The Downside Of Roads

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The density of transportation infrastructure in Europe. Credit: Marina Pinilla.

We enjoy a good drive as much as anyone, but we also have seen the impact they have over time in wilderness areas, and here is some unsurprising science from already developed regions to back up the concern:

IN EUROPE YOU CAN’T GET VERY FAR FROM ROADS—AND NEITHER CAN WILDLIFE

Roads and railway lines are so ubiquitous across the European continent that it is becoming impossible to measure their ecological effects, according to a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, researchers calculated the distances to the nearest paved road or railway line throughout 36 European countries, the first time that such calculations have been made comprehensively across the entire continent.

Nearly one-quarter of the land in Europe is within 500 meters of transportation infrastructure, half is within 1.5 kilometers, and virtually all is within 10 kilometers, they found. Continue reading →

Out of Sight, Out of Water

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Source: National Geographic

As a person who’s had the privilege to live her entire life in areas that have access to potable municipal water, I view water as an environmental commodity that only involves the twist of a faucet knob to obtain it (as I think most people who have enjoyed the same privilege do). Even when the water supply was cut off for some unknown reason, getting usable water was as simple as going to the closest convenience store and purchasing a five gallon jug or waiting for the daily Costa Rican downpour in the rainy season to collect some rainwater in large bins.

I have read, studied, and heard of the diminishing freshwater reserves on our planet and it is always on the back of my mind whenever I turn on a faucet to wash dishes, take a shower, brush my teeth, etc. I am frugal with my water consumption, but that is not enough. The fact that it is so easily accessible leads to the classic conundrum of  ‘out of sight, out of mind.’   Continue reading →

Jackfruit: Potential Meat Substitute?

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A vegetarian restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri, offers the Jack BBQ: jackfruit, onions, and kosher dill pickles served on sourdough bread. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE HEBERT, THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

This question has actually already been answered here before. Last year, Rosanna wrote about the fruit, revolving around an article from The Guardian that featured a recipe for pulled pork but with jackfruit replacing the meat. Earlier that month, we had linked to an NPR segment that called them a “nutritional bonanza” that may help with the food crisis in developing countries. And the year before that, we had written another post calling the fruit a “mega food.” So when will that happen for good? Hopefully, soon! Stacie Stukin writes for NatGeo on the would-be fad-food:

When Annie Ryu first encountered a large, spiky orb called jackfruit, she was perplexed. “I thought it was a porcupine,” she says.

But when she ate it prepared in a curry, she was amazed at how meat-like it was in taste and texture. That was in 2011, when she was traveling in southern India as a premed student helping community health workers improve prenatal care. By 2014, she had waylaid her medical career to start The Jackfruit Company.

Continue reading →

Smithsonian Features Recycled Trash Sculptures

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Image courtesy National Zoological Park

The plastics used in these colorful and eye-catching sculptures being shown at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo weren’t recycled in the way outlined yesterday, but rather were found by artist Angela Pozzi and her volunteers along the West Coast beaches that they traveled, picking up waste to raise awareness at a later date through their traveling art exhibit, “Washed Ashore: Art to Save the Sea.” The seventeen sculptures of marine wildlife are bombastic and full of character. Sabrina Greene reports for the Smithsonian Insider:

“The exhibit at the Zoo appears to be a wonderful success,” Pozzi says. “I have seen dozens of visitors stopping and looking closely, then entering into discussions and then really thinking about the marine debris issue. Besides raising awareness, one of our goals is for the public to start taking ownership of the problem and reevaluating their own plastic usage. We hope to spark positive changes in consumer habits. Every piece of plastic in our exhibit that we have picked up off the beaches, every single bit of it, was once purchased by somebody.”

Continue reading →

Concentrating Solar with Mirrors and Molten Salt

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A tower of salt, surrounded by sunlight-sensing and -reflecting mirrors. Photo © SolarReserve

Two months ago we posted about non-photovoltaic solar power via a story from Scientific American, and this week they’re exploring the subject again, this time in the desert of Nevada with the first utility-scale “concentrating solar” plant that can provide electricity even at night. Concentrating solar involves storing heat from the sun rather than converting light into electricity, and apparently molten sodium and potassium nitrates can do this very effectively. Knvul Sheikh reports:

Deep in the Nevada desert, halfway between Las Vegas and Reno, a lone white tower stands 195 meters tall, gleaming like a beacon. It is surrounded by more than 10,000 billboard-size mirrors focusing the sun’s rays on its tip. The Crescent Dunes “concentrating solar power” plant looks like some advanced communication device for aliens. But the facility’s innovation lies in the fact that it can store electricity and make it available on demand any time—day or night.

Continue reading →

Video Tour of a Recycling Plant in Brooklyn

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My junior year, I founded and sat as president of my high school’s recycling club, which was a fairly simple operation of setting up cardboard boxes in classrooms and asking people to put their plastic or glass bottles and aluminum cans inside – paper recycling was already managed by the school district, but the rest wasn’t. Every Monday I’d go around collecting all that material into the big blue plastic bags sold by the county for residential recycling, normally filling one to two of them a week, and then take them to some neighbor of the school’s gracious enough to loan us their curb space for recycling pickup the next morning. From those big trucks that would load up the blue bags for the county, all the glass, plastic, metal (and garbage people thought was recyclable or didn’t care enough to remove) probably went to a recycling plant a bit like the one in the video below:

Continue reading →

Old School Fromage

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Cheesemaker David Clarke separates the curds and whey to make Red Leicester cheese at Sparkenhoe Farm in Upton

Cheesemaker David Clarke separates the curds and whey to make Red Leicester cheese at Sparkenhoe Farm in Upton, central England October 8, 2007. Red Leicester cheese had not been made in Leicestershire since 1956 until Clarke started producing his traditional, unpasteurised cloth-bound cheese using milk from his 150 pedigree Holstein Fresian cows. REUTERS/Darren Staples (BRITAIN)

Thanks to the Atlantic’s concern for our culinary well-being:

How Real Cheese Made Its Comeback

After decades of Kraft Singles, more Americans than ever are hungry for artisanal varieties of the past. An Object Lesson.

by LAURA KIESEL

As a child, I was a picky eater. Except when it came to cheese. Continue reading →

A Pouncing Tradition

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On one of my first days at Villa del Faro, the subject of card games came up during a dinner meal and my ears perked up. Everyone at the table seemed eager to learn a new card game so I pounced at the opportunity to share the story of the epic card game that I can confidently say characterizes a Toll family member.

In general terms, Pounce is like Solitaire but with three to five people playing all at once and playing on the same stack that you are trying to play out your cards toward. It’s a very fast-paced game that does not cater to the faint of heart. Continue reading →

A Dawn Excursion Continued

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The main building in dawn light

My last post on this topic involved the ocean, but the bulk of that morning earlier this week was actually spent out in the chaparral: scrubby, thorny, and sparse vegetation in the desert just outside of Villa del Faro. Right before I exited the property I spotted a black-tailed jackrabbit warily watching me as I descended the hill–these hares are a common sight on the side of the dirt coastal road out here.

Continue reading →

A Tetra Pak Social Experiment

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The packaging company Tetra Pak, perhaps best known for its milk cartons, is also dedicated to eco-efficiency and recyclability of its materials. Recently, they put together a study with the participation of ten women who maintain lifestyle blogs while also being mothers. Tetra Pak wanted to explore the sense of happiness that comes from practicing a small renewable habit every day, like using reusable bottles, choosing renewable product packaging, switching one outdoor habit to an indoor one, and others. Here are their key takeaway points from a white paper they released:

1. Start small and start now. Don’t over plan or procrastinate. Choose a habit you can change today and begin. Immediate, incremental changes can quickly become more automatic and result in increased happiness.

2. Cues are the key. Choose a behavior associated with a situational cue and make it more renewable.

3. Make a pact with yourself. Like a New Year’s resolution, commit to a goal and set out to achieve it. A personal contract may help to solidify the commitment, i.e. “When I encounter situation X, I will perform behavior Y.”

Continue reading →

Museums, Things, Epiphanies

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Reading the review, and the museum’s description of this show, I immediately thought of a museum that Amie and I had the chance to visit in Istanbul, which had been on our to-do list for some time; and the next click through the museum’s website led me to this:

THURSDAY 09/29 /16 7PM 

Orhan Pamuk in Conversation with Massimiliano Gioni

Which just seemed right because the museum in Istanbul was create by Orhan Pamuk. I will do my best to find a recording of this conversation, if they make a recording or transcript available and but for now the best I can do is direct you to the website of the museum in Istanbul which, hopefully, will lead you to the actual museum, easily the most moving museum experience of my life:

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The Museum of Innocence is both a novel by Orhan Pamuk and a museum he has set up. From the very beginnings of the project, since the 1990s, Pamuk has conceived of novel and museum together. The novel, which is about love, is set between 1974 and the early ’00s, and describes life in Istanbul between 1950 and 2000 through memories and flashbacks centred around two families – one wealthy, the other lower middle class. The museum presents what the novel’s characters used, wore, heard, saw, collected and dreamed of, all meticulously arranged in boxes and display cabinets. It is not essential to have read the book in order to enjoy the museum, just as it is not necessary to have visited the museum in order to fully enjoy the book. But those who have read the novel will better grasp the many connotations of the museum, and those who have visited the museum will discover many nuances they had missed when reading the book. The novel was published in 2008, the museum opened in Spring 2012.

Be sure that you read the explanation for this floor motif.

Reflections On Collecting Things

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This exhibition, brought to our attention by a lengthy respectful review here, is the first time we have heard of this museum, but now that it is on our radar we stay tuned. This looks like our kind of show:

Object Lessons: The New Museum
Explores Why We Keep Things

Curators at the New Museum have created an exhibit with over 4,000 objects that examines the various ways we collect and own items.

By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

We live in a sharing economy of collaborative consumption — services, not stuff. Crowdsourcing, peer-to-peer rentals like Airbnb: An interest, exemplified by millennials, in a temporary ownership of goods.

Apps, not objects. Continue reading →

What Can Be Done with eBird Data?

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Brighter colors indicate higher relative abundance. © Cornell University

The Western Tanager is a species I have yet to see, but which will be unmistakeable once I do, with the male’s red-and-orange head and bright yellow body contrasting with black wings striped with white bars. Based on the animated map above, I expect to spot some of them down in Baja California Sur by September or October, and I look forward to it. As I’ve written here before in the case of another moving map, citizen science makes this sort of illustrative prediction of a species’ moving presence possible, and it’s one of the reasons why I contribute to eBird as often as I can.

A paper titled “Using open access observational data for conservation action: A case study for birds” was published in the scientific journal Biological Conservation by a team of researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, several of whom I was just down the hallway from when I worked there. Although I haven’t gotten through their findings yet myself, Victoria Campbell chose nine interesting examples of how eBird data created tangible conservation in several countries.  Continue reading →

A Fishy Excursion

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Thirty minutes north from Villa del Faro is a place called Los Arbolitos, which translates to “the little trees,” and is part of Cabo Pulmo National Park. I will just state from the beginning that this area does not have any trees, or small trees for that matter, only a sturdy watchtower on top of a sandbank that from a distance could perhaps look like the outline of a tree, and some scrubby bushes. Los Arbolitos is a small, secluded bay with crisp white sand and smooth crystalline waters, making it an ideal spot for snorkeling. Continue reading →

Big Butterfly Count Coming Up in UK

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Photo from bigbutterflycount.org

Starting this Friday and continuing through the first week of August, the largest survey in the world for butterflies and day-flying moths will take place in the United Kingdom. We’ve featured lepidopterists and citizen scientists here before, including today and for last year’s event, which involved over fifty thousand people counting more than half a million lepidopterans.  It’s great to see such a simple yet complete chart/app to ID the more common butterflies that people may encounter –– I would have really appreciated something like that for Costa Rica! Read more about the project below:

Why count butterflies?

Butterflies react very quickly to change in their environment which makes them excellent biodiversity indicators. Butterfly declines are an early warning for other wildlife losses.

That’s why counting butterflies can be described as taking the pulse of nature.

Continue reading →

And In Other Office Space News

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GoogleHQ

After this post reflecting on one big architectural adventure, somehow not too surprising that another related news story pops up almost immediately. Is it an arms race or an incredible burst of creativity that will have a positive impact beyond the companies involved?

Google may get its futuristic new campus after all

After a property swap with LinkedIn

By Nick Statt

Google’s grand plans for a futuristic new campus in the North Bayshore district of Mountain View, CA may finally become a reality thanks to a new real estate deal struck with LinkedIn. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the two tech companies came to an agreement on a property swap that puts to rest a longstanding feud over lucrative current and unused square footage in Silicon Valley. Google paid $215 million for the swap, while LinkedIn paid $331 million, the report states. Continue reading →