Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

laskan black bears hibernate for up to seven months a year, during which time they do not eat or drink, before waking up in virtually the same physical state they fell asleep in.
By reducing their heart rate to only 14 beats per minute and slowing their metabolism by three quarters, the animals are able to remain healthy through their long period of inactivity.
Now experts hope to develop methods of putting humans into a similar state, which could help astronauts survive long missions and lead to new ways of treating severely ill patients, The Guardian reported.
While many studies have examined hibernation in mice and hedgehogs, little research has been done into the same condition in larger mammals such as bears.
But new research conducted at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska monitored the animals' body temperature, heart rate and muscle movements while they slept.
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The results, published in the journal Science and announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, showed that during a five-month hibernation the bears' body temperatures varied between 30C and 36C (86F and 97F) in cycles that lasted between two and seven days – a pattern that was previously unknown in hibernating animals.
When they awoke, the bears' metabolisms did not revert to normal for up to three weeks, suggesting that their bodies were able to somehow suppress them.
Øivind Tøien, who led the study, said: "If our research could help by showing how to reduce metabolic rates and oxygen demands in human tissues, one could possibly save people.
"We simply need to know how to turn things on and off to take advantage of the different levels of hibernation."
Craig Heller, of Stanford University, who contributed tot he study, added: "There has always been a thought that, if there is ever long-distance space travel, it would be good to be able to put people into a state of lower metabolism or suspended animation. That's almost science fiction but you can see the rationale."

US researchers defend animal testing

Sun Feb 20, 10:01 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US researchers defended animal testing, telling a small group at one of the biggest science conferences in the United States that not doing animal research would be unethical and cost human lives.
The researchers, who are or have been involved in animal research, told a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that testing on animals has led to "dramatic developments in research that have improved and affected the quality of human life."
"To not do animal testing would mean that we would not be able to bring treatments and interventions and cures in a timely way. And what that means is people would die," Stuart Zola of Emory University, which is home to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, told AFP after the symposium.
Treatments for diseases such as diabetes and polio were made possible through animal research, the researchers said, and animals are currently being used in hepatitis-, HIV- and stem cell-related research, among others.
But animal rights activists continue to bring pressure on laboratories that use animals to develop drugs and vaccines, urging them to stop the practice and use other means to develop the next wonder drug, treatment or cure.
Animal rights activists also insist they will never use medications developed through animal testing, but the researchers said they probably already have done.
"I get a lot of emails from animal rights activists, and one of them said, 'I have hepatitis C, and if you discover any drugs using chimpanzees that help hepatitis C patients, I'm not going to take them,'" John Vandenberg of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in Texas told AFP.
"I didn't communicate back to him that if he's taking any drug whatsoever for hepatitis C, it was developed with chimpanzees. There's this ignorance in the world as to where these drugs come from, where vaccines come from," he said.
The researchers also argued that animal research in the United States is covered by a bevy of rules and regulations to ensure that the animals used in testing are treated humanely.
"It is quite dramatically regulated," said Zola.
Institutions that receive federal funding have to have an "animal care and use committee that reviews every protocol that uses even a single rodent," said Zola.
That protocol is then reviewed by another panel, which includes veterinarians, experts in medicine, and a representative of the public, and only when everyone has signed off on the protocol can testing proceed.

Yea....... Way to go --- I'm blubbering about the article, sumac.

Which article, Danon?


February 20, 2011

Recommended Reading for Republicans

The administration last week released a sweeping report recommending many useful steps for conserving, even expanding, America’s open spaces and making them more accessible to the American people. It is the sort of document destined to gather dust on bureaucratic shelves unless someone pays attention and follows up.

Congressional Republicans are making it impossible not to pay attention. Their budget resolution and the destructive amendments attached to it not only challenged the very premise of the report — that protecting wild lands from commercial development is essential to a nation’s physical and emotional health — but also some of the important weapons that make that possible.

The report takes its findings from more than 50 public sessions across the country organized by senior officials like Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary. It says that increasing development threatens open spaces and wildlife habitat everywhere, and draws special attention to the need to protect places near big cities, like the Hudson River Valley, as well as dwindling farmland almost everywhere.

These and other recommendations will require greater collaboration between government agencies and private landowners (70 percent of the land in the lower 48 states is in private ownership) — and, in less budget-constrained times, the expansion of existing conservation programs, particularly those for farmers.

The greater priority now is to save those and other programs from the Republican assault. President Obama’s budget for next year rightly asks for full financing of the $900 million Land and Water Conservation Fund, the government’s main instrument for buying threatened open space. Last week, House Republicans reduced financing for this year to less than one-third that amount, leaving the Senate to salvage the rest.

There was other damage the Senate must repair. One amendment would prevent the Bureau of Land Management from recommending permanent wilderness protections for public land. The president’s authority to designate new national monuments under the Antiquities Act survived by a slim margin, but some Republicans vowed to challenge that authority later this year.

In a perfect world this report would be required reading among House Republicans. Sadly, their headlong dash to weaken the nation’s environmental protections would appear to leave them little time for it.

The one with the whales in it of course....... Thanks.

Cold day here after being spoiled by 76 yesterday. Can't wait for spring.

Spring is already here in tha S...... Everything is blooming -- all the flowers and ---Aggggh the grass!!!

I hope the freeze comes back and kills everything except the flowers!!

Well, that's what I thing K........

It's a funny.

Send me some of that spring. Daffodils are starting to come up and we do have the occasional day in the 70's, but days in the 50's is the norm still.

Springs on the way, sumac................ All my wx goes your way.............

Thanks all for saving a tree today....

Global warming rate could be halved by controlling 2 pollutants, U.N. study says
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 23, 2011; 9:12 PM

The projected rise in global temperatures could be cut in half in coming years if world governments focused on reducing emissions of two harmful pollutants - black carbon and ground-level ozone, including methane - rather than carbon dioxide alone, according to a U.N. study released Wednesday.

The study, "Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone," by the U.N. Environment Programme, shows the impact that the two short-lived pollutants have on the environment, compared with carbon dioxide, which can stay in the atmosphere for decades.

"I think what this study does that hasn't been done in the past is look at the contributions to global warming by gases with short lifetimes," said Steve Seidel, vice president of policy analysis for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Black carbon, a component of soot, is a threat to human health and is known to hasten the melting of snow. Ground-level ozone kills farm crops and also adversely affects health. Reducing the two, the study said, would improve health outcomes in the regions where they are implemented and "slow the rate of climate change within the first half of this century."

The impact from reducing short-lived pollutants such as black carbon and ground-level ozone such as methane is more immediately felt. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for years, so the effects of reducing the emissions take longer to register.

To reduce black carbon emissions, the study recommends placing a ban on open-field burning of agricultural waste, replacing industrial coke ovens with modern recovery ovens, introducing clean-burning biomass cook stoves for cooking and heating in developing countries and eliminating high-emitting vehicles.

To reduce ground-level ozone, including methane, the study recommends upgrading wastewater treatment, controlling methane emissions from livestock and reducing gas emissions from long-distance pipelines.

A fairly aggressive strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions under current reduction scenarios "does little to mitigate warming over the next 20 to 30 years," the study said. With carbon dioxide reductions alone, global temperatures are still projected to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 over pre-industrial levels.

But reducing black carbon and ground-level ozone reductions would delay the warming for another 20 years, until 2070, according to the study.

"You get to keep below these critical temperatures," said Durwood Zaelke, president and founder of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

The study is aimed at local pollution control officials in municipalities worldwide, particularly in developing nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Scientists and activists have started to focus on reducing short-lived greenhouse gases in these areas in part because leaders have failed to reach a broader agreement to curb carbon dioxide, global warming's biggest contributor.

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Good morning, Danon, and Stradee (wherever you are)

I know where you are. Get your butt off fb and come here to say hello.

Jeeeeze, sumac --- quit beating around the bush and get to the point..........!!!!!

Oh!! You did!!!

Well, that's very different, Never mind...........!

That was my Gilda Radner improv ------------

G'Day all......

February 25, 2011

Look at the Science

Every winter, some of Yellowstone National Park’s more than 3,000 bison wander out of the park seeking better grazing. When they do, they are either shot, hazed back into the park or corralled for possible slaughter, all in accordance with a plan developed by the Interior and Agriculture Departments and the State of Montana. It is time to change that plan, which was based on bad science and has now been rendered obsolete by new regulations from the U.S.D.A.

The longstanding fear is that bison will infect cattle with brucellosis, which causes miscarriages. Draconian U.S.D.A. rules further reinforced that fear. A single case of brucellosis meant a rancher had to destroy an entire cattle herd, and the state risked losing its brucellosis-free status, making it much harder to ship cattle out of state.

Brucellosis has never been transmitted from bison to cattle in the wild. Among cattle, it is now being treated as a normal, containable disease. Scientists have demonstrated that ultraviolet radiation — sunlight — destroys the bacteria, meaning the risk of transmission is vanishingly small from bison, who move out of the park in winter, and cattle, which reach those areas in midsummer.

The Agriculture Department has sensibly revised its rules on cattle. Now only an infected animal is destroyed, and states no longer risk losing their brucellosis-free status if a small number of cattle are infected. But the policy of slaughtering or hazing bison continues.

At present, some 500 bison are penned up near Gardiner, Mont., awaiting testing and slaughter. A federal judge has authorized the slaughter, but Montana’s governor, Brian Schweitzer, has blocked it — not to rescue the animals but because he fears that transporting them might lead somehow to contact between bison and cattle.

These penned bison should be tested and all but the infected ones released. And the ranching community, the Interior Department and Montana need to acknowledge that bison leaving Yellowstone is not a serious problem.

Good morning, or afternoon, Danon. I did my dozen clicking and am planting the spring garden yesterday and today.

Happy Sat, sumac.......... We already have BeefAlo ------- cross between cattle and Bison...........been out in the public for years.

Thanks for the tree you and I made asmiling today........!!!!

Good morning, Danon. The following article, given the high concentration of natural gas facilities in Texas, is worth reading.

ebruary 26, 2011

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

By IAN URBINA
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.

In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.

That has experts worried.

sumac, thanks for the article...........

Those people can just 'Frack' themselves so I think!!!!!!!!

another tree asmiling!!!!!!!!!

February 27, 2011

The Anthropocene

The edges of historical eras tend to be fuzzy. It would be nice to think that someone awoke in Florence, Italy, one day in the late 1300s — perhaps as spring started— and said, “Today the Renaissance begins!” We can be sure no one did, if only because historians discern such eras only in retrospect. The same is true of geological epochs. Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11,500 years ago. The geologic time scale, which defines geological periods, began to take its modern form only in the 19th century.

Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun, called the Anthropocene, a term first used in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer.

The Royal Society has devoted a recent issue of its Philosophical Transactions to the Anthropocene. According to one of the papers, the name is “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.” It means that human activity has left a “stratigraphic signal” detectable thousands of years from now in ice cores and sedimentary rocks.

Those of us alive today may well be able to say we were present when the Anthropocene epoch was formally adopted. But we will not be able to say we were present at the start of the Anthropocene. There is a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere.

Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides — or index fossils — to the age of the rocks they’re embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity — something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment — from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

danon,
Our severe drought status continues and who would have thought that I would be dragging the hose around to water stuff in the middle of the winter?