Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

There you go, Danon = three outstanding articles/

MARCH 14, 2011, 5:34 PM

Forget the Treadmill. Get a Dog.

By TARA PARKER-POPE
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times UNLEASHED Among dog owners who went for regular walks, 60 percent met federal criteria for regular moderate or vigorous exercise, a new study says.
If you’re looking for the latest in home exercise equipment, you may want to consider something with four legs and a wagging tail.

Several studies now show that dogs can be powerful motivators to get people moving. Not only are dog owners more likely to take regular walks, but new research shows that dog walkers are more active over all than people who don’t have dogs.

One study even found that older people are more likely to take regular walks if the walking companion is canine rather than human.

“You need to walk, and so does your dog,” said Rebecca A. Johnson, director of the human-animal interaction research center at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine. “It’s good for both ends of the leash.”

Just last week, researchers from Michigan State University reported that among dog owners who took their pets for regular walks, 60 percent met federal criteria for regular moderate or vigorous exercise. Nearly half of dog walkers exercised an average of 30 minutes a day at least five days a week. By comparison, only about a third of those without dogs got that much regular exercise.

The researchers tracked the exercise habits of 5,900 people in Michigan, including 2,170 who owned dogs. They found that about two-thirds of dog owners took their pets for regular walks, defined as lasting at least 10 minutes.

Unlike other studies of dog ownership and walking, this one also tracked other forms of exercise, seeking to answer what the lead author, Mathew Reeves, called an obvious question: whether dog walking “adds significantly to the amount of exercise you do, or is it simply that it replaces exercise you would have done otherwise?”

The answers were encouraging, said Dr. Reeves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Michigan State. The dog walkers had higher overall levels of both moderate and vigorous physical activity than the other subjects, and they were more likely to take part in other leisure-time physical activities like sports and gardening. On average, they exercised about 30 minutes a week more than people who didn’t have dogs.

Send Us Your Videos Does Your Pet Keep You Healthy?
Do you dance with your cat? Play Frisbee with your dog? Sing with your bird? Send us your videos showing how your pets keep you healthy.

Dr. Reeves, who owns two Labrador mixes named Cadbury and Bella, said he was not surprised.

“There is exercise that gets done in this household that wouldn’t get done otherwise,” he said. “Our dogs demand that you take them out at 10 o’clock at night, when it’s the last thing you feel like doing. They’re not going to leave you alone until they get their walk in.”

But owning a dog didn’t guarantee physical activity. Some owners in the study did not walk their dogs, and they posted far less overall exercise than dog walkers or people who didn’t have a dog.

Dog walking was highest among the young and educated, with 18-to-24-year-old owners twice as likely to walk the dog as those over 65, and college graduates more than twice as likely as those with less education. Younger dogs were more likely to be walked than older dogs; and larger dogs (45 pounds or more) were taken for longer walks than smaller dogs.

The researchers asked owners who didn’t walk their pets to explain why. About 40 percent said their dogs ran free in a yard, so they didn’t need walks; 11 percent hired dog walkers.

Nine percent said they didn’t have time to walk their dogs, while another 9 percent said their dogs were too ill behaved to take on a walk. Age of the dog or dog owner also had an effect: 9 percent said the dog was too old to go for walks, while 8 percent said the owner was too old.

“There is still a lot more dog walking that could be done among dog owners,” Dr. Reeves said.

And the question remains whether owning a dog encourages regular activity or whether active, healthy people are simply more likely to acquire dogs as walking companions.

A 2008 study in Western Australia addressed the question when it followed 773 adults who didn’t have dogs. After a year, 92 people, or 12 percent of the group, had acquired a dog. Getting a dog increased average walking by about 30 minutes a week, compared with those who didn’t own dogs.

But on closer analysis, the new dog owners had been laggards before getting a dog, walking about 24 percent less than other people without dogs.

The researchers found that one of the motivations for getting a dog was a desire to get more exercise. Before getting a dog, the new dog owners had clocked about 89 minutes of weekly walking, but dog ownership boosted that number to 130 minutes a week.

A study of 41,500 California residents also looked at walking among dog and cat owners as well as those who didn’t have pets. Dog owners were about 60 percent more likely to walk for leisure than people who owned a cat or no pet at all. That translated to an extra 19 minutes a week of walking compared with people without dogs.

A study last year from the University of Missouri showed that for getting exercise, dogs are better walking companions than humans. In a 12-week study of 54 older adults at an assisted-living home, some people selected a friend or spouse as a walking companion, while others took a bus daily to a local animal shelter, where they were assigned a dog to walk.

To the surprise of the researchers, the dog walkers showed a much greater improvement in fitness. Walking speed among the dog walkers increased by 28 percent, compared with just 4 percent among the human walkers.

Dr. Johnson, the study’s lead author, said that human walkers often complained about the heat and talked each other out of exercise, but that people who were paired with dogs didn’t make those excuses.

“They help themselves by helping the dog,” said Dr. Johnson, co-author of the new book “Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound,” to be published in May by Purdue University Press. “If we’re committed to a dog, it enables us to commit to physical activity ourselves.”

March 14, 2011

Emotional Power Broker of the Modern Family

By BENEDICT CAREY
First, he tore up his dog toys. Then shredded the furniture, clothes, schoolbooks — and, finally, any semblance of family unity. James, a chocolate-brown pointer mix, turned from adorable pet to problem child in a matter of weeks.

“The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.”

Psychologists long ago confirmed what most pet owners feel in their bones: that for some people bonds with animals are every bit as strong as those with other humans. And less complicated, for sure; a dog’s devotion is without detectable irony, a lap cat’s purring without artifice (if not disapproval).

Yet the nature of individual human-pet relationships varies widely, and only now are scientists beginning to characterize those differences, and their impact on the family. Pets alter not only a family’s routines, after all, but also its hierarchy, its social rhythm, its web of relationships. Several new lines of research help explain why this overall effect can be so comforting in some families, and a source of tension in others. The answers have very little to do with the pet.

“The word ‘pet’ does not really capture what these animals mean in a family, first of all,” said Froma Walsh, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. The prevalent term among researchers is now “companion animal,” she said, which is closer to the childlike role they so often play.

“And in the way that children get caught up in the family system as peacekeepers, as go-betweens, as sources of disagreement, the same happens with pets.”

People cast these roles in part based on the sensations and memories associated with their first Princess or Scooter, psychologists say — echoing Freud’s idea of transference, in which early relationships provide a template for later ones. In many families, this means that Scruffy is the universal peacemaker, the fulcrum of shared affection.

In a family interview reviewed by Dr. Walsh in a recent paper, one mother said that the best way to end an argument between siblings was to bark, “Stop fighting, you’re upsetting Barkley!” “This is always more effective than saying, ‘Stop hitting your brother,’ ” the mother said. (Barkley made no comment.)

Animals often sense these expectations and act on them. In a video recording of another family discussed in the paper, the cat jumps on a woman’s lap when it senses an impending argument with her husband. “And it works,” Dr. Walsh said. “It reduces tension in both; you can see it happening.”

“She’s my first child,” said Adrienne Woods, a cellist in Los Angeles, of Bella, the Husky puppy that she and her fiancé just got. “The biggest upside is this sense of inner peace. I feel like a grandma, like I have a companion I’ve been wanting for 30 years.”

Yet pets can also raise tension, as millions of couples learn the hard way. The Animal Planet show “It’s Me or the Dog” is built on such cases. And Cesar Millan, a dog behavior specialist, has become a celebrity by helping people gain control over unruly hounds, bringing order into households with uncertain lines of authority.

Perhaps more often, pets become a psychological wedge not from lack of boundaries but because family members have diverging views of what a pet should be. And those views are shaped by cultural inheritance, more so than people may realize.

In a study of dog ownership, Elizabeth Terrien, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, conducted 90 in-depth interviews with families in Los Angeles, including Ms. Woods. One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside, whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed.

When asked to describe their pets without using the word “dog,” people in more affluent neighborhoods “came up with things like child, companion, little friend, teenage son, brother, or partner in crime,” Dr. Terrien said. In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse,” she said.

Such differences often emerge only after a family has adopted a pet, and they can exacerbate the more mundane disagreements about pet care, like how much to spend on vet bills, how often to walk the dog, how the animal should interact with young children. The fallout from such conflicts isn’t hard to find: Most everyone knows of couples who have quarreled over pets, or even divorced, because her spaniel nipped at his Rottweiler.

And there are countless single people out there all but married to some hairy Frida or Diego — banishing any potential partner who doesn’t fall quickly, and equally, in love.

The reason these feelings run so deep is that they are ideologies, as well as cultural and psychological dispositions. In the summer of 2007, David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, conducted extensive interviews with 35 dog owners around the state, chosen to represent a diverse mix of city, country and suburban dwellers.

He found that, as a rule, people fall into one of three broad categories of beliefs concerning pets. Members of one group, which he labels “dominionists,” see pets as an appendage to the family, a useful helper ranking below humans that is beloved but, ultimately, replaceable. Many people from rural areas — like the immigrants Dr. Terrien interviewed — qualified.

Another group of owners, labeled by Dr. Blouin as “humanists,” are the type who cherish their dog as a favored child or primary companion, to be pampered, allowed into bed, and mourned like a dying child at the end. These include the people who cook special meals for a pet, take it to exercise classes, to therapy — or leave it stock options in their will.

The third, called “protectionists,” strive to be the animal’s advocate. These owners have strong views about animal welfare, but their views on how a pet should be treated — whether it sleeps inside or outside, when it should be put down — vary depending on what they think is “best” for the animal. Its members include people who will “save” a dog tied to tree outside a store, usually delivering it home with a lecture about how to care for an animal.

“These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.”

Up until, and including, the end: Couples may not only disagree over when to put an animal down but also have vastly different emotional reactions to the loss. “For someone who’s been treating the pet like a child, it can feel like the loss of a child — and of course children are not supposed to die before their parents,” Dr. Terrien said. It’s an end-of-life crisis, which often begins a lengthy period of grieving. Whereas for the partner who sees the pet differently, the death may bring relief.

None of which is to say that a resourceful pet — using the combined power of cuteness, doleful stares and episodes of getting stuck in boxes or eating crayons — cannot bridge such opposing religions. But family therapists say that, usually, four-legged diplomats need some help from the two-legged kind to succeed.

“Families either figure it out and manage these differences,” Dr. Terrien said, “or they give up the pet — which happens far more often than people think.”

arch 10, 2011

New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes

By NICHOLAS WADE
Anthropologists studying living hunter-gatherers have radically revised their view of how early human societies were structured, a shift that yields new insights into how humans evolved away from apes.

Early human groups, according to the new view, would have been more cooperative and willing to learn from one another than the chimpanzees from which human ancestors split about five million years ago. The advantages of cooperation and social learning then propelled the incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path.

Anthropologists have assumed until now that hunter-gatherer bands consist of people fairly closely related to one another, much as chimpanzee groups do, and that kinship is a main motive for cooperation within the group. Natural selection, which usually promotes only selfish behavior, can reward this kind of cooperative behavior, called kin selection, because relatives contain many of the same genes.

A team of anthropologists led by Kim R. Hill of Arizona State University and Robert S. Walker of the University of Missouri analyzed data from 32 living hunter-gatherer peoples and found that the members of a band are not highly related. Fewer than 10 percent of people in a typical band are close relatives, meaning parents, children or siblings, they report in Friday’s issue of Science.

Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said the survey provided a strong foundation for the view that cooperative behavior, as distinct from the fierce aggression between chimp groups, was the turning point that shaped human evolution. If kin selection was much weaker than thought, Dr. Tomasello said, “then other factors like reciprocity and safeguarding one’s reputation have to be stronger to make cooperation work.”

The finding corroborates an influential new view of early human origins advanced by Bernard Chapais, a primatologist at the University of Montreal, in his book “Primeval Kinship” (2008). Dr. Chapais showed how a simple development, the emergence of a pair bond between male and female, would have allowed people to recognize their relatives, something chimps can do only to a limited extent. When family members dispersed to other bands, they would be recognized and neighboring bands would cooperate instead of fighting to the death as chimp groups do.

In chimpanzee societies, males stay where they are born and females disperse at puberty to neighboring groups, thus avoiding incest. The males, with many male relatives in their group, have a strong interest in cooperating within the group because they are defending both their own children and those of their brothers and other relatives.

Human hunter-gatherer societies have been assumed to follow much the same pattern, with female dispersal being the general, though not universal, rule and with members of bands therefore being closely related to one another. But Dr. Hill and Dr. Walker find that though it is the daughters who move in many hunter-gatherer societies, the sons leave the home community in many others. In fact, the human pattern of residency is so variable that it counts as a pattern in itself, one that the researchers say is not known for any species of ape or monkey. Dr. Chapais calls this social pattern “bilocality.”

Modern humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 90 percent of their existence as a species. If living hunter-gatherers are typical of ancient ones, the new data about their social pattern has considerable bearing on early human evolution.

On a genetic level, the finding that members of a band are not highly interrelated means that “inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands,” the researchers write. Some evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection can favor groups of people, not just individuals, but the idea is hotly disputed.

Dr. Hill said group selection, too, could not operate on hunter-gatherer bands because individuals move too often between them, which undoes any selective effect. But hunter-gatherers probably lived as tribes split into many small bands of 30 or so people. Group selection could possibly act at the level of the tribe, Dr. Hill said, meaning that tribes with highly cooperative members would prevail over those that were less cohesive, thus promoting genes for cooperation.

The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.

Knowledge can in fact be lost by hunter-gatherers if a social network gets too small. One group of the Ache people of Paraguay, cut off from its home territory, had lost use of fire when first contacted. Tasmanians apparently forgot various fishing techniques after rising sea levels broke their contact with the Australian mainland 10,000 years ago.

Dr. Chapais said that the new findings “validate and enrich” the model of human social evolution proposed in his book. “If you take the promiscuity that is the main feature of chimp society, and replace it with pair bonding, you get many of the most important features of human society,” he said.

Recognition of relatives promoted cooperation between neighboring bands, in his view, allowing people to move freely from one to another. Both sons and daughters could disperse from the home group, unlike chimp society, where only females can disperse. But this cooperation did not mean that everything was peaceful. The bands were just components of tribes, between which warfare may have been intense. “Males could remain as competitive and xenophobic as before at the between-tribe level,” Dr. Chapais writes.

Three more interesting articles. It is Science day in the NYTimes.

MARCH 15, 2011, 8:30 PM
Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others


It’s time to take a look at the line between “pet” and “animal.” When the ASPCA sends an agent to the home of a Brooklyn family to arrest one of its members for allegedly killing a hamster, something is wrong.

That “something” is this: we protect “companion animals” like hamsters while largely ignoring what amounts to the torture of chickens and cows and pigs. In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it. State laws known as “Common Farming Exemptions” allow industry — rather than lawmakers — to make any practice legal as long as it’s common. “In other words,” as Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Eating Animals,” wrote me via e-mail, “the industry has the power to define cruelty. It’s every bit as crazy as giving burglars the power to define trespassing.”

Meanwhile, there are pet police. So when 19-year-old Monique Smith slammed her sibling’s hamster on the floor and killed it, as she may have done in a fit of rage last week, an ASPCA agent — there are 18 of them, busily responding to animal cruelty calls in the five boroughs and occasionally beyond — arrested her. (The charges were later dropped, though Ms. Smith spent a night in jail at Rikers Island.)

In light of the way most animals are treated in this country, I’m pretty sure that ASPCA agents don’t need to spend their time in Brooklyn defending rodents.

In fact, there’s no rationality to be found here. Just a few blocks from Ms. Smith’s home, along the M subway line, the city routinely is poisoning rodents as quickly and futilely as it possibly can, though rats can be pets also. But that’s hardly the point. This is: we “process” (that means kill) nearly 10 billion animals annually in this country, approximately one-sixth of the world’s total.

Many if not most of these animals are raised (or not, since probably a couple of hundred million are killed at birth) industrially, in conditions that the philosopher Peter Singer and others have compared to concentration camps. Might we more usefully police those who keep egg-laying hens in cages so small the birds can’t open their wings, for example, than anger-management-challenged young people accused of hamstercide?

Yet Ms. Smith was charged as a felon, because in New York (and there are similar laws in other states) if you kick a dog or cat or hamster or, I suppose, a guppy, enough to “cause extreme physical pain” or do so “in an especially depraved or sadistic manner” you may be guilty of aggravated cruelty to animals, as long as you do this “with no justifiable purpose.”

But thanks to Common Farming Exemptions, as long as I “raise” animals for food and it’s done by my fellow “farmers” (in this case, manufacturers might be a better word), I can put around 200 million male chicks a year through grinders (graphic video here), castrate — mostly without anesthetic — 65 million calves and piglets a year, breed sick animals (don’t forget: more than half a billion eggs were recalled last summer, from just two Iowa farms) who in turn breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, allow those sick animals to die without individual veterinary care, imprison animals in cages so small they cannot turn around, skin live animals, or kill animals en masse to stem disease outbreaks.

All of this is legal, because we will eat them.

We have “justifiable purposes”: pleasure (or, at this point, habit, because eating is hardly a pleasure if you do it in your car, or in 10 minutes), convenience — there are few things more filling per dollar than a cheeseburger — and of course corporate profits. We should be treating animals better and raising fewer of them; this would naturally reduce our consumption. All in all, a better situation for us, the animals, the world.

Arguing for the freedom to eat as much meat as you want is equivalent to arguing for treating farm animals as if they could not feel pain. Yet no one would defend Ms. Smith’s cruel action because it was a pet and therefore not born to be put through living hell.

Is it really that bad? After all, a new video from Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer, makes industrial pig-raising seem like a little bit of heaven. But undercover videos from the Humane Society of the United States tell quite a different story, and a repulsive one. It also explains why we saw laws proposed by friends of agribusiness in both Iowa and Florida in recent weeks that would ban making such videos: the truth hurts, especially if you support the status quo.

Our fantasy is that until the industrial era domesticated animals were treated decently. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t; but certainly they weren’t turned out by the tens of thousands as if they were widgets.

We’re finally seeing some laws that take the first steps toward generally ameliorating cruelty to farm animals, and it’s safe to say that most of today’s small farmers and even some larger ones raise animals humanely. These few, at least, are treated with as much respect as the law believes we should treat a hamster.

For the majority of non-pets, though, it’s tough luck.

All done with clicking and a good article to read.


March 15, 2011
Forest Rules
There has been good news recently for America’s national forests, and some that could have been better.

On the decidedly plus-side was a decision by a federal district judge in Anchorage reinstating a Clinton-era rule prohibiting logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The Tongass is home to some of the country’s last remaining stands of primeval forest and is the crown jewel of the whole forest system.

The Clinton rule banned logging on nine million acres in the Tongass as part of a nationwide effort to protect roadless areas across 155 national forests. Bowing to the timber industry and Alaska politicians, the George W. Bush administration opened 2.3 million acres of the Tongass to logging. Judge John W. Sedwick has now invalidated the Bush rule as “arbitrary and capricious,” partly because it failed to account for public input.

The other piece of news is more complicated. Last month, the Agriculture Department proposed long-awaited forest-planning rules. The rules, mandated by 1976 National Forest Management Act, are supposed to guide forest managers as they decide which parts can be logged and which should be fully protected.

The act’s bedrock principle is that the health of the forests and their wildlife is to be valued at least as much as the interests of the timber companies. The Clinton administration’s rules firmly embraced that principle; the industry-friendly Bush rules did not.

The Obama administration’s proposed rules improve on the Bush rules and are full of high-minded promises about maintaining “viable” animal populations. But they are disappointingly vague on the question of how — and how often — the biological diversity of any particular forest is to be measured and what actions are to be taken to ensure its survival.

The net result is to give too much discretion to individual forest managers and not nearly enough say to scientists. This is dangerous because, over the years, forest managers have been easily influenced by timber companies and local politicians whose main interest is to increase the timber harvest.

As secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack has been more attentive to the needs of the forest, so far, than any agriculture secretary since the Clinton days. He should make sure these rules are strengthened.

Hi sue, dan, and alex

We've had torrential rains past three days...respite now...more due plus Sierra snow. Am so ready for Spring!

Had a vistor burrowing from the hedges, along the side of the lawns, then an abrubt turnaround and gone. Watched the lil critter during her travels and am very thankful she's departed the scene. Do not need a herd of baby moles!!!

Winter weathers been absolutely perfect for wildlife, plenty of water, soft earth (even red clay and rocks) and Spring promises new life. Landscaping singin', trees sprouting, lilacs have new foilage, hedges with deep red leafs, berries everywhere and i'm hoping mamma bear doesn't stop by for a 'howdy'.

California is contemplating opening bear hunting again...not happy bout that. Why can't we all just get along! Some humans need to evolve.

Speaking of caring for animals...my charge gold fish now resides in a new Marineland Aquarium System, with filters, a day light, and plenty of room for swimming. A very happy sentient. The kitty is still staying out of sight, however, we are communicating. She's taken to running about when i'm visiting...but still not letting me see her face. Shadow kitty hilarioius.
Oh, and sleeping on my- gift- to- her softie! More progress.

My babies are fine...Amanda is a tad slower moving these days...age does that.
When Mandy ventures outdoors, Bella keeps close watch as well. Amanda celebrates her 21st Birthday in September. Amazing

Still have a few more weeks of winter weather...stay warm y'll.

Good hearing from you Stradee. Dan and I are here every day. Here is interesting article:

ee You Next Summer

Sacha Vignieri


CREDIT: ACRO IMAGES GMBH/ALAMY (INSET) GERALD KERTH
Socially complex species such as humans, elephants, wolves, and orcas establish strong bonds among individuals that persist after periods of separation. These "fission-fusion" dynamics require an ability to recognize individuals even after periods of absence. Such long-term individual recognition has often been attributed to large-brained species with strong sociocognitive abilities; however, bats also display this ability. Whether these dynamics involve individual recognition or are purely driven by behavioral aggregation, however, is unknown. Bechstein's bats (Myotis bechsteinii) form stable colonies of females from April through September, which disintegrate during winter. Kerth et al. followed the movements of individually marked Bechstein's bats in two well-studied populations over 5 years. Analysis of 20,500 roosting sites revealed that individuals show consistent preference for individual roosting partners, who may differ in age, morphology, and family, and that these preferences persist over years, even after separation. These communities resemble those found in other socially complex species, which suggests that although social complexity is demanding sociocognitively, it may not require a large brain.
Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. 278, 10.1098/rspb.2010.2718 (2011).

ne of the most important consequences of global warming is the loss of mass from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and the rise in sea level accompanying that loss. Measuring changes in the mass of an ice sheet is extremely difficult, due both to the technical challenges involved in collecting good data and the intrinsic variability of the process, but the precision of the applied methods has increased sufficiently over the past decades that even monthly trends can now be discerned. Rignot et al. provide an update on the state of mass change of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, using two independent methods in order to demonstrate consistency in the measurements. They find that the rate of ice sheet loss has accelerated over the past 18 years by a combined total of 36.3 ± 2 Gt/year2, three times faster than that of mountain glaciers and ice caps. If this trend continues, ice sheets will be the largest single contributor to sea-level rise by the end of the 21st century and will probably contribute more to sea-level rise than is currently projected.
Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L05503 (2011).

Hi Stradee and sumac ----- good articles sumac and a lot of them. I'll have to go back to read them all. Thanks.

Still working my way through the articles, sumac..... Good stuff.

One unusual 'lost' invention in history is concrete - the Romans invented it and made the Coliseum --- then a short time afterwards lost the formulae for about six hundred years..... Finally it was invented again.

By the way the Coliseum in Rome was made AFTER Jesus C. -- the Coliseum in Verona was made during his lifetime. Verona is also where Romeo and Juliet had their thing --- I've seen the square with the balcony. Tiny place.

Yes, there were a lot of them, Danon. But I hope you enjoyed them.

Crawling computer yesterday prevented me from clicking but I did so today.

Always interesting stuff, sumac..........

My compy runs like heck sometimes when I try to do strange things.........

March 20, 2011

Long-Delayed Rules for Cleaner Air

After 20 years of delays and interminable litigation, the Obama administration has proposed a new rule requiring power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other airborne toxics by 91 percent within the next five years. Some environmental groups saw the rule as the most important step forward for healthier air since the Clean Air Act was last updated in 1990. It is unquestionably a victory for the public: when fully effective, the rule could save as many as 17,000 lives a year.

Some — but by no means all — power companies complained that the rule would impose high costs yielding relatively little payoff. So, too, did Congressional Republicans who have been on a two-month crusade to undermine the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate a whole range of pollutants, including greenhouse gases.

The numbers do not support them: The E.P.A. estimates the annual cost of compliance at $10 billion a year, compared with health benefits from reduced hospital visits and lost time on the job at $100 billion a year. Mercury and other airborne toxics like lead, arsenic and chromium can adversely affect the nervous system in children and fetuses and worsen respiratory ailments.

Nor is there merit in the argument that the technology for controlling these pollutants is not available. About one-third of all states have imposed their own rules on air toxics. In response to these rules, as well as earlier federal regulations governing other pollutants, plants with 60 percent of the country’s coal-fired capacity have already installed pollution controls that can be upgraded to meet the new standards.

The new rules bring to a close a bitter regulatory battle in which industry’s lobbying power has largely had the upper hand. President Bill Clinton waited until the end of his tenure to issue rules. They were promptly rescinded by President George Bush, whose own rules — ghost-written, in part, by industry — were thrown out of court as inadequate and inconsistent with the law.

March 20, 2011

Reconsidering the Robin

Emily Dickinson may have “dreaded that first robin so,” but she speaks for herself alone. To the rest of us, robins bring a mixture of joy and relief, the sign of a natural cycle still intact. The snow withdraws, and returning robins follow it across newly open ground like shorebirds tracing a falling tide. Their movement is almost as distinctive as their call: hasten and pause, hasten and pause. Once the ground is thoroughly thawed, there they are, tugging on earthworms as though they were the hawsers of the S.S. Earth.

And yet it’s only the first few robins in spring that really stand out. Soon we overlook them — because they’re so common and so open in manner, always in plain sight, flying low, nesting just out of reach above us. We see the familiarity as much as the bird itself, which wears, as always, a morning coat of gray and a waistcoat of the most understated red.

Give it a breast as vivid as the shoulder patches on a red-winged blackbird and the robin would never seem to recede the way it does as spring rushes onward, out-colored and out-sung by the birds of summer.

Somehow the robin stands for all the birds migrating now, the great V’s of geese heading north, the catbirds that will show up surreptitiously in a month. It also stands for the surprise of spring itself, which we had begun to fear would not arrive. We have all been keeping watch, as though one morning it might come sailing over the horizon. And now it’s here — the air a bit softer, snowdrops and winter aconites blooming, the bees doing their cleaning and the robins building their nests again.

Somewhat gloomy overcast day, with some wind, so temps are having trouble getting up to the predicted 72. The article on robins is especially appreciated today.

Thanks sumac --- down here in NE TX we have had flowers blooming since mid January. Amazing.

Birds are back here also - big time.

Temps in 80's now and have been for awhile.

Here's an interesting article for you and the paragraphs below are the beginning. Have to go to the source to read the rest.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22predict.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210&pagewanted=print

"March 21, 2011

Blindsided by Ferocity Unleashed by a Fault

By KENNETH CHANG
On a map of Japan that shows seismic hazards, the area around the prefecture of Fukushima is colored in green, signifying a fairly low risk, and yellow, denoting a fairly high one.

But since Japan sits on the collision of several tectonic plates, almost all of the country lies in an earthquake-risk zone. Most scientists expected the next whopper to strike the higher-risk areas southwest of Fukushima, which are marked in orange and red.

“Compared to the rest of Japan, it looks pretty safe,” said Christopher H. Scholz, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, referring to the area hit worst by the quake on March 11. “If you were going to site a nuclear reactor, you would base it on a map like this.”

Records kept for the past 300 years indicated that every few decades, part of the Japan trench, an offshore fault to the east of Fukushima, would break, generating an earthquake around magnitude 7.5, perhaps up to magnitude 8.0. While earthquakes that large would be devastating in many parts of the world, the Japanese have diligently prepared for them with stringent building codes and sea walls that are meant to hold back quake-generated tsunamis.

Shinji Toda, a professor of geology at Kyoto University in Japan, said a government committee recently concluded that there was a 99 percent chance of a magnitude-7.5 earthquake in the next 30 years, and warned there was a possibility for an even larger magnitude-8.0 quake."

Here is another, Danon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/earth/22food.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210&pagewanted=print

March 21, 2011

Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Ten days after an earthquake and tsunami crippled a nuclear plant in Japan, officials are detecting abnormal levels of radiation in what may seem like a scattershot assortment of foods: milk from Fukushima Prefecture, where the reactors sit; spinach from Ibaraki Prefecture to the south; canola from Gunma Prefecture to the west; and chrysanthemum greens from Chiba to the south. Shipments of the milk and spinach have been banned.

Experts hesitate to predict where the radiation will go. Once radioactive elements that can harm health are released into the outdoors, their travel patterns are as mercurial as the weather and as complicated as the food chains and biochemical pathways along which they move.

When and where radioactive contamination becomes a problem depends on a vast array of factors: the specific element released, which way the wind is blowing, whether rain will bring suspended radioactivity to earth, and what types of crops and animals are in an exposed area.

Research related to the 1986 Chernobyl accident makes clear that for decades, scientists will be able to detect the presence of radioactive particles released by the crippled Japanese reactors thousands of miles away. Scientists and doctors in Japan and abroad will be monitoring the results to see if those measurements reach dangerous levels. So far there is no indication that anyone has been harmed by eating contaminated food.

“It’s natural that people worldwide will be monitoring for this — just in case it is far worse than we now expect,” said F. Ward Whicker, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University who developed a leading model for following radiation through the food chain.

When radiation is released with gas, as it was at the Japanese reactors, the particl