Kids that are no-doubt influenced by foreign appetite enhancing substances—confronted with an inexhaustible supply of sugary, fatty foods and a plastic shipping pallet on which to pile it. Then again, if you are determined to waste food there are ways around anything.

Christmas: Tis the Season to be Cheap In Good News this week NBN argues against the standard paradigms of “play hard and work hard”, “hard work never killed anybody” and “jobs, jobs, jobs.” In doing so, we lean heavily on the notion that the work reducing abilities of science and technology will free humans to pursue loftier ambitions than a life of servitude. Because we make our case leaning more on assumption than fact, we thought we’d offer a few choice links here to back up our argument that science in the very near future is going to be the game changer that’s going to save the fate of humans and the planet we occupy.

First we have this National Science Foundation announcement of a new telescope technology that’s 10-100x stronger than the old. Then CNN’s Fareed Zakaria had a great piece last weekend saying we’re closer than ever to a cancer cure. Then we have the NSF saying that university R&D spending reached $65 billion, the highest it’s ever been. That’s still one-tenth of the military budget, but all the above has us confident that these times more than any other, will see the biggest changes in civilization ever. So much so that problems that seem insurmountable now will seem insignificant in 30 years.

Apparently, the movie 2001 Space Odyssey really put the hook into this guy and he’s now formed a three- man team studying the prospects for machines taking over the world a la The Terminator and The Matrix. Think there is a bridge in Brooklyn or some waterfront property in New Jersey this fellow might be interested in?

This adds a whole new dimension to the behavioral demands placed on a brain arguably ill equipped to meet them. The article touches on this evolutionary paradox but really doesn’t do justice to how one added complication to everyday survival requirements can turn an otherwise simple mindless creature into a socially complex being far beyond their brain size. Such inquiry, in turn, could provide insight into how the removal of survival requirements can turn a very socially complex animal into something of a potted plant.

Doha climate talks represent 'golden opportunity' Is it just us, or does this headline seem about as contrived as “Man Bites Dog”? Ok, it is a BBC article so we can forgive a certain level of sur-reality. Even still, after climate talks in RIO, Mexico, South Africa, Copenhagen—and let’s not forget Kyoto—all went nowhere, how can anyone think there’s a “golden opportunity” for any international agreement on this issue while we’ve got players like China, India, and the Koch Brothers contingent in the U.S. hinging their very existence on opposing such agreements? Adding insult to injury, this round of climate talks are being held in the global equivalent of the world’s largest gas station. There are 17,000 people from around the world attending this thing. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that upwards of  $100m will be spent. On what? Obviously the message sent is important from such an effort, but what about the solar- or wind-power farms that money could build. Wouldn’t the creation of a world fund to subsidize alternative energy installations and industries in developing nations, be a much better use of that money?

Hostess and the GM Bailout: Why the Chevy Volt Shouldn't Exist but Twinkies Still Will This article proclaiming that the death announcements of the Twinkie and Wonder Bread are premature caught NBN’s eye because we agreed with the premise: If Twinkies are selling like hotcakes there is no way the free market won’t find a way to keep them on store shelves. But the paean to capitalism that unfolds from this catchy headline was so perfunctory that it’s more demagoguery than logical argument. What piqued NBN is the author’s use of GM’s electric car, the Chevy Volt, as an example of the dangers of government entanglement in the natural capitalism-driven healing process of bankruptcy.  The author dismisses government efforts to support the Chevy Volt, and by extension GM,  “as pandering to green politicians.” To NBN that is a display of ignorance that could, perhaps, be forgiven back when the country was driving Hummers and buying his-and-her condos with money they didn’t know they didn’t have. Money that Wall Street took a generous cut from and retired allowing tax payers to bail out the bank these guys ruined. Nowhere in his article does the author weigh in on whether Wall Street should have gone to jail or whether the banks should have been left to go bankrupt as well. That’s too complicated to fit into the 900 words the website’s publishers paid this author to excrete. The author also omits any mention of global warming, dead zones, overfishing, groundwater contamination and the many other fruits of unfettered capitalism “true believers” prefer to overlook when making their arguments. However, NBN agrees that there should be limits to government intervention in a free economy, starting with the maker of Twinkies. For the 18,000 jobs that will be lost if the company does die, think of all the lives that will be saved from the vastly improved diets that will result. This author might argue that companies like Twinkies should be allowed to make poisonous, addictive crap to sell to consumers. But what do we do when those same consumers’ ruined health becomes a public liability? Well that’s another inconvenient truth the true believes would rather not discuss.

Lethally Hot" Earth Was Devoid of Life—Could It Happen Again? As the political realities of the day have our leaders assuming the position of the three wise monkeys on global warming this election this National Geographic article lets us ponder the concept of tropical oceans at a balmy 104 degrees. That right, water temps half way to boiling neutered our oceans everywhere but at the polar extremes for some 5 million years after the Jurassic period. Air temps along the same latitude made much of land-based living equally impossible. Should such temps return in a hundred years or so, humans will be in some deep, hot water. Say what you want about the adaptability of humans, if it becomes impossible to live in the most heavily populated parts of the world our survival options will be reduced to the sort that should make the NRA real happy. This thoroughly depressing article got NBN thinking about the prospects of reversing global warming. Lo and behold, we came upon this piece suggesting seeding space just over the polar caps might slow the ice-melt enough for voters and our leaders to face reality. At the same time it won’t disrupt climate in places we want to stay warm.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if science really did find a way to reverse global warming before the ice caps melt?

Inner city farming How can anybody read an article like this and not see the amazing potential future for this country just taking advantage of the stuff we already have. Turning vacant city buildings into live-in farms as discussed in this article is the ultimate in efficiency. Our future is not in breathing new life into coal, construction and other raw material-dependent industries that have historically driven our economy. No, the future lies in industries that mine the refined resources going unused like the tens of millions of square-feet of residential, industrial and retail space and the 250 trillion pounds of waste and water discarded every year in this country to keep this economy expanding. That’s where the real wealth lies in this country. Not in the natural gas being blasted from underground and the coal being scooped out of Appalachian mountaintops like ice cream. When it comes to mining our trash, let’s face it, America is filthy rich.

A Simple Fix for Farming This is another article where all NBN can say is read it from beginning to end. Assuming that you don’t have the time or interest in organic farming to do so here’s what you’re missing: going completely organic can be as simple as rotating crops over a cycle that extends four years or more instead of the standard two years or less. You do that and, a study cited by the article says, you reduce the need for fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides by 88 percent. This is not advice aimed at the mom-and-pop farms carved out of Vermont Valley floors. This applies to the Midwest corporate farms where these chemical contaminants are seeping relentlessly into the nation’s groundwater turning the country’s watersheds and coastal shores into deadzones. This should be earth shattering news, but as the writer notes the USDA declined comment on the Op-Ed and the top scientific journals in the world declined to publish the study it was based on. Even the Times buried the story in the back of its Op-Ed pages. The only publication that would touch it is Plos One. What gives? Does this study threaten the enormous interests corporate farming and petro-fertilizer makers have in maintaining the status quo. You bet.

Nutrient loading killing salt marshes Here’s is yet another great article in favor of the thoughtful farming espoused in the NYTimes Op-Ed linked above. A  National Science Foundation study out of Woods Hole, Mass., finds that fertilizer from lawns, golf courses, and farms is a culprit in an elusive problem causing widespread destruction of coastal marshes. The problem is called sudden marsh dieback and it’s elusive because there appear to be many causes for it. The Woods Hole study adds nutrients from land-based fertilizer use to the many maladies causing salt marshes to die in what is called, sudden marsh dieback. If you want to read another extraordinarily well-written, insightful, and meticulously documented article on dieback try this NY Times piece.

Wouldn’t it make great irrigation water for crops? That’s Aquaponics, one of the most promising industries in the world and there is no mention of it in the video.

Three Charts That Illustrate Why Solar Has Hit A True Tipping Point This article argues that the economics are lining up to edge the solar industry toward a tipping point: that prized ROI point where installing solar panels makes more sense than not. The article makes excellent points vis-à-vis the tipping point that NBN will reiterate here to entice you to read it yourself. 1) the economic potential for the technology in high resource areas is far bigger than actual deployment figures would suggest. That means places like the U.S. Southwest could be making a lot more money from solar installations than being made now. 2) The most important cost reductions in the next decade will come not through groundbreaking lab-scale improvements, but through incremental cost reductions due to deployment. 3) Solar is already comparable to fossil fuels in a variety of markets today.

Decades Old Weed Seeds Trigger New Outbreak of Devastating Plant Parasite NBN often argues that invasive species are best battled by surrendering the war. This press release about a parasitic plant outbreak in California has us weighing that argument again. A variety of species of broomrape suck the lifeblood from the roots of an even broader variety of mass produced money crops like tomato, potato, peppers, eggplant, and beans. Broomrape only appears above ground when flowering, an urge that appears to be triggered by as yet unknown elements in the environment. Broomrape seeds can lie dormant for decades making eradication more than a matter of pouring poison all over the place. You’ve got to wait these things out until the seeds feel like sprouting. Apparently, the US successfully contained a Southern California broomrape outbreak in the 1980s suggesting to NBN that invasive species can be successfully contained. Yet, now the same California field is once again infested and botanists are once again looking for an answer. NBN’s answer? End homogenized agricultural practices and increase crop variability. If you really want to kill broomrape plant something it can’t kill. 

Lesions on striped bass in Massachusetts are not mycobacteriosis While fish these days suffer from all kinds of maladies from all kinds of environmental pressures, few of those pressures are as ill-defined yet potentially potent as global warming. Which is why we post this article on lesions found in striped bass. Could warmer water make powerful fish like striped bass more prone to bacterial infection? Let’s look at the problem from the bottom up. Marine ecosystems historically are the most stable. The water acts as a sort of insulator keeping things from going to extremes as they can on land where temperature, droughts, floods tornadoes and what have you can make life much more perilous. It’s why marine ecosystems can be so much more diverse and full of life. We emphasize can be. So when you have permanent changes, even if it’s a few degrees increase in temperature, in an environment where change is not a part of the ecosystem dynamic then you are going to see a lot more change result and that’s what we think is cause the proliferation of shell disease in lobster and tumors in fish. Expect to see more of it.

Among the great points he makes one stood out, and we paraphrase: before you pass judgment on the court’s ruling you need to read the majority judge’s decisions. Before listening to Sauter, NBN was perfectly happy believing Citizen’s United was political corruption on a par with Idi Amin, without having ever read the judges’ decisions. We could easily have read them during the three hours we devoted the other night to watching The Matrix Revolutions, complete with 30 minutes of hairspray and pick-up truck commercials. Now NBN wants the Supreme Court to consider another law: making it illegal to form an opinion from ignorance.

The rush to exploit an increasingly ice-free Arctic This article is certainly looking on the bright side. Despite the prospect that rising sea levels could threaten one-seventh of the world’s population, the industrial powers that be are “chomping at the bit” over new shipping routes and natural gas fields that will open when the polar ice is gone. You could argue that with so much of the planet being underwater in 30 or so years, we’ll need all the resources possible to rebuild. Then again you can argue that just reducing global warming gases by throttling back the economy, makes a lot more sense. When you see such complete abandonment of deliberation in favor of growth at all costs you begin to wonder just how evolved humans are.

Stress and Negativity May Change Size and Function of the Brain Here we have a shoestring local news organization posting an article by a self-help-coach kind of guy saying excess negativity and stress can “peel neuron’s away” from your hippocampus. Let’s leave for now why this local news outlet ran such an esoteric article and focus on the article itself. Why is a self-help guru suggesting the brain shrinks from excess stress without any empirical evidence to back it up? He’s just sort of speculating. Well, since he’s speculating NBN will too. We agree with the article, which is why we’re so optimistic all the time, present issue excepted of course. We believe in a bright future because we can’t spare any more brain cells dwelling on bad news.

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists. Tumorous fish and blind shrimp are among the “disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish” fishermen are pulling from the Gulf of Mexico these days. The culprit is believed to be chemicals used to quell the Gulf oil spill. At the same time we have the oil industry pumping billions of dollars into Romney’s campaign, while coal miners decry Obama-spawned environmental regulations for taking away their jobs. The coal mining complaints overlook the dirt-cheap price of natural gas these days, while the oil industry turns a blind eye to the sightless shrimp. It almost seems like the fossil fuel industry as a whole wants to take advantage of the bad jobs market to further their own interests regardless of the deception involved or damage being done. Do you think it’s possible that in politics people could be that unscrupulous?

_ DuPont Achieves Zero Landfill Status in Building Innovations Business Certainly DuPont has a lot of environmental damage to atone for, and there’s clearly more room for improvement in its current operations. But hearing the corporation reduced the trash in its building innovations company from 81 million pounds to nothing in three years, well, that’s something to clap about. Whenever we think about recycling we have to remember there’s two sides to the story. First, Dupont's effort means there's 81 million pounds of debris not going into a landfill. Second, and perhaps more important, that translates into many more millions of pounds of raw material not being mined or milked from Mother Earth to create new building innovations supplies, what-ever the heck those may be.

But increasingly, eating from the tree of knowledge is forcing those with even a mild curiosity to acknowledge that the vast majority of religious doctrine has no place in an information-driven world. Akin illustrates beautifully this crossroads where so many of us stand, and the level of ignorance that must be embraced in order to turn right. Thanks Todd.  Keep up the good work. And may God, Allah and Buddha bless you.

Every issue of New Scientist magazine seems like a veritable Garden of Eden when it comes to content to post in NBN. A recent issue had an article on the senses of plants and another on some on-line lecturer using a robot stand-in. Now that’s weird science. Then there’s this piece on bonobo chimps using sharpened stones to access food locked inside a log, like early humans using sharpened stones to pull marrow from inside bones. This story alone didn’t rock our word, however this excerpt did: “since these animals are raised in unusual environments where they frequently interact with humans, their cases may be too singular to extrapolate their talents to their brethren.” In other words, the animals tested may have been much smarter than the average bonobo chimp by virtue of having been tested and taught so much by humans. Can we extrapolate this to humans? Is it possible the more work you put into a person the smarter they can become, regardless of where they start on the level of intellectual ability. What are the limits to cognitive development? How much can we learn? Does innate intelligence alone explain the revolutionary insights of the Einstein’s of the world. Or, did it come from some insight Einstein experienced that completely reconfigured his perception of the world around him. There’s no denying that the smarter you become the faster you learn. But is learning an asymptotic curve? If so what is the singularity in human learning? Is there one? NBN has no idea, but it sure is fun to think about.

Fan Pens How-to Book in Overcoming Celebrity Obsession With the release of Diane Saks how-to book on overcoming celebrity obsession, NBN has hope for our own dark fixation on that former subject of national adulation: Frank Zappa. Finally, we can admit it. When we’re not cranking out copy on nanotechnology, genetics and the perils and politics of ignoring science, NBN is combing the depths of YouTube for a new glimmer of insight into the mind that crafted such tunes as Peaches en Regalia and Brown Shoes Don’t Make It. A little more seriously folks, what does it say about our culture that there are enough celebrity obsessed people to write a book about it? According to Saks, you are celebrity-obsessed when your target celebrity gets its own story character in your life. Also according to Saks, stage one for ending that obsession means ending that character’s role in your life. (Ya think?) The next step is: understanding why the obsession took place. (Because you have no life?) The third step is re-establishing yourself into a real life. (Good luck with that.) While NBN may not be actually obsessed with Frank Zappa, it’s hard for any satirists not to dream of what a world with Todd Akin, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Frank Zappa would be like. He must be turning over in his grave. We miss you Frank.  Moreover, we need you.

“How is the Drought Affecting Me” Relishing the first few sips of strong morning coffee trolling through the Twittersphere, NBN came upon a post linking to a webpage on the fed’s U.S. Drought Portal called “How is the Drought Affecting Me.” How cool is this, we thought, the webpage allows regular folks to post their own drought observations on a state-by-state basis.  It seemed a little clunky at first, but the webpage soon succumbed to our powers of deduction revealing a cornucopia of information about what the drought is doing to the hay crop, water levels and pasturelands in far reaches of states like Oklahoma and Texas. Then we realized the reports for the entire country listed on this webpage totaled about 300. That’s not a lot when measured against what had to be a lot of money spent building this website. It had to cost over $1 million, when you consider the work involved in gathering all the information, building the website, and weeding out the pointy-headed remarks made by those looking for a laugh or an opportunity to vent on wasteful government projects. We hate to question any effort to gather information for public use, but in these days of tight budgets we fear this website just doesn’t pass muster. Then again, if this portal does stay up for a few years it could become a valuable database. Then again, if Romney gets into office say goodbye to the Drought Monitor Portal. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney killed a five-year watershed monitoring program just as it was entering its fifth year. Now that’s wasting tax-payers money.

The Cost of Cool NBN forced its way through all of this Sunday New York Times Op-Ed about the problems air conditioning pose to our global warming future, preparing to argue that the problem is moot given present day economic reality. After all, air conditioning is an expensive indulgence and its wide spread adoption in developing cities in tropical climes may no longer be possible as money grows tight. A tidy argument, which NBN planned to expand on with observations that all these tropical cities are centers of growth largely because there’s a surplus of cheap labor who’s air conditioning needs are surely a low priority to their employers. Then this Op-Ed by Jonathan S. Tobin on the Time’s Op-Ed popped up. Thanks to Tobin, NBN now has an identity: We are eco-luddites. According to Tobin, eco-luddites believe greater government regulation is the only answer to global warming, fisheries collapse, groundwater contamination, plastic’s pollution, coastal deadzones and the myriad problems each of those mega-eco-evils is spawning. Eco-luddites like NBN, can’t see that the profit driven ingenuity of capitalism will not only solve all these problems—in a timely fashion no doubt—but end up providing air conditioning enough to keep the folks in India, China and Brazil happily grinding out the schlock we buy from the Christmas Tree store and throw away without using. As we said at the outset, the Times piece makes a moot point and you can expect air conditioner sales to continue to plummet in the BRIC countries for the foreseeable future. The real news here is a clearly popular writer is espousing a level of ignorance not seen since the Luddites. Interestingly enough, when we opened the webpage with Tobin’s article, it sat alongside an ad for Sear Air conditioners.

Lawmakers go to Obama for fish aid If you’re looking for Democrats and Republicans agreeing on something, this article is for you. Apparently, every elected official living within 50 miles of the coast is fretting over the fate of our country’s fishermen. And well they should fret. These people are being forced out of business by government regulations put in place to protect fish that have disappeared from over-fishing. If that seems a little paradoxical, just think of the banks we bailed out after they ruined our economy. Nothing makes perfect sense anymore, but the wisdom behind supporting fishermen who wiped out all the fish, is secondary to helping hard-working people who wisely or otherwise cut off the limb they stand on. These are not bankers living in $5 million McMansions in Greenwich, Conn. More importantly, financial assistance will take the fight out fishermen opposing the regulatory efforts to protect what fish remain. Those regulatory efforts are clearly costing the fishermen their jobs. But since everyone benefits by rebuilding these fishing stocks, perhaps we should all pay to help those who, wisely or otherwise, created the problem they now need our help dealing with. It’s called fixing the problem instead of fixing blame.

That said NBN would like you to look in the comments section of the fishing article linked in the post above. Someone took great pains to decry the fishing industry’s use of bait fish to create what the commenter quite accurately calls the largest aquaculture project in the world: the New England lobster fishery. New England Lobster prices have never been lower thanks to a boom in the population of lobsters in New England waters. Pictured here is the catch from 2.5 hours of diving in northern Massachusetts waters this past weekend. Not pictured here are the roughly 40 other lobsters left behind because they all were packed with eggs. In addition to these lobsters, NBN staffers caught and released a 7-pound lobster and numerous five-pounders all packed with eggs. The commercial lobsterman living next door to the offices of NBN says he’s taking to market 700 pounds of lobster every time he hauls his pots, which he does three times a week. Read the remark at the top of the comments section in the article linked above to learn why. It’s an eye opener. What it all boils down to is tons of lobster bait being placed in pots that only catch a small portion of the lobster out there. The rest find their way out of the pots as easily as they find their way in and go about the business of making baby lobsters.

Despite Extreme Melt, Signs of Hope Emerge for Greenland Ice This article is a completely pointless exercise in journalism, and possibly research, brought to us by Wired magazine last week. Dutch climate researchers using archival photos say in the latest issue of Science magazine that the Greenland ice sheet is not melting like an ice cube in a dishwasher. The historic photos, when married up to more recent shots from the 1980s suggests Greenland’s vital ice sheet melts a little then freezes up. Melts a little, then freezes up…ect. That’s it for Wired magazine's take on the Science magazine study. No putting the recent events into historic perspective, like: Is this recent rapid ice melt any different from other rapid ice melts from decades ago? Might the fact that 13 of the past 15 years have been the warmest on record, make the recent ice melt more threatening than the others? One can only hope/assume the researchers and the editors at Science provided such perspective before the editors at Wired got a hold of it. Perhaps Wired thought the beautiful, but equally confounding photo slideshow of Greenland ice provided in the Science study is reason enough to run its inconclusive article. Is it possible this article is just an effort to present some global warming good news amidst the avalanche of bad news? It seems to us Wired does have a tendency to spin this subject a little.

Concerns about climate change, health Just when you thought the shrinking ozone worries were well behind us, a Harvard study says a growing skin cancer risk from same could be the gravest future threat yet. The culprit? Global warming, of course. This gets convoluted. The study says increasingly severe storms are throwing more water vapor into the air causing the conversion of stable chlorine in the air to an unstable kind that eats ozone. To NBN there seem enough enough uncertainties in this study for it not to rank as high on the should-we-panic scale as more immediate global warming threats, like the increasingly severe storms and heat waves we’re having. However, the study author feels markedly different. He says: “If you were to ask me where this fits into the spectrum of things I worry about, right now it’s at the top of the list.” Of course the prospect of an skin cancer epidemic world-wide might be more disconcerting than sweating out the prospect of Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma et. al. turning into one enormous sand dune. After all, if global warming is going to turn sunshine into poison, can’t we all just spend more time inside?

Tell the EPA to get harmful soot out of the air we breathe Someone should tell the NRDC it’s fighting a losing battle trying to pressure federal lawmakers and regulatory agencies to do better by the environment. The NRDC has won some notable legislative victories back in the day when people planned for the future. But reason doesn’t rule the roost anymore as the race is on by those financing our elections to claim what remains of our rapidly diminishing natural resources. How does the NRDC hope to hold the EPA accountable for cleaning up anything when we have fellow Americans in the nation’s heartland electing national leaders who want to abolish the agency altogether. It seems folks like the NRDC might start turning their considerable fundraising abilities on softening the stance of voters in places like Texas, Arizona, and Nebraska. Then again, the environmental movement just may have a secret weapon. As militant as so many voters are becoming in these states, they are also dealing with a drought that can clearly be linked to the same mad dash for remaining resources these folks are protecting as the American way of life. The question is, how long will it take folks in Arizona et. al. to realize that the very reasons they can’t fill their swimming pools, or grow a crop worth anything is due to the lack of environmental regulations they want to eliminate altogether. That’s who the NRDC should be talking to about the soot in the air.

What is a species? As full–throated supporters of efficiency and warriors against waste NBN occasionally finds itself giving an awful lot of leeway in defending some pretty pointy-headed science. We ran out of rope with this University of Bern study that purports to have covered new ground in defining what is, or is not, a distinct species. They produced a genetically modified fruit fly that can breed with other similarly modified fruit flies, but not with the original species of fruit fly from which they were derived. Maybe one of our alert readers can help us understand a practical application for this information. The more science learns about DNA the clearer it becomes that science can pretty much build whatever life form it wants from these nucleic acids. So who cares what is and is not a species anymore? Yet these folks have to have spent—and continue to spend—a couple hundred thousand dollars pursuing this answer. The question, once central to science, and still being fought over by subspecies from Cincinnati, is increasingly becoming a moot point.

Liquid Robotics and BioSonics Team with Cornell Researcher Develop Revolutionary Instrument Platform Like so many articles NBN digs into in our RSS Feed, we entered this piece about robotic marine survey subs with an eye toward cheap jokes and finding flaws. A solar-powered underwater lab being dragged about the ocean by a wave-powered tug seemed awfully Rube Goldberg for something expected to ride out hurricanes in the briny blue. However, Cornell science is backing the project and if they can make it work it’s eventually going to be much cheaper than sending scientists out on research vessels to do the same lab work. This really could be a break-through for fisheries science. Then NBN thought of one flaw with the project: What happens when fishermen pick-up these things up in their nets? Fishermen are taking it on the chin right now largely from the reports fisheries scientists are producing on the health of the ocean. More than likely fishermen are not going to take too kindly to these things. These surface to submarine labs will need security cameras.

Dumping Iron in Ocean & 6 More Extreme Climate Fixes Here are 7 not-so-easy steps science is seriously considering to check the advance of global warming. 1) Seeding the oceans with iron to promote plankton blooms which get buried in the ocean sediment. 2) Increasing production of charcoal from agricultural byproducts and then burying it. 3) Mass producing seaweed and then burying it. 4) Planting trees on the edge of deserts using energy from solar plants to help them along. 5) White roofs on homes to reflect heat. 6) Man-made volcanoes. 7) Some sort of floating factory that makes clouds out of sea-water. Anybody who may have followed the history of a very suspect company called Planktos knows even the scientifically soundest of these proposals, the ocean iron seeding, is rife with difficulties that still need to be worked out. However, most absurd of all of is the first three of these are proposals that take carbon from the air and plant it into the ground. At the same time industries across the globe are finding ever more ingenious ways to pull carbon out of the ground to be used in industries that put it into the air.

Stanford-SLAC team uses X-ray imaging to observe running batteries in real time Stanford science says it has taken a big step toward producing less expensive batteries that store five-times more energy for the electric car market. We post it here because the article is almost understandable. It says lithium sulfur batteries could transform the electric car market but it was thought the sulfur gets chemically changed into something that clogs up the battery after a few dozen rechargings. However, by changing the method of examining the spent sulfur batteries from electron microscopes to x-ray microscopes the researchers found the sulfur was largely unchanged. That suggests lithium sulfur batteries might work forecasting a much brighter future for electric cars. This discovery is certainly forecasting a brighter future for the folks over at Stanford announcing the discovery. Car companies and government agencies will be tripping over themselves to give this lab money.

Then there’s London’s energy-generating sidewalk set to start powering Europe’s largest mall by the start of the 2012 London Olympics. (Something’s counter-intuitive about alternative energy being used to power Europe’s largest shopping mall.) Then we have really alternative energy sources like electricity-harvesting viruses, and the recently developed T-shirt battery. Once again, thanks to Renewable Energy World for great coverage of this subject.

Heat Waves, Wildfires, and Droughts, oh my! How, in the face of all this bad environmental news, can our youth grow up to be anything but more militant environmentalists than ever joined Earth First or Greenpeace. The only concern NBN has is it is too late for popular sentiment to shift sufficiently to save a planet a lot of people think is doing just fine. So while economic woes chip away at Obama’s re-election prospects will the endless stream of bad environmental news help him out? Hmmmmm

Above all else sunglasses have to be two-pair for $10. Now those are cheap sunglasses. Of course this is completely counter to this week’s theme of recycling and reuse but it gives us an opportunity to post a ZZ Top video.

Freudenberg North America Companies Target Zero Manufacturing Waste in Push to Improve Sustainability NBN lost an hour last week thinking this article was an objective conservative’s thoughts on what’s missing in both Obama’s and Romney’s campaign messages. We particularly liked the references to the grotesque subsidy of Corporate America through political corruption at the expense of small business innovation. Lo and behold the conservative wraps up his argument with messianic talk of the fossil fuel industry fueling a new U.S. economic boom. To salvage the hour lost on this ill conceived argument, NBN turned to the press release linked atop about Freudenberg Industries. This is apparently a huge corporation using 100 percent recycled plastic and energy efficient light bulbs, among many other “green” initiatives, with an aim toward achieving zero manufacturing waste. NBN would like to leverage this press release into another illustration that efficiency is the fuel for this country’s next economic boom. Yet nowhere in the conservative’s one-hour argument is mention made of solar power or renewable energy. Why? Because eventually efficiency will mean less consumption and how do you square less consumption with the kind of economic growth fossil fuels have produced over the past century? You don’t. And that doesn’t fit into the decidedly un-objective arguments made by most all conservatives including the chuckle-head who wrote the piece above. They all want to turn back the clock. Who doesn’t? We can’t. Middle class American’s are going to have to live leaner, simpler lives while the wealthy are going to have to pay much, much more if they still want to ride jetskies. That’s the Gospel according to NBN.

But is it unreasonable to think they may be interested in why the universe contains matter, but no antimatter. Thanks to the internet, and iphones and tablets, such folks can bone up on such heady subjects any time they are bored. At the same time, doing so is looking at the boundaries of existence, including human existence. Such inquiry got Adam and Eve into a heap of trouble and there are powerful forces working hard these days to discourage folks from making the same mistake again.

Miracle Method Setting Sales Records Contrary to the gospel of modern day political conservatism, when the economic gods close one door another invariably opens. Read another way: when one business dies another benefits. Folks like Kohler and Waterworks may be singing the blues these days, but the folks repairing the products they sell are doing great, according to the folks over at Miracle Method. Bathrooms have always been the most expensive installations in a home. They should not be temporary. Yet between 1995 and 2005 thousands of perfectly good bathrooms were replaced with vastly more expensive fixtures and Kohler and Waterworks put a lot of people to work making those fixtures. Now it appears Miracle Method is putting at least a few of those people to work maintaining those bathrooms instead of replacing them. It’s sad that fewer jobs are filled but fewer natural resources are wasted to make ceramic tile and porcelain bathtubs that end up in a landfill a few years later. Before you know it we’ll be fixing our shoes and TVs instead of discarding them and buying anew. And dare we say it. Could we one day soon be darning our socks?

What makes a worm say ‘yuck’ For our immunologically inclined readers, this article out of Harvard says our immune systems are more robust than previously thought. That is, one particular facet of immune systems, what the article calls our “innate immune system.” The older and less well-known of the body’s two immune systems, the innate immune system is pre-programmed to recognize certain pathogens inside our cells. As near as we can determine from the six paragraphs we read, the break-though in the article is the discovery that the innate immune system can detect trouble in a cell—like the presence of virus or toxin--before any damage is done. Which begs the question: can medicine take advantage of this discovery to jump start our immune responses to fight infection before it spreads? The next question is: why should those not immunologically inclined care? Because, as we’ve written many time before in this website, the ever increasing presence of funky viruses and toxins in our environment mean our immune systems are being taxed as never before. It’s why we have the spike in autoimmune disease we’re seeing in the world today. Immune system health, and promoting it, is going to be big-time industry in the coming decades. Unless, of course, we clean up the planet.  See Global Warming New this week to evaluate that prospect.

The 4th R: REPAIR We shoveled our way through most of this NRDC piece on the resurgence of recycling, unsure about passing it on to NBN readers, when we found something to write about. This links to the Google search results for the headline. There are more than 10 full pages of search results for “The 4th R: Repairs”. That’s including the quotes. So NBN through it might be worth going off on a mini-lecture on the virtue of milking everything you can from what you buy in an economy geared toward buying stuff and throwing it out ASAP, a.k.a. consumerism. We illustrate the lecture with this hp deskjet 3520 printer. This $39 unit is eight years old. It has printed tens of thousands of pages. Who sells a printer for $39 that works so well? The same people making the $27 ink cartridges that only fit that unit and last for about a week. If we believed the dweeb at Staples who told us refill kits can’t be used on this printer, we’d have chewed through a couple thousand dollars worth of HP deskjet 3520 ink cartridges by now. So it’s with near giddiness, and a real sense of triumphing over greedy engineers and product strategy experts at HP, that NBN refills for a dollar or two the ink cartridges we were told we couldn’t refill. It’s a heart-warming. So why don’t we look more favorably upon others around us applying the same sense of frugality to other purchases, like cars? Or their homes?

China tells US to stop reporting Beijing's bad air Is it possible that China has a decent argument here? They’re asking the U.S. embassy in Beijing to stop its twitter feed reporting the city’s hourly air quality. China says it is a developing country and should be allowed the same pollution rights as the U.S. enjoyed unchallenged during its development years when no one thought about air quality. Now it's being stigmatized by the U.S. for doing what developing nations must to make life better for citizens. Should a county under development be granted greater pollution leeway than those that are developed? Theoretically, once they get “developed” they may not need to pollute so much. Then again we’re talking about 1.3 billion people in this "China under development.” Then there’s India and its 1.17 billion people in need of development. And what about Brazil, Eastern Europe and Africa? Using the old economic model the U.S. created, and these countries now strive for, the world will never get developed. The planet can’t afford it. We need a new economic model.

Low-Cost Solar Brightens Lives in the Developing World A while back NBN questioned the wisdom of a solar lightbulb project that was handing Hatians lights that lasted 2 hours on a charge and cost a week’s wages ($10-$15). A similar program in Africa has NBN now questioning its own wisdom. Two hours of light in what was once darkness helped propel a poor Ugandan family into middle-classdom, meaning they now own a few more chickens, a cow and a goat. That family in turn is now getting wealthy, by animal husbandry and perhaps other Ugandan standards, distributing those bulbs to neighbors. There are 1.5 billion people on the planet without access to electricity. Take the difference made in one family through that extra two hours of light and multiply that by 1.5 billion and you’ve got a sea-change that very well illustrated in this article. It’s very worth reading.

Pennsylvania's acid mine water seen as drilling help In the earthly equations of pluses and minuses that increasingly must make up environmental law, the use of fouled coalmine water to use in hydraulic fracturing wells in Pennsylvania, as outlined in this article, proves a particularly ugly Hobson’s choice. Sadly, the author blathers away the first 1,000 words on the requisite quotes and official titles that show he did his job. The real news is at the bottom of the story. First it notes that abandon coalmines act as mini watersheds, channeling rainwater through what amount to huge coffee makers filled with coal industry discards, most notably a lot of coal. Apparently, the rainwater collected is contaminating many of the state’s rivers and streams. Next the article quotes the officials saying this abwater might instead be used to pump into fracking wells, except it’s uncertain how the chemical make-up of the mine water will serve, or not, the needs of the fracking operations. No mention is made of what the fracking folks will do with this water after they’ve used it, a major industry problem. The article also glosses over the costs of trucking the mine water to the well sites. Lastly the article says if this recycling effort were to meet the tests above then it would somehow allow state regulators and volunteer environmental organization more opportunity to divert rainwater away from the mines, cleaning up the state’s trout streams in the process. Sounds great on paper.

Three Charts That Illustrate Why Solar Has Hit A True Tipping Point This article argues that the economics are lining up to edge the solar industry toward a tipping point: that prized ROI point where installing solar panels makes more sense than not. The article makes excellent points vis-à-vis the tipping point that NBN will reiterate here to entice you to read it yourself. 1) the economic potential for the technology in high resource areas is far bigger than actual deployment figures would suggest. That means places like the U.S. Southwest could be making a lot more money from solar installations than being made now. 2) The most important cost reductions in the next decade will come not through groundbreaking lab-scale improvements, but through incremental cost reductions due to deployment. 3) Solar is already comparable to fossil fuels in a variety of markets today.

DuPont Celebrates World’s Largest Solar Boat’s Successful Global Journey Powered by the Sun  This is just plain silly. How many millions, (tens of millions?) did DuPont spend on this little publicity stunt? In theory, in a free country, DuPont is clear to spent what it wants, where it wants. But this is supposed to be some sort of celebration of the promise of solar power. By a chemical company, no less. Yet, marine transportation is the most energy intensive mode of transportation there is. If we’re going to use fossil fuels they should be reserved for marine transportation only. Gas has the biggest bang for the bucket-full. What’s worse about this solar boat is the hull underneath is also useless for any other purpose. So both solar panel and boat are a waste of time and resources outside of the limited scope of a publicity stunt. Perhaps it’s possible the work going into the solar boat will produce developments that further the industry. We think  that if DuPont really wants to celebrate the potential of solar power, why not just fix these panels to a few thousand homes for free. Sorry, NBN can’t find anything good to say about this clearly well-meaning project.

Rules of Engagement Here’s a Harvard professor conducting research on an outdated science: the evolutionary impact of social networks. We started reading it thinking the social networks referred to were social media. Any regular reader of this website knows the possible role of social media in human evolution is a hot topic. However, this guy is talking about real social networks like bars, parties and Kiwanis Clubs. He goes on to make some pedestrian point about how engagement in same can both, provide useful information while exposing folks to risks like catching the flu or meeting unsavory people. As we read through the piece our assessment of it started to gel.  But then a thought occurred that might make the article worthwhile. What if social media produced the same rewards as the real-life social networks, only without the risks? The news is full of stories of vulnerable people being taken advantage of, and worse, through online scams and predators. But how many more such stories do we hear of people being victimized by people they interact with in real life. Is it possible virtual socializing can cut down on the risks of real socializing? With Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest you’re not looking someone in the eye while talking to them. You’re not subconsciously registering all the subtle body movement and voice inflections that can more quickly earn your trust then if there were no such personal interaction. And you’re certainly not going to catch the flu from Facebook, although you can get bullied a bit.That doesn’t mean you can’t eventually forming a real relationship, weather social, professional or intimate, with online associates, it just means that you can know more about a person or group through online interaction before deciding you want to party, go hiking or something better.

Diversity 'helped mammals to survive over deep time'  This is a fairly pedestrian article on the effect of major climate change on species diversity over the past several million years. It speaks matter-of-factly about the prospect of numerous species going extinct from a global temperature increase of six degrees. If six degrees doesn’t sound like much consider this:  that’s how much the earth’s temperature has fluctuated over the past 56 million years. Six lousy degrees is enough to melt the entirety of all the earth’s ice, according to the article. In that, six degrees is the kind of temperature change most of global warming science seems to think this planet is heading toward, this is not a very optimistic article. There’s some consolation, perhaps, from the finding that the greater the diversity of animals within a family of species—for example the Cricetidae, which includes rats, mice, hamsters, and voles—the greater the survival rate of that family during climatic convulsions. Apparently that diversity enables species within that family coping with climate change to more readily change in size, diet, and other survival strategies. So how does the news bode for the family Hominidae? Let’s ask these folks.  

Elegant Entanglement NBN increasingly believes that man-made devices and technology will inevitably be added to the survival-of-the-fittest formulations that drive human evolution. Which is why we love quantum computers. We’re not even sure we know what quantum computers are, but this great piece in the New Yorker a year ago has us thinking we do, so we dare to explain the Harvard Gazette article linked above. Just as electrons are employed in conventional computers to travel around tiny wires and circuits to add 2 and 2, electrons in quantum computers travel around each other in making the same calculations. But because the electrons are working with each other instead of alone, more information can be gathered. In keeping with the analogy, they can add -2 and -2 while adding 2 and 2. Or something like that. However, controlling electrons as they interact with each other is not like asking electrons to travel from Point A to Point B on a motherboard. That’s where the paper linked above comes in. They’ve found a way to tame these electron tag-teams—called qubits—through a process NBN read three times and still doesn’t understand. However, if they’ve done what they claim, it’s huge. For us, just thinking about this stuff is fun. More importantly, after reading a bit about what these bizarre computers can do, it’s clear they are going to play a major role in what it means to be human in 100 years or so.

Wild Things from Shore to Sea In theory, NBN shouldn’t post this blog post. The author, Caroline Craft, is taking a slice of her life, shopping in a Santa Monica Barnes and Noble which charges $.10 for plastic bags, and turning it into a well written piece about the hope for the future. That’s what NBN does, or tries to do. Accordingly, after reading her earlier posts NBN realized that, in some respects, her wonderful blog might be viewed as competition. We’re both doing the same thing, only she’s nicer about it, and arguably a better writer. She simply and beautifully works to help others to see the beauty in simply enjoying the world around them. Hey, that’s NBN’s shtick. Judging by the lack of advertizing, she’s doing it for free. Just like NBN. Check that, she’s doing it because she wants to improve the planet. That’s about as great a paycheck as you can ask for. Beats the snot out of watching an extra hour or two of TV every day. It’s a wonderful blog. More importantly, Ms. Craft and NBN might represent a new New World Order where spare time is spent productively. And, as technology affords us more and more spare time, we might start to see some very interesting changes in how we define "work."  Please take a moment and visit oceanwildthings.com, even if it means you have to navigate away from NBN. Then think about starting your own blog or website. NBN needs all the competition it can get.

Benjamin Franklin probably looked a little silly when he lofted a kite into air in one of the earliest tests of the reaches of electricity. On the other hand how silly will the “drill baby drill” crowd look 100 years from now when all remaining oil sources have dried up, the polar ice caps have melted, livable landmass has been reduced by 20 percent and everybody and his sister is fixing solar panels to their roofs, windmills to the ridges of those roofs, and sending kites into the air above those roofs just to suck up all that free power. They won't just look silly.

NBN isn’t sure what to make of the disappearance last week of a Rush Limbaugh Youtube we plug into our copy whenever we want to illustrate the profound ignorance of the climate change skeptics. We clicked on the hyperlink only to discover the “account associated with this video has been terminated” because of copyright complaints by the people paying Rush Limbaugh. In the search to see whose account it was, we came upon this Youtube of an apparently popular conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones talking about Youtube possibly pulling his account. Like Limbaugh, Alex Jones apparently thinks global warming, and pretty much everything else in the world, is a liberal conspiracy. We couldn’t find if Jones owns the account that posted our favorite Rush Limbaugh Youtube, but the coincidence prompted our posting here.

The SpikerBox: A Low Cost, Open-Source BioAmplifier for Increasing Public Participation in Neuroscience Inquiry Although most people are generally interested in how the brain works, the Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding the Brain has yet to make it to the best sellers list. Now aspiring high school neurologists can take hope. The Spikerbox is the new, affordable way to explore your inner neurologist while indulging every child's love of torturing helpless creatures. The folks in the PLoSone article linked above developed a teaching tool called the SpikerBox, which is appropriate for use in middle/high school educational programs. To quote the article: "This device can be used in easy experiments in which students insert sewing pins into the leg of a cockroach or other invertebrate, to amplify and listen to the electrical activity of neurons. With the cockroach leg preparation, students can hear and see (using a smartphone oscilloscope app they developed) the dramatic changes in activity caused by touching the mechanosensitive barbs. Students can also experiment with other manipulations such as temperature, drugs, and microstimulation that affect the neural activity." Which has NBN wondering who this might work on little brothers.

Sending DNA robot to do the job Sometimes it seems to us that scientific focus of late on nano-technology resembles the defense industry’s focus on atomic power in the 1940s. These folks are definitely playing with fire. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in the medical research using DNA. Case in point is this Harvard study linked above that’s building robots of sorts using human DNA. The scientists are using DNA’s ability to seek out and attach to specific parts of a cell called proteins. It’s an ability that allows us to make babies. The scientists have built what NBN understands to be artificial white blood cells without the cells. Rather, these cells are more like containers, the article calls them barrels. Once these barrels have attached to these specific proteins little “latches” open and out pour certain chemicals that cause the cell containing the proteins to self destruct. The real beauty here is these barrels can be built using different parts to target proteins specific to different cancer cells much like, as the article says, “different engines and tires can be placed on the same chassis.” This is all well and good if you’re going after cancer, but what happens if some disgruntled scientists builds one of these things to target brain cells? Clearly building these DNA robots is much harder than building a nuclear bomb. Ditto, for effectively delivering it to large sections of the world population. But it’s useful every once in a while to put this marvelous research into some sort of every day perspective. Isn’t it?

Google glasses give glimpse into future, 'Project Glass' Let’s call this Google glasses thing what it is: The Matrix without the jumper cables. This ABC article dances all around the arguments for and against the idea of being hardwired to the internet at all times, but let’s be honest with ourselves, all the against articles seem tethered to concepts of life that are rapidly becoming archaic. Take for instance the concern in the article over wearing these glasses while driving. It may be a concern for the next decade or two, but as the interface with the internet becomes increasingly omnipresent, the need to drive will soon be relegated to recreational purposes only. And as recreation--and we’re including physical recreation—becomes ever more available through the internet, that too will become a thing of the past. It was just three years ago that NBN was in awe of this MIT video introducing the concept of the sixth sense. Now the discussion has shifted from concept to its application. In three years! The Matrix movies vilify this concept, and there are all manner of people clinging to the past out of fear of such a future. The only thing we really have to fear are such people.

With gobies on the menu, snake species rebounds Is this article more proof that the battle over invasive species may best be fought by Mother Nature? Or is it a view into the sort of Frankenstein ecosystems that we can expect as species that never coexisted before are now forced to slug it out in new solutions to survival of the fittest and we should do everything within our power to reduce collateral damage? NBN sides with the former and offers up the invasive green crab as more evidence that as species we can all just get along, even if we didn’t evolve together. It will take a little time and nature as we know her will be very different in the outcome. But to quote JurassicPark: life finds a way. For example, the greencrab is not native to U.S. shores and anyone diving off New England these days will see the things everywhere. But guess what is also moving in: blackfish, also called tautog. They love green crabs and anybody who likes fish loves blackfish.

 Before agreeing, NBN would like to remind folks of something called quantum computing. This landmark New Yorker article notes these mysterious computers can predict with “80 percent” accuracy four-card monte. And then anyone watching the equally mind-blowing series “Fabric of the Cosmos” is forced to agree that everything is not what it seems when seen through the limited scope of our own limited senses.

It’s just a robot replica of a tie-rod. We might have missed something in the release, but we’re still wondering how these robot mimics will be put to good use. Outside that, it’s really cool what they’ve built in such tiny packages.

An Even Warmer Future Ahead Call this our climate-change-underestimation story for the week. It says a new scientific model found global temps could be 5.5 degrees hotter in the next half century than previously thought. That’s 2 degrees higher than previously thought based on assumptions that sulfur emissions…blah, blah, blah. It took about three paragraphs of this before NBN’s ADHD jump started the search for reasons to include it in this issue. At first we thought we could use the article to voice again the need for legislation allowing lawsuits against those proven to actively campaign against climate change science, should those campaigns prove at a later date to have cost others to lose property and assets. That should shut some of these clowns up. Or, we could dwell on how the article mentions “citizen scientists” who loaned their personal computers to help with the mind-bending number of computations involved. That’s a pretty cool element of the story. Ultimately, we just settled on that old saw common sense: Given the catastrophe forecast by climate change science, the existence of alternative energies that may change that forecast, and the fact that coal and car smoke are no fun to breath, how the heck are we having this discussion? Renewable energy should be a top national priority, instead all we talk about is how much drilling we’re doing.

Stanford geophysicist: More environmental rules needed for shale gas. We read with enthusiasm this piece on a Stanford U. professor who is saying that hydrofracking for natural gas, if done right, is perfectly safe for the environment. Done right, he says, amounts to little more than holding natural gas companies’ feet to the fire regarding recycling the waste water from the wells. That, he says, is much easier for big gas companies than small. That leaves the reader to think the only serious environmental hurdle for fracking is making sure that only companies that can afford to put the needed environmental controls into place are allowed to do it. Apparently, those controls are not too expensive when economies of scale come into play. NBN almost bought the argument, until we started combing through the Stanford professor’s resume. Nestled among his many academic and public policy laurels is his seat on the board of the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America. If the name of the group doesn’t say enough, the pipeline pictured on their website home page leaves little doubt this group loves fossil fuels. Does that mean this Stanford professor has a conflict of interest. Or worse, the university is entrusting its impressionable young minds to the corrupt instructions of a shill for the petroleum industry? We don't know. What we do know is it took a little over a minute after reading the article to look up the author’s credentials on the internet. These days simply reading an article isn’t enough, you’ve got to read about its author to be truly informed.

Mega squid use HUMONGOUS eyes to spot ravenous sperm whales. Boffins float theory on colossal creatures' eyesight. Finally, the mystery behind the enormous eye size of the giant deepwater squid has been solved. They apparently use the basketball-sized orbs to see! That’s according to this British website which cites a study just out in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology. However, like most scientific study, this one creates more questions than it answers. Chief among them is: Why did they do this study? Apparently, the justification for this research, other than possibly as an excuse for some scientists to go boating, is to bolster the theory the giant squid use these massive eyes to detect the minute light given off by glow-in-the-dark jellyfish that light up as squid hungry sperm whales swim by. Which raises another great question: of what possible practical use is this information? The justification NBN likes to apply to science probing so deep into the reaches of practical purpose is that you never know of what future use such information might be. Maybe the insight gained from this exercise in the painfully obvious may someday lead to a cure for macular degeneration. However, it seems this study might better serve mankind as the new standard for which public research facilities can not extend funding.  BTW a boffin is British slang for scientists.

My View by Sen. Kerry: Righting a wrong for our fisheries A while back an NBN column suggested that New England elected officials like Sen.  John Kerry and Rep. John Tierney were paying little more than lip service in their outrage over the toll recent federal fishing policy is taking on New England fishermen. This Kerry editorial recently suggests we’re right. In the editorial Kerry asks that federal money designated for fisheries science but now being used elsewhere, once again be used for its intended cause. Kerry writes this at the same time the fishermen he professes to be fighting for are deeply skeptical of the fisheries science he now wants to funnel more money into. It’s political pandering at its finest, folks. Read the editorial above. There’s no way Kerry shares the fishermen’s skepticism of fisheries science. Yet he’s constantly complaining about the bum deal fishermen are getting from the policies that science is putting into place. Wouldn’t it be nice if our leaders would level with voters. But voters don’t want to hear the truth if it means more sacrifices. Nowhere more so than in the commercial fishing industry, which is already seeing huge losses. Those losses are in part, because of the environmentally destructive techniques used by many in the industry. But they also come from widespread coastal pollution which fishermen have no control over.

Evolutionary question, answered: Harvard researcher co-authors paper on peppered moth evolution This Harvard study says that a century or so ago something called the peppered moth evolved its wing patterns and colors to blend more with the soot of coal-smoke choked skies of the industrial revolution. Then, the paper says, the moth evolved back to its old color patterns when the air started to clear. After reading the article, NBN was preparing to write another we-told-ya-so on our oft-voiced theory that random mutation is not the only force driving evolution. We thought the changes needed to the moth’s DNA to produce a different wing color and then back would take much longer than 100 years to happen by chance, as Darwin’s theory dictates. Then we thought again. There are a few other things to consider here before assuming Darwin missed the boat. First is the reproduction rate of the month: the more generations within a given time span the more likely random mutation can explain the color change. The level of chromosomal change needed to affect this color change also comes into play as does how much of a survival advantage the moth enjoys through this color change. You can argue that we should have thought yet again before posting this piece on NBN. We belabor all this because unbeknownst to most of the world, evolution is a hot science right now, in no small part due to global warming. The ability of species--think polar bear—to keep up with the enormous ecological changes we’re going to see in the next few decades is going to be of intense scientific interest and there will be a lot more money going into it.

Westminster Skating Facility Announces Energy Efficient Lighting Retrofit  When a National League Hockey team’s practice arena saves $30,000 a year in electric bills by changing its lighting system it should, it seems, get at least one editorial outlet to do their own story. Instead the press release above only  got linked-to by a few energy-oriented websites. Is it bad news that such good news generates no real news at all? Or is it a positive sign of the times that such good news is common place enough to not penetrate the editorial staff meetings of even local newspapers? What is perhaps news here, or at least worth noodling over in NBN, is the fact that this great green news comes without any government intervention at all. Which makes us wonder about the need for laws NBN has embraced in the past, compelling folks to buy energy efficient bulbs. Is this an example of capitalism and conservation working hand in hand in a model that should be embraced by our law makers? Absolutely, with one crucial distinction. If you want to buy bulbs that use 30-to-40 percent more electricity than needed, you should not only have to pay for that wasted energy but also the right to waste that energy. Where have we heard this idea before? That said, this website makes a neat point: incandescent bulbs lose lots of energy to heat which isn't what we buy lightbulbs for. However, when you are also heating the home you are lighting up, are the heat-producing incandescent bulbs still wasting energy? One more thing to consider: how much more inefficient are these hot bulbs when used in air conditioned rooms? See? Nothing is ever simple. There is no black and white.

Europe Hammered by Winter, Is North America Next? Here’s more on the weird things from The Winter That Wasn’t: Eastern Europe’s deep freeze appears to be from global warming. Somehow, NASA says, the increasing Arctic ice melt from global warming is increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere to make snow with. Helping out, the vagaries of something called the Arctic oscillation  pushed cold air down over Eastern Europe a few weeks back to the envy of North American ski resorts. The crucial question in the headline is answered in the article only in the suggestion that, if North America is next stop for the Arctic oscillation aberration, we’re too close to spring for any long-term weather threats to materialize. The article take pains to note that Europe has been slammed with serious winter weather before. Were it not for the frigid winters of 1812 and 1941 Europe might be called France or Germany, respectively. So, where does that leave global warming theory in explaining our abnormal weather? As indicated in the article, NASA's scientists isn’t sure, but Rush Limbaugh is.

To further illustrate NBN’s Winter That Wasn’t issue, NBN offers this email account from Waterford, VA. To some this vernal pond maven’s email may seem over-the-top: wetting wood frogs migrating on a dry night? Still, there’s no denying that a few more wood frogs are going to create a few more wood frogs this spring thanks to this arguably obsessed vernal pond devotee, so we post the email here: “Last night I was coming home from a great birding experience (Northern Harriers followed by Short-eared Owls hunting a nearby field). It had rained during the day and was in the 50s. As the sun set, a serious front rolled through - temps dropped and wind really picked up - so much so that our spotting scopes were almost blown over, it was that kind of wind. As I drove home, at 6:30pm. with no rain and big winds, I got to a 4-way intersection where there are known sink hole vernal pools. As I rolled to the stop, I saw that familiar sign—not leaves blowing across the street but, frogs hopping. My heart dropped. They were all female wood frogs, gravid-as-gravid can be. While this is a "back road" of sorts, the traffic was constant and it was "rush" hour. I put on my hazard lights and jumped into road-crossing-assist mode. Didn't expect this on a no-rain night and didn't have the tel numbers to call in help. It all lasted about 40 minutes. Their skin was pretty dry from the wind so I tried to wet them a bit from a clean puddle to help a little as they continued on their way. Not only does this feel a few weeks early for our wood frogs, I was also surprised to see movement without the rain. Spring has sprung!

Extreme Cave Diving This documentary sounded to us like another way for a scientist to get money enough to further his own hobby, in this case cave diving. However, anyone embracing so enthusiastically the prospect of dying the sort of death we’d not wish on biting insects is going to get NBN to sit and watch for a while. Lo and behold, while the movie had its gratuitous measure of mind-numbingly beautiful underwater cave diving footage, they came across with a very serious scientific message. By cutting in half a stalagmite pulled from the cave—pictured above—the divers discovered what they said was geological proof of radical climate change taking place over 50 years. How that discovery translates into today’s forecasts, dire and less-so, for global warming wasn’t well spelled out in the documentary: they didn’t appear to be talking about giant meteors or any cataclysmic event that caused the climate change evidenced in the cave stalagmite. However, it certain starts to make today's global warming seem a lot more cataclysmic than most of the oil companies and their minions would have you believe. The documentary is definitely worth seeing.

Rivaling the World's Smallest Reptiles: Discovery of Miniaturized and Microendemic New Species of Leaf Chameleons (Brookesia) from Northern Madagascar A lizard that fits on the face of a dime was discovered recently in Madagascar. First, NBN wants to note how cool it is that in this day and age new species of vertebrates—that’s animals with backbones—are still being discovered at all. That naturally leads NBN to wonder how vulnerable these tiny creatures are to extinction, and can protecting them be leveraged into action to stop the rampant illegal logging in Madagscar. It’s pretty cool to think a lizard the size of a dime can save a tree the size of a Boeing 747. What the heck, a fish the size of a paper clip slowed the construction of a dam in this country. Sadly it didn’t stop the dam, but every little bit helps.

Unwelcome Consequences Likely After Warm Winter There are a few species NBN would be happy to see head into extinction and the gypsy caterpillar is certainly among them. However, the incredibly warm winter in New England this year will likely mean a banner year for the oak-leaf stripping little buggers. That’s the remarkably insightful scoop from this otherwise quite unremarkable Boston TV station’s website post. The warm weather is also good news for other wildlife that have fallen out of favor, like the Canada goose.

Santorum Says Obama's Policies Elevate 'the Earth Above Man' Rick Santorum, the washout senator from the Keystone State gets NBN’s James Watt Limb-sawing service award for his remarks about Obama placing the needs of the planet above the needs of the planet’s anchor tenants: humans. Hmmm…..Let’s give this some thought. Humans can’t survive without the planet, so let’s put the needs of humans over the needs of the planet we can’t survive without. If anyone is thinking that Santorum is, perhaps, not the brightest smile in the class picture, think about this: he’s now the most popular potential leader among 100 million or more of this nation’s residents. This strikes NBN as the height of hypocrisy because the same people feel that spending too much money on things like protecting the planet is ruining the future for generations to come. There is a reason the Republicans can’t find a suitable candidate to challenge a very challengeable Barack Obama. It’s because the premise on which the party must build its platform—that the planet is ours to exploit—doesn’t work with planning a future for the folks on that planet. The days of “gimme mine and screw everybody else” are over because we’re running out of resources to grab.

Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot Why is this front page NY Times story in our Really Strange Stuff feed? What else can you call a political movement that says government energy efficiency initiatives are a U.N. plot to take away American freedoms. If that’s not strange enough, these folks are actually slowing those government initiatives. In some respects a UN plot for world domination through energy efficiency fits rather neatly into this age of the Tea Party, 9.11 conspiracy theorists and Occupy Wall Street. What's worth noting is the Tea Party is fueling this latest conspiracy-driven political movement and it's working. They are successfully fighting government initiatives like bike paths, high-speed trains and energy efficient housing all over the country. What do all these initiatives have in common? They will dramatically reduce this nation’s oil consumption. What do the Tea Party and the people selling oil have in common? They share the same bank account. If these folks want a conspiracy theory to gather behind they might take a hard look at their own organization’s funding. Read the story linked above. It's shocking and depressing. Now consider that article alongside this piece on folks in Maine begging for oil to heat their homes, and not getting it while Big Oil reaps record profits.

Kyocera to Launch Solar With Li-Ion Battery Storage for Homes in Japan Speaking of those folks in Maine in the story linked above, would their lives be any different if they had the systems Japan’s government is helping its citizens buy. Or would such an effort be viewed by the Big-Oil fueled Tea Party folk as a government conspiracy to take away our freedom to waste the oil Big Oil sells us. OK enough teeing off on the Tea Party. Clearly the organization has many well-meaning, good hearted Americans among its ranks. NBN contends they are there despite the best efforts by the organization's leaders. These are misguided people, not bad people.

_Integrating Anaerobic Digestion Into Our Culture Part 2: Stats, Reality and the Future NBN knows just enough on the subject of renewable energy from organic digestion, to sound knowledgeable. This article on the other hand sounds like an excellent review of the subject that we only wish we had the time to digest, pardon the pun, in both parts. However, this sentence got our attention: “Germany, which has the largest installed base of solar and the third largest installed base of wind gets more renewable energy from organic materials than wind and solar combined.” Is there really that much energy to be gleaned using bacteria to break down sugar and starch into natural gas? We may revisit this piece when time allows. In the meantime we have to wonder how the Koch Brothers feel about this technology.

We needed a filler to help balance off the front page more—hey, esthetics are everything—so NBN thought this photo filled the bill. All those little gray dots are aquatic deadzones, areas where nutrient loading have created algal blooms that suck all the oxygen out of the water killing all the fish through a process called eutrophication. Two points to make here: one is that deadzones are becoming an enormous problem and the other is that Google has once again earned the fawning appreciation of NBN with yet another amazing, free data base that allows a unique view of the world. You have to check out the Deadzone tab on Google Earth to get a real appreciation of how bad this problem is. And unless we dramatically clean up our wastewater treatment plants and reduce the use of fertilizers in this country these deadzone are only going to grow in size and number.

_Hatcheries Change Salmon Genetics After a Single Generation The impact of hatcheries on salmonids is so profound that in just one generation traits are selected that allow fish to survive and prosper in the hatchery environment, at the cost of their ability to thrive and reproduce in a wild environment. This discovery is more than just another argument for aquaponics and moving fish farms inshore. It also illustrates just how aggressively humans are redefining "fittest" as it relates to evolution and just what is a "wild" population in a world where humans call the shots in most every ecosystem in the world. Hatchery born salmon have been released into the wild for decades. The results of this study suggest we haven't had a truly wild population of salmon in decades.

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Solar-powered Internet Connectivity in Lascahobas, Haiti We talk often about the internet playing a part in human evolution, so we thought this article on the Illinois Institute of Technology’s solar powered internet access project in Haiti might be a good illustration for this subject. The Haitian school being wired up has just two teachers who have ever used the internet. That means none of the students have. It will take some work by the students to fully understand just how powerful the internet is: many may get no further than the nearest online free video game. So just hooking-up the school isn’t enough bring the students up to speed. They will need some instruction. But so many of the minds that will be opened to this experience are quite literally blank slates. It’s one thing to be a second grader in Dayton Ohio who has never seen the internet, you’ve seen so many other elements of technology the shock is muted. But a Haitian? That’s a shock to the system that might just reach into the DNA in some fashion. Certainly any student so-exposed will stand a far better chance of survival in this world than one who isn't.

_ Environmental Bootcamp Coming to New Orleans Up to now the dreaded insurance seminar was often held up as the occupational purgatory that no middle-aged professional wanted to find themselves participating in, or worse, looking forward to. Now we have the Environmental Bootcamp as the potential standard bearer of boredom. The bootcamp is a three-day emersion into environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, NAAQS, NSR Program, NSPS, NESHAPs, Title V Permitting Program, the Clean Water Act, Water Quality Permitting, Storm Water Management & NPDES Permitting, SPCC Compliance and Planning, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Identification of Hazardous Waste/Exclusions and Delisting of Wastes, CERCLA, EPCRA, TSCA, Environmental Audits, ISO 14001. Who would volunteer for such torture, let alone pay $1,150 to attend? The answer to that question is less important than the fact that enough people will do so to justify  holding such an event, which is great news.

_ Thieves Seek Restaurants’ Used Fryer Oil This first sounded like good news: people are stealing use fryer grease from behind restaurants. Surely, we thought, there is no more certain milepost that the environmental movement is truly becoming an element of everyday life than seeing crime elements cashing in on it. To the tune of $750,000, according to one grease recycling company quoted in the story. Despite such losses, the article says, getting local law enforcement, particularly prosecutors’ offices, to take the matter seriously has been a bit of a chore. To quote the article: “Turning arrests into convictions with punishments large enough to deter future theft is rare.” You have to wonder: if thieves were targeting barrels of crude oil from refineries the matter might be taken a little more seriously. Still, NBN takes some solace knowing that yet another waste product in this country is being put to good use, regardless of who is using it.

_ DuPont Achieves Zero Landfill Status in Building Innovations Business Certainly DuPont has a lot of environmental damage to atone for, and there’s clearly more room for improvement in its current operations. But hearing the corporation reduced the trash in its building innovations company from 81 million pounds to nothing in three years, well, that’s something to clap about. Whenever we think about recycling we have to remember there’s two sides to the story. First, Dupont's effort means there's 81 million pounds of debris not going into a landfill. Second, and perhaps more important, that translates into many more millions of pounds of raw material not being mined or milked from Mother Earth to create new building innovations supplies, what-ever the heck those may be.

_ Graphic Image Warning: Leopard Scalps Man in Brutal Attack There are a thousand different jokes to pursue with any news story about leopard attacks in India (well maybe a few dozen). However, if you’re looking for a few laughs, NBN would like to direct you to the comments at the end of this story out of eastern India. What’s no laughing matter is the attacking leopard was released back into the wild. NBN is all in favor of protecting wildlife, but one would hope that a leopard prone to attacking humans might give Indian wildlife officials paws to reconsider before releasing it back into the wild. BTW there’s nothing graphic about the images. Outdoor Life just used this headline to draw readers.

_ Reaping benefits of exercise minus the sweat Once again, exercise to the rescue. This Harvard study shows some odd chemical it's calling Irisin, produced during exercise, appears to prompted the body into turning bad white fat into great brown fat. Irisin helps the body hedge against diseases like diabetes, cancer and obesity. The authors of the study actually think they can have some sort of pill distilled from Irisin in about two years. Yeah, exercise in a pill. Wanna get in on the ground floor of that company? We didn't have time to read the whole article, but you might want to.

_PolyU scientist finds novel use of African mushroom in cancer research A young scientist from PolyU's Food Safety and Technology Research Centre has successfully prepared highly stable selenium nanoparticles by using the polysaccharide-protein complex extracted from the African Tiger Milk mushroom. The preliminary study discovered that these stabilized selenium nanoparticles can significantly inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells by apoptosis. We include it here just to illustrate traditional medicines like herbs and mushrooms can have roots, pardon the pun, in real science. That and the theory that the mushrooms only grow where tigers milk has leaked onto the ground. Finally, something that likes to drink Tigers Milk.

_American DG Energy to Provide Clean Energy from Fourteen Combined Heat and Power Systems at Multiple Buildings. This is what we’re talking about. A Massachusetts company just inked a deal with a New York property management company to provide heat and supplemental electricity to buildings the management company manages. This is a 15-year, $24 million deal that’s being fueled through installation of hyper efficient natural gas utilities to serve the building’s HAVC, hot water and electricity needs. While we’re not thrilled with the natural gas part of this equation, we love the efficiency part. The real beauty of it is, it’s all private investment. Efficiency, not consumption, has to be the new driver of this economy. The property management firm is RY Management and the Massachusetts company is American DG Energy. They deserve a round of applause.

_Stoller Enterprises Introduces Stimulate Products to Enhance Plant Growth and Crop Yield Just what this country’s agriculture industry doesn't need, a cocktail of hormones to sprinkle over crops to amp up their cell division and seed production. While it's clear we need to get as much from our crops as possible in this world of seven billion and counting, but do our watersheds need yet another pollutant running off our farms and into our rivers and streams? We already have bisexual fish resulting from all the medications we flush into these watersheds. What are we going to get when we start mass producing hormones to dump into our ecosystems? Queer ducks? Opps, we mean gay ducks.

_ This Is a Big Deal Here’s the great Tom Friedman exclaiming over Obama’s deal with the Big Three automakers to increase the U.S. auto fleet’s mileage by five percent annually starting in 2017.  That’s five years away. (Thank you State University of New York!) According to this article, in the past 20 years CO2 emission jumped by 50 percent giving the world “much less chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.” Then we’ve got this article saying Big Oil is increasingly setting its sights on domestic sources of fossil fuels. Lastly we’ve got an endless stream of articles suggesting the planet is warming much faster than anyone thought before. So just how big a deal is this auto deal, Mr. Friedman? Make no mistake, NBN loves Friedman. But his argument here sounds more like taking a step in the right direction after we’ve jumped off a cliff. 

_ Suntactics sCharger-5 Solar Charger Impresses Forbes New Product Editor in Recent Review of Hiking Equipment Made in America These folks couldn’t have prepared a better press release for this issue of NBN. On the one hand, who wants to be seen walking around sporting solar panels that make them look like the Flying Nun. On the other hand, for such small sacrifice you can insure your cellphone, ipad, electronic nose hair clippers…whathaveyou… are always charged and ready to go. It’s taking advantage of resources at the planet’s convenience instead of our own and reaping the benefits at the cost of a little humility. What’s wrong with that?  How is this superior to the solar bra that NBN panned a few years back? We’re not sure anymore that it is.

_ A (Literally) Fishy Study on Political Ignorance NBN was casting about in the internet for a logical thread needed for one of this week’s posts when we landed this fishy article we’re now filleting for every pun we can. At first we were impressed with the use of the simplest of intellects, fish, to offer insight into political movements like the Tea Party. So we read it a second time. It seems to say that uninformed elements of a population can play a vital role in insuring democracy, the very sort of debate that’s been fixed to both the Tea Party and Occupy movements of the past two years. The second reading, and a brief tour of the comments made at the bottom of the article, only seemed to cloud any conclusions drawn in the first. It is, however, worth a read if you’re curious about the dynamics of crowd decision making.

_ Cal-Recycle WRAP Award Winning Company – CleanFlame In its never-ending search for things to do with things that appear destined for landfills, NBN has come across a great use for wax-soaked cardboard like ice cream and milk containers. These things are the bane of cardboard recycling operations, but they are great for burning in fireplaces. So much so that the California company in the press release linked above earned some sort of green award for their recycled dairy container firelogs. What’s to stop a homeowner from setting aside a corner of the basement and stockpiling these containers for use in their own fireplace or for cashing them in at a highly specialized recycling center that NBN keeps hoping people will build? It’s too inconvenient. Easier to just toss them into the trash or let cardboard recycling companies figure out what to do with them. 

_ Families Can Now Give Their Refrigerator a Green Update with the Ozonator We had to read this a few times before believing what it says: The Ozonater produces ammonia eating ozone inside your refrigerator to help keep foods from getting moldy. We’re not sure how this is good for the environment, as the press release linked above suggests. Perhaps it will mean less food thrown out so less food needed from over-fertilized farms. Has anyone polled the farmers, or the supermarkets they supply, on the usefulness of the Ozonator? Buying food and throwing it out may not be good for the environment, but it’s good for the economy and isn’t that all that counts these days? Speaking of overspending we came up with this little jewel for the holidays. So now we need counselors to keep us from overspending during the holidays. Even in the middle of a recession. Amazing!

_Composting Toilets Pitched As Better Than Sewers for Protecting Ponds When the folks of Massachusetts’ Plum Island were mulling hooking up to the nearest city wastewater treatment plant seven years ago, all the talk about composting toilets seemed like the chatter of tree huggers. Anyway you build it, a toilet without water comes across as an outhouse, indoors or otherwise. Never mind that composting toilets reduce household water demand by 40 percent. The best that can be said about the aroma of these things is that, installed correctly, they don’t smell. But what about skidmarks, and composting toilets depend on bacterial activity to breakdown the waste, so they are very sensitive to chemical cleaners. That’s a far cry from the arguably false sense of biosecurity one gets from things like scrubbing bubbles and the toilet duck. So, after $23 million in underground piping there's nary a composting toilet near Plum Island. Sewage is now sent to a wastewater plant a half-mile away where it’s filtered, treated with tiny bacteria-eating bacteria, laced with chlorine and then dumped back into the Merrimack River which washes over Plum Island before heading out to the Atlantic. Out of sight, out of mind, just don’t go clamming in the Merrimack. Now tree huggers on Martha’s Vineyard are making similar pitches for composting toilets there. You think the Kennedy’s want to worry about what to do with the bushel of “humanure” composting toilets create annually? Do you think they are susceptible to the idea of growing and selling bamboo with the liquid waste? All we can say is: how long before you can't dig Marthas Vineyard clams.

_ Continuous Three-Dimensional Control of a Virtual Helicopter Using a Motor Imagery Based Brain-Computer Interface We’re not sure how impressed to be with this work. At first it sounded like brain waves sucked through your scalp by EEG sensors were being used to do real tasks like turning on your kitchen stove. It turns out the paper talks only about using brain waves to manipulate a video game of sorts. However, there is a key difference in this work and previous brain-computer interface studies. In this experiment the brain waves used maneuvered a computer game piece, a helicopter, left and right and up and down by asking the subjects to  think about their right hand or left hand, tongue and toes respectively. That’s pretty cool. All other BCI work has been one dimensional, like turning a virtual stove on and off. Logically, this work raises the prospect, however far off in the future, of taking a human brain and plopping it into a robot and heading out to rake the yard. It also gave some writer a clear shot at a great pun in this Scientific American article on the study: “These kinds of systems could eventually open new doors for the disabled.”