Whale Wonder

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Hvaldimir near a salmon farm in the fjords off the coast of Stavanger, Norway, in Nov. Conor McDonnell

Whale stories are abundant in these pages partly because they are charismatic and tend to evoke joy, but also because they serve as a barometer for how well we are caring for the planet. Here is one more story, as intriguing as any we have linked to before, for the mix:

The Whale Who Went AWOL

After escaping captivity, Hvaldimir took up residence in Hammerfest, Norway, where he quickly became an international celebrity. Joakim Eskildsen/Institute, for The New York Times

Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope. Continue reading →

Not The End Of The World, Reviewed

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Bibi van der Zee’s reviews and other articles in the Guardian are always insightful:

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie review – an optimist’s guide to the climate crisis

This book is full of pragmatic, hopeful solutions to environmental challenges. But is there something missing?

Data scientist Hannah Ritchie has written a good-hearted, generous book that tries its very best to reassure us about the various environmental crises we face. Which, obviously, is much appreciated: God knows we need all the optimism we can get.

Ritchie is lead researcher at the groundbreaking Our World in Data, a website run out of Oxford University. She begins by describing the moment of revelation she experienced when, after years of feeling helpless and anxious about the state of things, she discovered the Swedish professor Hans Rosling, and “everything changed”. Continue reading →

Nuclear Energy Cheat Sheet

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Nuclear reactors around the world. Source.

We have linked to articles about nuclear energy before, but this one is more like a cheat sheet for a yes opinion on the option than earlier articles we have read:

Why Nuclear Is the Best Energy

This article will convince you of that nuclear is the best source of energy.1 Don’t read it if you need your mind to remain anti-nuclear. If you are against nuclear, I recommend you to precisely write down your concerns and what it would take for you to be convinced that nuclear is great, otherwise you might move the goalposts subconsciously. 

To do justice to the topic, the article had to cover all the important aspects of nuclear energy, and as a result is long. I chose to publish it in one piece despite that so all the relevant information is in one place, and I can update it over time and you can bookmark, reference, and share it. Continue reading →

Kew Gardens & New Species

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Cochlospermum adjanyae, a flowering plant that grows mostly underground and was first recorded by scientists in Angola in 2023. STEVE BOYES

Thanks to Yale e360:

Ten Curious New Plants and Fungi Recorded in 2023

Aeranthes bigibbum. JOHAN HERMANS / RBG KEW

As the planet warms and extinctions mount, scientists are racing to catalog the vast array of life on Earth before species disappear. This year, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recorded 89 new species of plant and fungi across the globe, from the rocky edges of Antarctica to a dormant volcano in Indonesia.

Baphia arenicola.

Baphia arenicola. DAVID GOYDER / RBG KEW

“It is an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist, but even as we make these wonderful new discoveries, we must remember that nature is under threat, and we have the power to do something about it,” Martin Cheek, a senior researcher with Kew, said in a statement. Continue reading →

Channeling Water Nature’s Way

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Just as much as we want packaging of our drinking water to be carefully thought out, we also want the channeling of water to make sense:

How the beck at James Robinson’s farm looked before the introduction of natural flood management techniques. Photograph: James Robinson

‘The wildlife that has come is phenomenal’: the UK farmers holding off floods the natural way

Planting trees, creating floodplains and rewilding rivers are among the new techniques being used to adapt to a heating climate

The streams, or becks, that run through James Robinson’s Lake District farm used to be cleaned out regularly – with vegetation yanked out and riverbeds dredged, or even completely filled in. Continue reading →

Plastic’s Plentiful Problems

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Emil Lippe for The New York Times

The waste has been our main objection to plastic water bottles. But there are other major questions.

We have reason to wonder (more on that another day) whether water in reusable glass bottles is an answer to this one:

Bottled Water Is Full of Plastic Particles. Can They Harm Your Health?

Here’s what scientists know so far about the health effects of nanoplastics, and what you can do to reduce your exposure.

A liter of bottled water contains nearly a quarter of a million pieces of nanoplastic on average, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Continue reading →

Katherine J. Wu On Grizzlies

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a black-and-white photo of several brown bears walking across a grassy plain, in front of mountains

Getty

We always appreciate Katherine J. Wu‘s writings on nature, especially her use of archival material to make a point:

Grizzly Bears Are Mostly Vegan

But humans made them more carnivorous.

On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Continue reading →

The Alternative, Reviewed

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Nick Romeo has a new book coming out, and the Guardian recommends it, tentatively. It is up to all of us to answer the reviewer’s doubts through our choices and actions:

The Alternative by Nick Romeo review – moral substitutes for the free market model

A survey of the global alternatives to the current economic system makes for an enlightening, inspiring read, but you’re left wondering why such initiatives have failed to take hold

Anti-capitalist street art in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Photograph: Soma/Alamy

I wrestled with how to approach this review. On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism. There is an ache for better – for more just ways of organising the way we work and adding more meaning to our lives. Continue reading →

Nature, Peer-Reviewed Science Since 1869

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The scientific journal Nature shows up in exactly one search result among thousands of posts here. And that one, because photos have such a wide audience. We have not linked to their articles because, since 1869, they are written by and oriented to highly credentialed scientists. A look at ten influential articles makes the point. And we can only respect what they do, even if we wish more of us could digest more of the science. Now that they offer some articles in audio version, this may make the science more accessible to those who hear better than they read. Judge for yourself, if you want to pay to play. The audio version of the article below (available on YouTube above) is free, but unless you have a subscription the written version is available for a small charge:

Rooftop solar panels in China. Tandem cells could boost power density in crowded urban areas. Credit: VCG/Getty

A new kind of solar cell is coming: is it the future of green energy?

Firms commercializing perovskite–silicon ‘tandem’ photovoltaics say that the panels will be more efficient and could lead to cheaper electricity.

On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic (PV) materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Surrounded by unkempt grass and a weed-strewn car park, the factory is a modest cradle for such a potentially transformative technology, but the firm’s chief technology officer Chris Case is clearly in love with the place. “This is the culmination of my dreams,” he says.

The Irony Of Patriotic Fervor

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There is an interview with Jill Lepore discussing this book to the left, which I link to below. It got me thinking about an earlier post I wrote about having read April Morning and The Hessian in my teens and my brief encounter with their author Howard Fast. That post was primarily a thank you to the librarians who got me interested in reading. I knew from the return address on the letter he sent me that Mr. Fast lived on my same street, a five minute walk from my home. I enjoyed that fact because I enjoyed the two of his books that I had read. But I never saw him after the library lecture.

Who I did see frequently, because he drove an easily identifiable red convertible Cadillac, and also lived close by, was Roy Cohn. Yes, that guy. If you know a certain bit of mid-20th Century history, the bit called the Red Scare, you might understand my first glimpse of irony. I had learned that Howard Fast was punished early in his career for his political beliefs. By the time I knew who Roy Cohn was I knew he had something to do with that punishment, directly or indirectly. What I found ironic, as a teenager, was that Howard Fast was influential on my sense of why patriotism exists; and Roy Cohn, a self-proclaimed protector of American values, made me fear patriotism. I always wondered if they knew they lived so close to one another. History does not seem to have recorded anything about that. The interview by Julien Crockett below reminded me of that irony of patriotic fervor I sensed in my teens:

The Hold of the Dead Over the Living: A Conversation with Jill Lepore

“I WROTE THESE essays during a period of terrible, tragic decline in the United States,” historian Jill Lepore writes in the introduction to her new essay collection, The Deadline. Wide-ranging and often provocative, the essays cover the past decade of “political violence, endless vicious culture war, a series of constitutional crises, catastrophic climate change, and a global pandemic.” In short, “a time that felt like a time, felt like history.” Continue reading →