Posted in In The News on Apr 16th, 2007
[Environmentalism, Friedman, Geo Green]I’ve talked in these pages about Tom Friedman’s Geo-Green ideas before (here, and here), but I’ll summarize it again quickly: geo-green means being green for the sake of national and economic security as much as for traditional environmentalist reasons. For the feature article in Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine, and his longest writing […]
Posted in In The News, Book Reviews, Opinion on Mar 13th, 2007
[Capitalism, Climate Change, Conservation, Environmentalism, Pragmatism]You’re forgiven if you have missed it, but there’s a rhetorical war being waged on blogs and in the tradition media for the soul of the modern environmental movement. I’ve written of this concept before, and as I see it there are two primary groups involved: the conservationists and […]
Posted in In The News, Informative Articles on Nov 14th, 2006
[Economics, Energy, Policy, RAND, Renewable]Perhaps you may have seen this story floating about: RAND (a non-partisan research institute, or think tank) released a study today concluding that the most likely scenario is that renewable energies will cost no more than nonrenewables in 2025. To be a little more explicit, if the nation gets 25% […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Oct 27th, 2006
[Armadillo Aerospace, Space, Space Advocacy, Space Exploration, X Prize]If you happen to have been reading this blog for the last year or so, you may have noticed that I sometimes find myself at odds with Jeffrey Bell, the occasional opinion writer at Space Daily.com. Here’s a link to his latest column, but let me […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Jul 31st, 2006
[Biology, DNA, Synthetic, Terrorism, Viruses, Weapons]Today’s Washington Post has an article about how synthetically-produced pathogens may become a viable means of bioterrorism. The article itself is a fairly broad overview of an immense subject, and as such lacks some important details (like who the researchers are that are working on synthetic microbes, I wanted […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Jun 15th, 2006
[Environment, Marine Reserve, Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Oceanography]Yesterday President Bush signed an executive order designating the Northwest Hawaiian Island chain as a protected marine reserve.
This is a significant move for a number of reasons, but primarily it’s because President Bush’s environmental record up to this point looks pretty terrible. The National Resources Defense […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on May 24th, 2006
[Criticism, Science, Space Elevator, Space Exploration]One of the treasured axioms of scientific inquiry is that science is incapable of proving something to be true; it can only prove that something is untrue. However, that statement does not mean that science is necessarily capable of proving that something is impossible. Scientists are fond of […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Mar 30th, 2006
[Administration, Cancer, Contamination, EPA, Groundwater, TCE, War on Science]Starting in the early 1980s, it became clear that the common industrial degreasing agent Trichloroethylene (or TCE, for short) might increase the risk of cancer in those exposed to it. Since then, over 80 studies have been published on the possible toxicological effects of TCE exposure. […]
Posted in In The News on Mar 16th, 2006
[ESA, Mars, Mars Express, Planetary Science, Space, Water]Following the discovery of what appeared to be an ice-filled crater early this year, the MARSIS team announced that they have discovered a thin layer of water ice surrounding the southern polar ice cap. Though the layer is not very thick, its extent means that it contains […]
Posted in In The News on Mar 15th, 2006
[Astronomy, DNA, Double Helix, Life, Nebula, Spitzer]One of the reasons that astronomy appeals to so many people are the stunningly beautiful photographs of nebulae throughout our galaxy. Tomorrow’s edition of the journal Nature features a paper that explains just how a cloud of gas was twisted and formed into a double helix shape. […]
