Bikes Starting to be Made in USA Again

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This latest post in our common bicycle theme is not about any novel designs or materials being used to make the pedal-powered machines, but rather a feature from The New Yorker website on the new bicycle manufacturing scene in the US, particularly in Detroit, where a crashed automobile industry left a city in dire need of revival. Omar Mouallem writes:

In 1896, the Detroit Wheelmen opened an ornate new clubhouse, complete with an auditorium and a bowling alley. The Detroit Free Press called it “the most modern club house of any cycling organization in the west.” Its forty-thousand-dollar cost (about $1.1 million today) was paid for by the club’s four hundred and fifty members, who included John and Horace Dodge, the co-owners of Evans & Dodge Bicycle Company, one of more than three hundred U.S. manufacturers during the bike boom of the eighteen-nineties.

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The History of America’s National Parks through Maps

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A map depicting the three-day battle of Gettysburg. Source: Library of Congress

Later this week, on August 25th, will be the U.S. National Park Service centennial (more about that on the day in question). So for all history buffs out there, you might enjoy the following article by National Geographic that provides a historical context to several topographical maps of the national parks (a somewhat contrasting view to yesterday’s post on fictional map creation) and their uncharted contribution to historians many years later.

By Betsy Mason

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—John Badger Bachelder arrived at Gettysburg before the soldiers’ bodies were buried. He spent the next 84 days studying the battlefield by horseback and filling notebooks with the accounts of injured soldiers from both sides of the battle. He even took some of the wounded back to the scene so they could point out their positions and recount what had happened.

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Upcycling Food Waste

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Crusty heels of loaves of bread which are used to make Toast Ale. All photos from: npr.org

We are no strangers to the food waste crisis. We recently wrote about the average landfill contribution per person per state in the U.S. and on prior occasions have shared stories about the severity of poor “waste” management.  At the same time, we acknowledge that there are people who are leading the cause to reduce the amount of food thrown away and salvage the unwanted scraps into healthful and tasty food, or otherwise useful products. It is important for us to share these stories to serve as inspiration for those with an entrepreneurial spirit and to inform citizens how they can support these businesses or organizations.

Toast Ale is a London-based company that sources fresh, surplus bread that would otherwise be thrown out to brew suds and create beer. The company believes it has found an environmentally friendly way to tap into the booming craft beer market. Continue reading →

First-ever Electricity Surplus in India

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Unregulated coal mining is polluting rivers in Meghalaya, India (Flickr/ECSP via climatechangenews.com)

We’ve covered a couple examples of alternative energy in India, but in general there’s a long way to go towards providing electricity to even most of the population, which generally suffers power outages. Now, the country has a surplus for the first time, but at what cost? Indian energy is still mostly in coal, and six of the country’s cities are in the top ten worst-polluted in the world. Tali Trigg writes for his blog Plugged In on Scientific American:

Like Germany, India has struggled to achieve power selling parity between its southern and northern regions, but is finally starting to see prices close-to-equal across the country. While India’s achievement is remarkable from one point-of-view, the fact remains that 300 million Indians still do not benefit as they have no access to electricity and most of the added capacity is from highly-polluting coal power causing grievous air quality.

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Superlens from Spider Silk

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(a) Nephila edulis spider in its web. (b) Schematic drawing of reflection mode silk biosuperlens imaging. The spider silk was placed directly on top of the sample surface by using a soft tape, which magnify underlying nano objects 2-3 times (c) SEM image of Blu-ray disk with 200/100 nm groove and lines (d) Clear magnified image (2.1x) of Blu-ray disk under spider silk superlens. Images © Bangor University and Oxford University, via EurekAlert

We’ve seen silk made without spiders, photomicrograph competitions, and the development of a new underwater microscope, but never thought that a strand of spider’s silk could be put under a normal microscope to then magnify an image even more than previously possible with current technology. But biologists from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University provided the silk know-how for engineers at the Bangor University’s  School of Electronic Engineering to create a natural superlens:

Extending the limit of classical microscope’s resolution has been the ‘El Dorado’ or ‘Holy Grail’ of microscopy for over a century. Physical laws of light make it impossible to view objects smaller than 200 nm – the smallest size of bacteria, using a normal microscope alone. However, superlenses which enable us to see beyond the current magnification have been the goal since the turn of the millennium.

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The Bosnian Tree Elder

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Certain species of trees can grow to be very old, and a group of scientists from Stockholm University  discovered a Bosnian pine (Pinus heldreichii) that would certainly classify as ancient. The solitary Bosnian pine is growing in the highlands of northern Greece and has been dendrochronologically dated– that is, analyzed to see how old the tree is – to be more than 1075 years old, making it the oldest known living tree in Europe.

“It is quite remarkable that this large, complex and impressive organism has survived so long in such an inhospitable environment, in a land that has been civilized for over 3000 years” says Swedish dendrochronologist, Paul J. Krusic, leader of the expedition that found the tree. It is one of more than a dozen individuals of millennial age, living in a treeline forest high in the Pindos mountains.

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Fantastic Fantasy Maps Generated By Code

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Different steps in the creation of a code-generated map that mimics real-world coastal landscape formation by erosion. Images by Martin O’Leary

There is no shortage of posts on maps here, but only one has been focused on the maps published in fantasy or fiction novels to set the scene. Two others have been linked to conservation, with one formatted in an amusing way. Then there’s my series on Icelandic cartography, starting in 1585 and continuing through 1849, then 1875, and finally 1906. But this is the first I hear about realistic fantasy maps created every hour by a bot – or computer program – coded by glaciologist Martin O’Leary and then tweeted on Twitter. And you can even go through the steps yourself and create a map of your making on his website! Betsy Manson writes for NatGeo:

As you travel northeast along the shore of southern Nimrathutkam, the first town you’ll encounter is Ak Tuh, followed by Nunrat and Nrik Mah before you reach the coastal city of Tuhuk, the largest urban area in the region of Mum Huttak.

If these sound like places out of a fantasy novel you read as a teenager, you’re not far off. Nimrathutkan is the result of an automated map generator that was inspired by those novels. The map bot, created by glaciologist Martin O’Leary of Swansea University in Wales, combines imaginary place names with fake terrain to produce fantasy worlds, tweeting a new one every hour from the Twitter account @unchartedatlas.

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An Abandoned Quarry Transformed

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Fátima Anselmo, owner of Orgânicas da Fátima. All photos from: modernfarmer.com

The following is a story about a woman in Rio de Janeiro whose passion for sustainable farming, along with the support of a loyal community, allowed her to transcend an unforeseen hardship and turn an industrial wasteland into a fruitful organic farm. Here’s the story as told on Modern Farmer:

On a steep, forested hillside, in what was once a quarry in Rio de Janeiro, Fátima Anselmo scoops a handful of loose, dark soil from one of her garden beds. “It’s alive!” she says, holding the dirt in the air.

The whole place, in fact, is bursting with life.

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Our Landfill Contribution

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The diagram above provides a clear illustration of the amount of waste each person contributes to the landfill per year in the U.S. It is a regrettable outcome that results from decades of unresponsive national policies and unsustainable urban development, but can be remedied with a multilateral shift towards a circular economy, according to Nithin Coca, journalist for Triple Pundit LLC.

One of the reasons that America went down the path of throw-it-away is related to the reason we decided to build vast suburbs instead of dense, sustainable, walkable cities. We have a lot of land compared to most other developed countries. The same space we used to build suburbs, roads and an auto-centric culture, we also used to hide our waste as we moved into a throw-away economy.

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Chan Chich Spider Monkeys

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Pretty much any time you walk out in the woods at Chan Chich Lodge, at some point during your hike you should be able to hear the rocking branches that are a sign of either spider monkeys or howler monkeys moving or eating in the treetops. And if you’re lucky, the swinging simians might stop and watch you with an uncannily familiar curiosity (or boredom), interrupting their normal activity for a minute or two before continuing on their way.

During the period in which we observed the family of three in the video above, the father yawned at least nine times, while the mother did so at least five times. Continue reading →

A New Weekly Feature!

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Ergaki National Park. Source: siberiatimes.com

Drawing inspiration from our site’s Bird of the Day, a new weekly feature titled National Park of the Week will publish every Sunday starting on August 28th. We love birds – but other wildlife too! – and we love the environment they (as well as we) live in, so we decided to start this new “column” (if this was a newspaper) to promulgate the protected areas that reflect the range of biodiversity and natural beauty around the globe. Although this weekly article has the words national park in the title, all types of government-protected areas, such as refuges, reserves, sanctuaries, and parks, will be featured in this category.  Continue reading →

Isthmus of Panama Younger than We Thought

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Split by the Isthmus of Panama: Species of butterfly fish, sand dollar and cone snail that today live on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Central America are very closely related. Genetic sequencing shows that only 4 to 3 million years ago, each pair was a single species, demonstrating that marine connections between the oceans must have existed until that time. (Image by Coppard et al., via The Smithsonian)

It’s probably not something you’ve given much thought to, unless perhaps you’ve visited Central America in the past and experienced first-hand the incredible biodiversity displayed in such a small area. Part of the reason why this little strip of land has so many different species of animals and plants is that it connects two very large continents that used to be separate, but it also has given birth to new aquatic species via evolution, as you can see from the image above. Previous thought on the topic had been that the Isthmus of Panama rose from the ocean roughly between 23 and 15 million years ago, but a very large and very interdisciplinary team of researchers – mostly with some link to the Smithsonian Institution, which has its Tropical Research Institute in Panama City – have reaffirmed that the enormously important geological change occurred around 3 million years ago.

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Cycling through the Belize Forest

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There are plenty of activities at Chan Chich Lodge that will expose you to a variety of forest wildlife and immerse you in the nature of Belize, such as the walking tours, horseback riding, canoeing, or the driving tours. But one of the lesser known activities that can also provide the same thrill as the other ones is bicycling.

I went on my first bike ride along the main road a week ago.  For the first mile starting from the compound area, the paved road offered a smooth ride past the suspension bridge and up until the “Y” intersection. I turned the handlebar to the left and my bike dropped a half-inch to the lower, limestone gravel road. The gravel pebbles started out small, boosting my confidence that I would make it to edge of cattle pastures of Gallon Jug estate, about five miles out. Continue reading →

Most Orangutans are Left-handed

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Image © playbuzz.com

It may seem like a strange title, but this post, which partly continues our celebration of orangutans (see how you can help the endangered species by avoiding palm oil), comes from this week’s Science Friday segment on whether other animals display a preference for left or right in their daily lives, the way humans do. A couple of our contributors here are lefties, making up a small percentage of the total, while 66% of orangutans are left-handed! Nicole Wetsman writes:

The human tendency to be right-handed is obvious—especially if you’re a lefty, and have to deal with right-handed desks and scissors, not to mention spiral notebooks.

But humans aren’t the only members of the animal kingdom that show handedness, or the preference for one hand over the other. Other primates exhibit right-handed or left-handed proclivities, as do animals that don’t technically have hands. For instance, research has shown that some mice are righties while others are southpaws, and that some tree frogs preferentially jump away from predators in one direction over another.

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Enhancing the L.A. River

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Nature Conservancy biologist Sophie Parker in the Glendale Narrows section of the Lost Angeles River. Source: Yale E360

It might be hard to believe, but at one point in time the Los Angeles River was characterized by perennial and seasonal wetland, seeps, springs, swamps, riparian forests, and mud and alkali flats. Starting in  1938 and until 1960, however, the river underwent a radical transformation, as it was enclosed by a concrete straitjacket for 51 miles to funnel the water through a channel that prevents flooding.

In its natural state [the L.A. River] was often little more than a trickle for nine months of the year. During the rainy season, however, the small, braided stream would turn into a powerful, churning river. It behaved like a dropped firehose, wildly lashing the Los Angeles valley, scouring gravel and soil across a seven-mile-wide floodplain, and carving a new course with every deluge. When the waters receded, a mosaic of fertile marshes, ponds, and other wetlands remained.

Now the L.A. River will undergo another profound change in the near future that will release parts of the river from its man-made confines and allow for  the water to transgress more naturally. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in collaboration with the City of L.A.  and conservation groups, completed a plan to remove three miles of concrete, enhance an 11-mile run through the Elysian Valley called the Glendale Narrows, and restore lost habitat. Continue reading →