Thanks to our friends at Ecowatch for this story:

Michael Pollan: What You Should Eat to Be Healthy

Cole Mellino

A new documentary from Kikim Media based on Michael Pollan’s bestselling book, In Defense of Food, helps consumers navigate a food system complicated by globalization and industrialization.

“I’ve been writing about the food system for a very long time,” Pollan said in the trailer for the new film. “But what I kept hearing from readers was ‘yeah yeah yeah, you told me where the food comes from and how the animals live and everything, but what I want to know is what should I eat.’”

Courtesy of Jungle Rhythms. Koen Hufkens and colleagues digitized the tables, but quickly realized the marks were simply too faint (image 1). “The notes are basically small pencil lines that overlay a grid on the paper, and the lack of contrast between the two makes it difficult to separate. It needs the human eye to tease them apart,” he said. Image 2 shows what the grid looked like after it was annotated.

The Harvard Gazette’s story on the citizen science project that will put dormant analog data to new use with digital assistance:

Koen Hufkens is trying to solve a scientific mystery, and he’s asking for the public’s help to do it.

Hufkens, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Andrew Richardson, this month launched Jungle Rhythms, a citizen-science project that aims to digitize thousands of pages of detailed observations on the life cycles of African trees. Continue reading →

We are delighted to have Conservation, one of our longstanding go-to sources for environmental science news, back in business:

A herpetologist holds a Blanchard’s cricket frog (Acris blanchardi). Credit: The Wandering Herpetologist via Flickr.

DEGRADED HABITAT ALTERS FROG MICROBIOMES

Human-caused changes in the environment are linked to differences in the microbiome – the community of bacteria and other microbes that normally inhabit the skin – of a threatened species of frog, according to a new study.

Since the skin microbiome is essentially a major component of a frog’s immune system, the findings suggest that land use change could increase amphibians’ vulnerability to disease. In turn, this could be a clue to why some populations of frogs are more susceptible than others to a chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, that causes a fatal skin infection and has resulted in declines and even extinctions of amphibian species worldwide.

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We are aware that his work depends on well-protected geological wonders so we are automatically attracted to his activities; we cannot recommend this as a sport, but we cannot help but point out Alex Honnold’s feats as inspiring. From his website:

Alex Honnold is a professional adventure rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of America’s biggest cliffs have made him one of the most recognized and followed climbers in the world. A gifted but hard-working athlete, Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold is known as much for his humble, self-effacing attitude as he is for the dizzyingly tall cliffs he has climbed without a rope to protect him if he falls. Honnold has been profiled by 60 Minutes and the Continue reading →

Atacama 1 concentrated solar power plant being built by Spanish firm Abengoa in Chile. Photograph: Jonathan Watts for the Guardian

Not yet guaranteed, but promising nonetheless, we will consider this one of the best pieces of news on this day of gift-giving:

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We have a special place for any citizen science project, no matter what kingdom of natural life it covers, or whether its accomplished at home or in the field. Now we’re learning about a new project covering trees from The Nature Conservancy’s “Cool Green Science” blog:

What Is i-Tree?

i-Tree is a Swiss army-knife collection of tools that people can use to measure the impact individual trees and forests.

In fact, the collection of tools is so comprehensive it can seem overwhelming. But don’t be daunted. Here’s the information you need to get started.

For citizen scientists, i-Tree Streets and i-Tree Pest Detection are two key instruments in the i-Tree arsenal. (Many of the other tools are designed primarily for city officials and forest managers.)

For each tree that you select to inventory, i-Tree Streets can estimate the tree’s effect on greenhouse gasses, air quality, and stormwater overflow. Find a group in your area that is conducting a tree inventory with i-Tree Streets. City governments and conservation organizations can collect the data for use at the local level.

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In Hawaii, where 12 percent of the homes have solar panels, handling the surplus power is putting pressure on the state’s biggest utility, which is fighting to reduce what it pays for the energy. By Erik Braund and Eugene Yi on Publish Date April 18, 2015. Photo by Kent Nishimura for The New York Times.

Thanks to the New York Times for their ongoing coverage of how we manage to make do on this planet, including in the various well known gardens of Eden:

Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes

By DIANE CARDWELL

…“Hawaii is a postcard from the future,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.

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Click on the image above to go to the publisher’s website and their preferred purchase options for this book; the publisher’s blurbists have this to say about it:

An award-winning author’s stirring quest to find and understand an elusive and exceptionally rare species in the heart of Southeast Asia’s jungles.

In 1992, in a remote mountain range, a team of scientists discovered the remains of an unusual animal with beautiful long horns. It turned out to be a living species new to western science — a saola, the first large land mammal discovered in 50 years. Continue reading →

This is a subject that we will be seeing more of, for sure. But for the record, a basic rule we live by at Raxa Collective is that we never have and never will slip such critters into food on the sly. We see the day coming, though we are not confident to predict how soon, when it is taken for granted that some portion of protein in the diets of people in even the most well-developed economies comes from insects. One more story in that vein,from our friends at the EcoWatch website, inspired by the recent TedX talk linked to above:

Maybe you’ve see little cans of chocolate-covered ants or grasshoppers in the exotic food section of your grocery and thought to yourself, “Yuck—who eats that?” Insects may not come to mind when you think of superfoods. But they could be the next hot “alternative” protein. They’re low in fat and loaded with fiber.

You might be surprised to learn you may have been eating insects already. Continue reading →

Indonesian President, Joko Widodo joins members of the Sungai Tohor community in damming a canal draining peatlands on Tebing Tinggi island on Thursday. Photograph: Ardiles Rante/Greenpeace

Welcome news, thanks to the Guardian‘s coverage:

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Although food entrepreneur Tim West’s family legacy is in Doritos chips, he wants to shake up the food system — with sustainable, healthful food. Vignesh Ramachandran/Ozy

Thank you, National Public Radio (USA), for carrying The Salt and its occasionally deliciously ironic stories:

Tim West’s grandfather invented Doritos chips and was an executive at the global snack food giant Frito-Lay.

The younger West ate plenty of junk food growing up. But lately, he’s been much more interested in kale, quinoa and tree-ripened fruit.

And the 30-year-old Bay Area food entrepreneur now wants to completely reinvent what we eat and how it’s produced. Continue reading →

Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Illustration by Brian Stauffer.

In an interview published on Friday, at the very end there is a sentence that caught our attention:

…I could list all kinds of problems that we still need to resolve, because a theory is developed in a process, not an event. [Disruption] has never happened in the hotel industry, for example…

It jumped from the page at us because “disruption” is such a powerful concept in current business strategy thinking, and because Raxa Collective develops and manages hotels; we have every reason to be concerned about disruption (of the normal variety, of course, but especially the strategic variety).

On whether disruption has never happened in the hotel industry: “chain” formation a century ago disrupted the millenia-old universal business model of owner-operated lodging; more recently, online travel agencies have altered the fortunes of the hotel industry sufficiently to force transformation of how hotels distribute their product; and at the same time the internet has enabled segments of the hotel industry that were previously dependent on travel agencies for survival to distribute their product independently of intermediaries, which seems disruptive.

Over the weekend our attention turned from that sentence above to what spurred it. The interview refers to an article from the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that we have now read in entirety.  A historical analysis of one of the driving forces of today’s entrepreneurial culture makes clear how a paradigm can take hold without anyone questioning its underpinnings. When a prominent history professor challenges the fundamental premises of a prominent business school professor (and virtually the entire business world following that professor’s prescriptions) with language and imagery this rich, fireworks were a foregone conclusion:

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times. Jason Aramburu examining a sensor he developed that monitors the condition of soil in gardens.

Thanks to the New York Times Science section for this good news about a smartphone app to monitor plant health and assist their resistance to drought and other challenges:

PROTOTYPE

Planting for Profit, and Greater Good

By CLAIRE MARTIN

Not all of it is spectacular (zoos are not our cup of tea, generally speaking) but especially the “budding birders” initiative has our attention; we are grateful for the Hindu’s coverage of some the news about several conservation schemes to be established in Kerala:

A primary environment care project with the cooperation of grama panchayats; Rs.259-crore ‘Krishi Raksha’ scheme to protect crops from wild animals; forest academy at Arippa; and ‘Urinunarvu Kadinunarvu’ for the development of Adivasi settlements are among the projects identified by the Forest Department for implementation under Mission 676. A Rs.15-crore project will be launched to conserve water in the catchment areas of rivers and forests during the summer. Continue reading →