GreenWatch

B. McPherson                 This film shows an earlier version of water repelling glass. Researchers working with nanotechnology at MIT have invented a new kind of glass. The possibilities for the new glass seem endless. Because of the special non-glare, self-cleaning surface engineered by the scientists, always clean car headlamps, more efficient solar panels, an end to window washing all seem possible. Of course, like many new inventions, this nano-glass will likely take some years to filter down to every day use. The description of the work is found in   MIT NEWS . In a nod to Mother Nature, the scientists gave credit for their inspiration to Nature’s structures such as lotus leaves and insect eyeballs.

Captain Pete Bethune has left the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society organization. Actually, he left October 2010. I just happened to run across his You Tube video explaining why he felt the need to resign. Many of you will remember that Bethune was captain of the high tech Ady Gil.  That was the ship that was in a collision with a Japanese whaler in the Southern Ocean and subsequently sunk. After the sinking Bethune made a daring boarding of the Japanese ship in an attempt to arrest the captain. He was taken to Japan where he spent four months in prison and was given a suspended sentence and deported. His version of events differs from the Sea Shepherd's reasons for leaving. Because I have been a cheerleader for the Society's efforts to dissuade the hunting of whales, I felt I should put on both sides here. You will have to judge for yourselves which is the more truthful.

B. McPherson Paul Watson and his crews of animal activists have announced their intention to disrupt the mass slaughter of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands. Their campaign recorded by Whale Wars Animal Planet is called Operation Ferocious Isles. They will be seeking to divert migrating pilot whales away from the Atlantic islands and failing that, interfere with the actual, bloody killing in the bays. The Faroe Islands are located in the frigid North Atlantic between Iceland and Scotland. These islands are ultimately administered by Denmark although they are independent in most of their internal affairs. The people are descendants of Gaels who settled the islands in the 6 th century and Norsemen who cling to their traditions, one of which has set them against animal rights activists – The Grind. The Grind or grindadrap is a slaughter of pilot whales after having herded them into a shallow bay. The Faroese traditionally depended on whale meat to supplement their di...

B. McPherson There’s an arms race going on in N. America’s cornfields. The race is developing genetically modified crops to resist ever more lavish spraying of herbicides. An early winner in the weed race was Monsanto, a corporation that developed seeds containing weed genes that could resist the spraying of that other Monsanto product, Roundup. Roundup was an effective weed/plant killer for many years, but gradually as Nature will do, some weeds survived Roundup to reproduce. So farmers sprayed Roundup(or the generic glyphosate) in ever heavier doses. The effect has been to breed a wide number of SuperWeeds that will not die when sprayed with the herbicide. Now rival Agro company Dow AgroSciences has developed a GM corn that carries a gene resistant to Dow Chemical’s herbicide 2,4-D. It is seeking to be allowed to start widespread planting of the genetically altered seeds in time for the 2013 crop year. Fields planted with the new corn, dubbed Enlist, could be ...

B. McPherson Put a new word into your vocabulary -- biofortified. The Harvest Plus organization is researching and breeding plants with enhanced micronutrients. This is not the high tech gene manipulation so in the news with companies like Monsanto. It is going back to basics in plant husbandry. Howath Bouis initially floated his ideas about breeding food plants with increased micronuturients in 1994 when the shine was still on the science of gene swapping. He received little support for his initiative Harvest Plus. Now that the prospect of gene altered plants has been found wanting, Bouis has improved the amount of zinc, iron and a precursor to Vitamin A in cassava by selecting varieties higher in the micronutrients to plant, selecting the offspring that are higher yet, planting those and so on until the desired plant content is reached. The technique of artificial selection has been used by farmers for thousands of years and has given us such familiar organisms ...

B. McPherson                                                 This short film explains very well the greenhouse effect on Earth. While the world is focussing on the production and release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, other gasses are quietly adding to the catastrophe. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and nitrous oxide is 300 times more efficient at keeping the Earth warmed. While much of the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of the element nitrogen, it is the nitrogen in reactive compounds that is starting to worry atmospheric scientists. The Green Revolution was made possible by the industrial production of chemical fertilizers. It, combined with antibiotics has allowed the Earth’s population of humans to swell from 1.6 billion at the beginning of the 20 th century to seven billion this year. Nitrogen is a key nutrient in plant growth. Unfor...

B. McPherson This little brown bat has white nose syndrome. Note the white dusting on its muzzle Some bat populations hit hard by White Nose Syndrome have rebounded in their numbers in some caves. Researchers in New York have counted increased populations of little brown bats this spring.  In some caves and abandoned mine shafts the population had plummeted by 90% to 100% due to the fungal disease. While it is too early to cheer the spring bat counts as some of the population could have been missed during earlier counts, biologists are hopeful that this signals the rebound of the bat population. Many people do not realize that bats are an important contributor to pollination and insect control, eating thousands of insects in their nightly excursions. With the death of millions of bats in eastern Canada and south in the US as far as Alabama, insect pests were expected to escalate. White nose syndrome is a fungal disease that appeared in bat caves about six yea...