Photo via the New Republic It's a widely held notion that politicians have long been in the pocket of Big Oil. And there's good reason for that perception: oil companies' huge campaign donations, vast lobbying power, and close ties to politicians have ensured that their taxes remain low , that hidden subsidies are around to provide extra funding, and that they receive preferential treatment in US energy policy. But there could be a new, ... View original post here: The Next Big Oil: Big Smart Grid?
So there really isn't anything that deep to this image. It's just a (more or less) life-sized blue whale eye. And on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society site you can educate yourself/be mesmerized/ waste some time for a while staring at it while the entire life-sized animal scrolls across your browser window. Believe me, it's way cooler than you might think:... Read more from the original source: Ever See a Blue Whale Life-Sized on Your Computer? Now You Can
published September 5, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo via kasei.co.uk It turns out that a surprisingly high number of grade schools in Japan are serving their students more than just a well-rounded education. According to the results of a survey released today, whale meat is back on the menu at about a sixth of Japan's public elementary and junior-high schools... Read the full story on TreeHugger ...
Read more...published September 4, 2010 and has No Comments
A tiny baby seahorse was measured off the coast of Dorset, England. Image via the Seahorse Trust . It must have been like finding a needle in a haystack, but somehow, in murky water conditions, diver Neil Garrick-Maidment, the executive director of the Seahorse Trust , spotted a single 1.5-inch-long female baby seahorse "clinging onto a piece of seagrass" ...
Read more...published September 3, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Mr. T in DC via flickr A bit of a sustainable seafood smackdown is ongoing: In a new opinion piece in the journal Nature scientists from the University of British Columbia, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and other institutions have called out the Marine Stewardship Council for not doing a good job at marine stewardship. As is to be ...
Read more...published September 2, 2010 and has No Comments
"We all live downstream from one another," says Alexandra Cousteau. In other words, what we do to the water, we do to ourselves. A third-generation Cousteau explorer, Alexandra is an ambassador of the sea. She's the host of Planet Green's Blue August , is currently traveling the world as a documentarian with her organization Blue Legacy , and, when ...
Read more...published September 2, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo via The Daily Mail The ocean's whales are some of the Earth's most massive and majestic animals, reaching sizes of up to 80 feet long and 150 tons. As the targets of centuries of whaling, they have a violent history -- and are still recovering from an industry that depleted their numbers substantially. But while whales can be ...
Read more...published September 1, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo via JWGA Inc Sometimes the waterway is both greener and faster than the highway. Though ferries are bigger than cars and usually use more fuel, they can carry hundreds of people and cars at one time. Plus, they are also often the shortest route from point A to point B -- meaning a fraction of the mileage that ...
Read more...published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
Image via UCSD What happens inside a whale's head when it encounters sound? The mammals have highly developed capabilities of detecting and processing sound waves, something that helps them communicate over long distances, but which also spell their demise in an ocean filled with intense, loud human-generated noise. We've seen research that shows scientists looking into how too-loud noise ...
Read more...published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo via FreeCat @ Flickr Sometimes a name change can be a good thing (just ask Walter Willison, Jennifer Anastassakis, or Caryn Johnson, who you know as Bruce Willis, Jennifer Aniston , and Whoopi Goldberg). But for these fish, a new name meant new popularity -- and an increased danger of being overfished. Would slimeheads, mudbugs, hogs, and whore's ...
Read more...published August 29, 2010 and has No Comments
Screen capture: About the Vaquita , vaquita.tv The Vaquita porpoise may be living its last days in Mexico's Gulf of California. The demise of the species is imminent, says Chris Johnson, who's spent the last three years on a documentary, "Vaquita - Last Chance for the Desert Porpoise." Johnson hopes the film, available online, will help change the practice ...
Read more...published August 28, 2010 and has No Comments
photo via flickr There's rising awareness about the hard place that the mighty bluefin tuna are in, but some people just haven't gotten the message. Take Sinju Restaurant, in Portland's Pearl District, which still has bluefin on the menu even though many environmental groups, including EDF and Seafood Watch , say to leave it off because the bluefin is ...
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Excerpt from: Today on Planet 100: Planet 100's Top 10 Most Outrageous Stories (Video)
Photo via Wired You may have heard of Simon Singh long before his name rose to the top of the list of those championing sound science: He'd written two bestselling books, Fermat's Enigma and the Big Bang . Despite ...
