Bird of the Day: White-cheeked Barbet feeding its young
News(Paper) Power
Despite the now ubiquitous use of the internet to follow both local and world news, newspapers continue to exist for many people as their daily connection to current events. In many countries that’s not their only use of course. We’ve written about the recycling initiatives of newspaper bags and baskets, as well as their use as wrappers and packaging in markets around the world. But used for fueling our cars? Now that’s news!
Tulane University associate professor of cell and molecular biology Dr. Mullin and his team have just applied for a patent for a method to produce the biofuel butanol from organic material. Continue reading
Borneo On Our Mind
If you enjoyed Nicole’s post, you will definitely want to watch this. We had the opportunity to exchange emails with Willie and can affirm what you will see at 1:11 (one minute and eleven seconds) into this TED talk: being an activist for a cause you care about can be frustrating and challenging enough that applause is not a motivator. He is already recognized by enough famous organizations that our two cents will seem a pittance, but we consider him a hero of entrepreneurial conservation, so must say: thank you Willie!
If you feel the same way after watching this video, say so by visiting this website and then this one. Especially this latter link should give you some ideas about how to get involved and make a difference.
Borneoculars: Observations from a Scientific Expedition in Borneo
Guest Author: Nicole Kravec
Indiana Jones would be proud of the entire scientific expedition team. For two weeks we trekked through the jungles of Malaysia’s Imbak Canyon, the “biological gene bank” in the heart of the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo. It was one of the best – and most adventurous – trips of my life.
Flattering Mother Nature
The Art and Design worlds are constantly giving us examples of our interpretive abilities when it comes to nature. In fact, the very roots of Art go back to those expressions. But if “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery” then scientists and engineers are also following the adage that “form follows function” in ways that have the potential to direct us out of some of our environmental problems.
Lindsey Doermann writes about how an elephant’s trunk, water strider’s legs, woodpecker’s beak, peacock’s feathers or a beetle’s back (to name a few) are inspirations toward conservation focused engineering.
Bird of the Day: White-winged Tern
Jellyfish Preserves
Ever heard of Jellyfish Lake? Located on the Eil Malik island of Palau, Ongeim’l Tketau (as the natives call it) is a lake which was formed about 12,000 years ago by the Pacific Ocean. Along with the clean blue waters of the Pacific, the tides brought in immigrants – jellyfish of the genus Mastigias . Today, after 12,000 years of isolation and removal from the predator-rich environment of the Pacific Ocean from which they originated, the jellyfish have evolved into a significantly different organism. Due to the fact that the only predators the scyphozoans have is a species of anemone which is significantly removed from their swimming depth, they reduced their defensive mechanisms to virtual non-existence, meaning that unlike most beach-faring jellyfish, they don’t sting.
Due to this remarkably friendly gesture, Jellyfish Lake has become a popular snorkelling destination, and those fortunate enough to swim those waters are graced with an ethereal sensation of a world different and far removed from our own.
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The Buffet Personality Test
There’s the Myers-Briggs test, the Jungian archetypes, the Japanese with their blood types and the astrologically inclined with their zodiac signs. These are all ways of putting people into classifications of one kind or another, to see which boxes they check and use this as a means of understanding their personalities. These taxonomies are useful for some in their attempts to easily judge books by their covers (or perhaps by their tables of contents). But I’ve got a new one: the buffet approach – comparably empirical but a lot more fun!
When you’re at a buffet, do you take a little of everything for the first round, then go back for bigger helpings of the dishes you liked best? Or do you browse at first, automatically writing off the red stuff for its overt similarity to a vegan rump roast and skipping the crunchy stuff for its unrecognizable position on the food chain? Or do you phase through it, bit by bit, going back for the things you’ve not yet tried? In my highly rudimentary and anthropologically unqualified analysis, I’d be willing to take your “buffet approach” as a proxy for your “approach to life.”
There are the grazers, particular and self assured. Then there are the nibblers, shy, disciplined and unimposing. And at the other extreme you have the all-out face-stuffers, decadent adventurists for whom a plate’s inadequacy of surface area is just another reminder of the fact that there aren’t enough hours in a day. Of course there would be the combo personalities, like the high-piling sharers, ambitious enough to stack up the sweets yet self-restrained and manipulative enough to make their partner eat the rest. Or the serial nibblers, philosophically conservative yet constitutionally indulgent. I’m telling you, this could be the new Rorschach test. Continue reading
Challenge: Nappie-free Landfills
Even if the jury is still out comparing the environmental impacts and carbon footprints of cloth vs. disposable nappies, it’s clear that standard disposables are a landfill problem. As in, a space problem if nothing else. Being a petroleum-based product, they pose other problems as well.
But since the main component of these stubbornly indispensable items is cellulose, and mushrooms are nature’s cellulose-eating machines, Mexican scientist Alethia Vázquez-Morillas of The Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City has found a solution. Continue reading
Thevara, So Five Minutes Ago
How So?
After watching some random video captures of natural scenes and especially creatures interacting, by more than one of our Contributors over the last few months, the temptation is to follow the cute animal trail where it leads. No. But from time to time, if for no other reason than to wonder how they did that video, we do not hesitate to share something that seems worth a moment of wonder:
Bird of the Day: Yellow-throated Bulbul
Thevara, Thanksgiving
Let Us Give Thanks
The Kerala Harvest Festival Onam transcends religion and region, making it one of the most important festivals of the state. All signs of abundance and prosperity are incorporated into the celebrations: Elaborate pookalams (mandalas made of flowers and leaves, shown below) adorn the courtyards of homes and business; and elaborate multicourse meals called Onamsadya are served on banana leaves.
The festival celebrates a story, not unlike the Greek myth of Persephone when she was kidnapped to the underworld but allowed to return once a year for the spirit of rebirth in spring. The Kerala story is about a beloved king during a time of great prosperity who sacrificed himself, saving the earth from an avatar of Vishnu. For his devotion he is granted the boon of being able to return to his country once a year to visit his people, who prepare for his coming with an abundant harvest to assure their King that the land still flows with milk and honey. Continue reading
Kerala’s Finest
Changing the Land
A previous post described the beliefs about land usage that settlers brought to New England, and the resulting impact on the environment. The same source material (Cronon’s “Changes in the Land”) provides a fascinating description of what Native Americans had been doing to “improve the land” since pre-Columbian times.
In southern New England they would burn large areas of the surrounding forest once or twice a year, creating forests that Europeans saw as “open and parklike.” The fires would consume all the undergrowth so that the result was “a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage.” Wherever Native Americans in southern New England lived, the English traveler (1633) William Wood noted, “there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground.”
Thevara, Morning Walk
Bird Of The Day: Dark Fronted Babbler–Male (Gavi, India)
Balancing Act
Stacked stones at Samaria Gorge on the Greek island of Crete
Many of us enter a wilderness area to get away from the obvious signs of human habitation. We go to commune with nature, to be awed by rock, tree or water that has power and age beyond what we can comprehend.
Ancient ruins and other cultural conservation sites have no less appeal. To stand near a structure built with the often inexplicable ingenuity of early civilizations can be literally breathtaking.
The desire to leave a time capsule of that moment by means of a scratched name and date is nothing new. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Mayans, not to mention Eighteenth Century Romantic Poets have succumbed. (Lord Byron’s carved name on a column of the Temple to Poseidon at Cape Sounion, Greece is likely one of the world’s most famous pieces of graffiti.) Continue reading
In Mumbai Traffic
For anyone who has lived in a great city with street-level public transit the experience is familiar: traffic is a lullaby; snooze; random awakening; the window frames something that seems important. There are plenty of visual reasons to take a bus, for residents as well as visitors. This view was taken from such a window in Mumbai a few days ago, at a place that evoked a strong memory. Neither was it 5th Avenue at 60-something Street, nor was that Central Park behind the wall. But it was, for a moment. For one particular person. A madeleine, of sorts?
Just a moment later, before the cab started moving again:
Organikos 
