Archive for the "Natural Disaster" Category

  • Going, Going,…

    By Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology This century will surely be remembered as the time the Earth bit back—not that Mother Nature hadn't been a little testy before now. In the fourteenth century, plague spread more easily as the population both grew and became more concentrated in urban areas. When Europeans began to travel widely to other parts of the world, they took diseases with them to vulnerable continents—smallpox to the Americas, for example. And, there were plenty of regional examples of cultures, some sophisticated, that declined precipitously, abandoning long-occupied sites where

  • Expert: U.S. population to hit 1 billion by 2100

    If the USA seems too crowded and its roads too congested now, imagine future generations: The nation's population could more than triple to 1 billion as early as 2100. That's the eye-popping projection that urban and rural planners, gathered today for their annual meeting in Las Vegas, are hearing from a land-use expert. "What do we do now to start preparing for that?" asks Arthur Nelson, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, whose analysis projects that the USA will hit the 1 billion mark sometime between 2100 and 2120. "It's a realistic long-term challenge." The nation currently has almost 304

  • Monsanto wants to patent the pig.

    From the corporation which wants to control the world by controlling the food, this video tells how Monsanto wants to patent the pig. But how can a corporation get a patent on something that already exists? http://www.documentarywir... Jane Akre, from that great video about Monsanto, bovine growth hormones, and Fox News, "The Corporation- Unsettling Accounts", is also in this video.

  • Cyclone Sidr has Clearly Caused a Major Disaster

    From Sheril Kirshenbaum & Chris Mooney Folks, We don't know the death toll yet, but Cyclone Sidr has clearly caused a major disaster. I would encourage everyone to blog to encourage your readers to give charitable donations. Sheril put up a videoblog that I think is very inspiring to this end http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/11/from_sheril_bangladesh_needs_y.php Finally, for more information on the disaster, including a map showing population densities of affected areas, see jeff masters