will for now remain in Frederick.

The company has been on a solar cost-cutting mission since the beginning of 2009. It cannot compete with high cost solar products in a world where solar prices have dropped between 40 and 50% since the beginning of the global financial crisis about two years ago.

Photovoltaic technology just might have advanced beyond BP’s silicon-based photovoltaic products. This tried and true technology, versions of which BP made in Frederick, are the most effective in terms of conserving energy. But if cost is a larger issue than efficiency, thin film solar, using other technologies such as Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) seem to be the new way to go for large scale projects in the megawatt-plus scale, utility grade Reyad Fezzani, CEO of BP Solar had this to say:

“The global solar market is expected to reach 12 GW in 2012 with the US growing to nearly 3 GW, and we are scaling up our supply chain to serve this rapid growth here in the US, in the European, and Asian markets…The company is bringing its worldwide experience gained over 37 years as a solar product supplier and developer to both develop larger scale projects ranging from 1-300 MW in size and supply distribution partners serving residential and smaller commercial segments.”

In 2009 BP Solar increased its sales by more than 26% and expects to grow sales by 50% in 2010.

The departure from high cost solar manufacturing, such as the Frederick shop, has helped BP cut unit costs by an impressive 45% making products more competitive in a global market.

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Humans: You Have a New Cousin

archaeological conference participants inside Denisova caveGenetic material pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows that a formerly unknown type of pre-human lived alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.

The creature, temporarily nicknamed “Woman X”, could have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago and seems only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals.

Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said, “It really just looked like something we had never seen before… It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different.”

Krause and colleagues said that they sequenced DNA from the mitochondria, a part of the cell, which is passed down virtually intact from woman to offspring. They compared it to the DNA of humans, Neanderthals and apes.

The sequence indicates the hominid’s line diverged about a million years ago from the line that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals and that split about 500,000 years ago.

This makes it younger than Homo erectus, the pre-human that spread out of Africa to much of the world roughly 1.9 million years ago.

“It is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far,” said Svaante Paabo, Krause’s colleague who specializes in analyzing ancient DNA. “There were at least three …different forms of humans in this area 40,000 years ago.”

Krause and Paabo are not naming the creature as a new species just yet. They are currently working to sequence nuclear DNA – the DNA which makes up most of the genetic code. This will tell a great deal more about “Woman X”.

The genetic sequence tells scientists little about what the creature would have looked like or whether it interacted with humans living in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

The work, performed using a DNA sequencer made by Illumina Ltd, suggests a new path is opening in the identification of ancestors of humanity. Krause and Paabo had only a small fragment of bone to work with and cannot reconstruct a skeleton in the time-honored manner of most paleontologists.

But there could possibly be more there. The cold, dry conditions of the Altai Mountains preserve the DNA well. Stone tools have also been found in the area, as well as the bones of woolly mammoths but only tantalizing fragments of human bones and teeth.

Scientists have sequenced DNA from mammoths frozen in Siberia and have sequenced DNA from Neanderthals.

Paabo and Krause said that it’s theoretically possible that the creature is related to another potential third species of human – Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “hobbit”— which lived on an island in what is now Indonesia about 17,000 years ago.

The team has attempted, though to no avail, to get DNA from the bones of “hobbits”. Most pre-human skeletons have been found in warm places such as Africa, however hot, wet conditions break down DNA.

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The EPA Is Cleaning Our Water

water from a faucetThe Environmental Protection Agency is changing drinking water standards to impose stricter limits on four specific contaminants which can cause cancer.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said that the agency is developing stricter regulations for: tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, acrylamide and epichlorohydrin.

Trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, and tetrachloroethylene are usually used as industrial solvents and can seep into drinking water from contaminated ground or surface water. The other two compounds are impurities which get introduced into drinking water during the water treatment process.

Jackson says that the EPA will issue new rules on TCE and tetrachloroethylene within the coming year. New rules for the other two compounds will follow.

Jackson called for more collaboration among states and the federal government, as well as development of new technologies to meet the needs of urban, rural and other water-stressed communities.

The new strategy would address contaminants as a group to better the efficiency; develop new technologies to address health risks from a vast array of contaminants; use a combination of state and federal laws to protect drinking water; and form partnerships with states.

TCE is an especially problematic chemical compound. It was used to clean nuclear missiles and was frequently dumped at missile sites. Exposure to high concentrations of this chemical causes nervous system problems, liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and death.

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Food Industry to Change Fast With New Health America

fast foodOne aspect of the health care bill taking immediate effect is that chain restaurants will now be required to display nutrition information. What we are witnessing could well make a seismic shift in the changing of the food landscape of America.

The Associated Press Reports:

More than 200,000 fast food and other chain restaurants will have to include calorie counts on menus, menu boards and even drive-throughs.

The new law, which applies to any restaurant with 20 or more locations, directs the Food and Drug Administration to create a new national standard for menu labeling, superseding a growing number of state and city laws. President Barack Obama signed the health care legislation Tuesday.

The idea is to make sure that customers process the calorie information as they are ordering. Many restaurants currently post nutritional information in a hallway, on a hamburger wrapper or on their Web site. The new law will make calories immediately available for most items.

This rule will also apply to vending machines carrying convenience foods.

So how will this change be manifested to the American food system?

Americans’ appetite for cheap and processed foods and factory-farmed meat impacts everything from carbon emissions to water quality to pesticide and farms’ use of antibiotics.

The Oscar-nominated documentary “Food, Inc.” had a huge effect on informing people about the problems in the industrial food system. Oprah brought author and food expert Michael Pollan on her show to discuss the documentary, which she called “thought-provoking” and “eye-opening”. Michael Pollan also made appearances on The Daily Show and told Jon Stewart in January that he thought the passage of health care reform would have a large impact on changing the way people eat, because health insurers would have a financial motive to keep people away from eating unhealthy foods that will cause long-term health problems.

Michelle Obama has also become a public spokeswoman of increasing access to real food, gardening and fighting childhood obesity with her Let’s Move campaign. Last week she spoke to the Grocery Manufacturers Association about completely reassessing the ‘junk’ food which they sell:

“We need you not to just tweak around the edges but entirely rethink the products you are offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

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Calera to Produce Carbon Absorbing Cement

Calera logoA Silicon Valley start-up says that it has found a way to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from coal and gas power plants and absorb them in cement.

Cement production is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions in the United States; coal-fired electricity plants are the biggest source.

“With this technology, coal can be cleaner than solar and wind, because they can only be carbon-neutral,” said Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley billionaire. His venture capital firm, Khosla Ventures, has invested about $50 million in Calera. On Monday, Calera will announce that Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, has invested $15 million.

Calera says that by changing carbon into a building material, it can make carbon reduction economically attractive, especially in places where there are no government subsidies or carbon taxes.

In 2007, Brent Constantz and Mr. Khosla formulated plans for Calera. Though the company declines to share precise details of its process, it says that it combines carbon dioxide with seawater or groundwater brine, which contains calcium, oxygen and magnesium. It gets left with calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, used for making cement and aggregate.

To make its cement more usable for manufacturers of traditional Portland cement, it is also making concrete blends of 20% Calera cement and 80% Portland cement – the calcium silicate binder used in concrete for buildings, bridges and highways.

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The Latest on Sperm

egg and spermMen, did you know that in the last second your bodies each produced at least 1,500 sperm cells? Now you do. Here’s how it happened:

For the last 40 years scientists thought stem cells in the testicles, called germline stem cells, become sperm through a simple, two-step process. That is not so. Germline stem cells can become sperm in several different ways, according to what was learned through new experiments with mice.

“What we’re saying is there isn’t a strict linear progression from a stem cell to a [sperm] cell…Sometimes the stem cells go through several cell divisions to get there, sometimes they don’t” said study co-author Robert Braun, an associate director at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The researchers also found that a cell that is partway to becoming a sperm cell can revert back to being a germline stem cell. For this new study, scientists genetically engineered mice so that their germline stem cells appeared fluorescent, allowing the team to watch the cells develop.

The researchers also “labeled” specific cells within the mouse germline stem cells, a certain color, and observed what happened to them over the course of a few days. The research also showed that sperm develop from a smaller subset of germline stem cells in the testes than previously thought.

“In addition, fertiization is surprisingly inefficient…There has to be a large initial payload [for those] few cells to make it to the final destination [the woman's egg]” said Braun.

Continuously pumping out a stream of sperm cells from puberty to old age requires a man’s body to maintain a very delicate germ cell balance. If germline stem cells stay stem cells for a long time and don’t change into sperm cells, a man may be at risk of getting testicular cancer. If germline stem cells too often develop into sperm, a man may become infertile.

Unlocking such mysteries of sperm development could someday lead to infertility treatments or even the elusive male birth control pill. For example, scientists may learn how to keep germline stem cells from becoming sperm.

“The more we learn about the normal behavior of cells…the more we know how to manipulate them” said Braun.

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Eco-Friendly Recovery from the Flu and Common Cold

box of tissuesSneezing green may be a duality – one interpretation comes with ease, the other, very much not so. When your head is pounding and you’ve been hacking up a lung all night, the last thought on your mind is, how can I make this experience more eco-friendly?

Times of illness do not a conservationist make: It is pretty much just scrapping for whatever will provide relief, whether that is three-times-a-day deliveries of tom yum gai or a medicine cabinet stuffed with decongestants.

I’m actually just recovering from a two-week bought with bronchitis. I feel quite guilty about this; yesterday, I stood in the tissue aisle of the drugstore for a full 10 minutes, debating whether my nose was worth the destruction of so many old-growth forests.

In this case, sadly, I must admit: I decided that it was. Had I felt like my normal and healthy, eco-crusader self, I would have made the schlep to the supermarket that I know stocks sustainable boxes of 100% recycled, chlorine-free Seventh Generation tissue.

With a bit of knowledge, even the most pathetic of cold-sufferers can lessen the damage of their feverish footprint. Here are some ideas:

Washable tissues are an elegant, eco-friendly option. In the privacy of your home, who cares if you look like a granny when you’re blowing your nose in an old-timey tissue? You’ll find that they’re also a nice alternative to recycled facial tissues, which feel like sandpaper.

It’s not fun or easy to cook when you’re sick, but a week’s worth of wonton soup delivery can add up to a pile of trash, definitely due to all of that unnecessary packaging (who needs 10 packets of soy sauce anyway?). Just cook up a giant pot of soup that’s full of organic veggies.

With the threat of H1N1 this flu season, it seems like everyone’s going crazy with the hand sanitizer. Though many conventional sanitizers contain harmful chemicals like phthalates, and can actually promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria if they contain the antimicrobial triclosan, a suspected endocrine disruptor. Bottom line? To prevent your illness from infecting others, nothing is as safe and effective as washing your hands with soap and water.

Don’t pressure your doc into prescribing an antibiotic for your runny nose. The common cold and flu are viral illnesses, and while it’s not fun to wait it out for a week while your cough dies off, a dose of amoxicillin will not make you healthier. In fact, it could harm you, since every time you take an antibiotic when you don’t actually have a bacterial infection, you actually increase your risk of later developing a life-threatening superbug.

It’s very tempting to arm yourself with an arsenal of decongestants and sleeping aids, but most of these medications come with a whole slew of side effects — and actually do nothing to lessen the duration of your illness. They also will pollute our soil and groundwater with chemicals once they’re thrown in the trash. Interestingly, some of the best remedies are also the most eco-friendly: a salt water gargle to soothe a sore throat and hot lemon water with honey to calm a cough.

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Soiling the Garden

GardenAn organic garden must start with healthy soil. Natural fertilizers promote the growth of beneficial bacteria, earthworms and fungi which build soil structure and foster healthy plants.

The best fertilizer for your lawn and garden is homemade compost, made from food scraps, fall leaves and lawn clippings. If you still need store-bought products, there are some things to keep in mind.

Commercially made compost has a high level of naturally occurring nitrogen and phosphorous which is released gradually and is absorbed more easily by plants. Other soil improvers, such as worm castings, Epsom salts and decomposed organic matter called humates, add nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Watch out for commercial fertilizers, even those that are labeled “organic”, because they most likely contain harmful ingredients, like animal byproducts or sewage sludge. Animal byproducts, such as bone meal or fish meal, may have come from industrial farming operations, and sewage sludge, might be contaminated with diseases or heavy metals.

The Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) and the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), an accredited certifying agency for the USDA National Organic Program, approve of products which have been composted according to USDA Organic standards. The only synthetic materials that can be added to NOFA approved compost are those allowed in the production of organic crops.

Have your soil tested by your local USDA Cooperative Extension Service to determine pH and which nutrients your grass is missing, or test it yourself with a soil testing kit.

Once you know the pH, you may add organic matter to help balance it. Lawns prefer slightly acidic soils with a pH range of 6.5 to 7, while flowers, shrubs and trees vary in their pH preferences. Lime helps balance acidic soil, while sulfur helps with alkaline.

To find out the nutrient content of a fertilizer, look for the “NPK” number (NPK stands for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). A “5-6-5″ NPK number, for example, means that a fertilizer is 5% nitrogen, 6% phosphorus and 5% potassium with the remaining 84% representing filler material.

Spread only about 1/2 an inch of compost on your lawn at a time. Even though plant-based nitrogen is more easily absorbed, composts and organic fertilizers may still be applied too heavily, leading to nitrogen- and phosphate-heavy runoff.

Avoid applying fertilizer before a downpour which will rinse it away before it gets absorbed. Wear a mask if you are applying dusty fertilizers made with lime or any other fine particles that you might inhale.

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