The news is in: Carnivores are back in style in Europe. If you like big kitties, brown bears, wolves and wolverines, they’re returning to Europe, and not where you’d necessary expect them. While you might imagine that they’re hanging out in conservation areas and regions specifically set aside for preserving wildlife, they’re also showing up outside those zones, which is a real conservation victory, and a model of helping animals and people live together.
St. Louis Rams center Jason Brown has left the NFL to pursue farming: … “Brown is doing this to help the less fortunate. He grows sweet potatoes and other vegetables and donates his harvest to food pantries. According to the New & Observer, he has given away 46,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 10,000 pounds of cucumbers this fall.”
Read more http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/26/1347677/-29-year-old-leaves-NFL-and-37-million-contract-to-become-farmer-in-order-to-feed-the-hungry?detail=email
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/29/1348326/-9-Million-Solar-Panels-Spanning-9-5-Sq-Miles-World-s-Largest-Solar-Farm-Becomes-Fully-Operational?detail=email
It was, Charles Darwin wrote in 1879, “an abominable mystery”. Elsewhere he described it as “a most perplexing phenomenon”. Twenty years after the publication of his seminal work The Origin of Species, there were still aspects of evolution that bothered the father of evolutionary biology. Chief among these was the flower problem. … Today’s plant scientists understandably have a better handle on the origins of flowering plants than Darwin did, but they are still struggling to explain the group’s diversity, and why despite this it has failed to become dominant in some parts of the world.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world
“In collaboration with John Coleman, professor of phonetics at Oxford, we spent six years producing the best possible reading,” [Dr. Gareth ] Owens, a linguist researcher with the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, told The Huffington Post in an email.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/28/ancient-cd-rom-phaistos-disk-code_n_6055178.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
The Cambridge, England-based Solar Cloth Company is beginning to run trials of its solar cloth, which uses lightweight photovoltaic fabric that can be stretched across parking lots or on buildings that can’t hold heavy loads, such as sports stadiums with lightweight, retractable roofs. Perry Carroll, Solar Cloth Company’s founder, told BusinessGreen that the company is working to close deals to install solar cloth on 27,000 parking lots.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/14/3592449/solar-cloth-parking-lots/
David Cohen understands that mosquitoes aren’t just pesky annoyances — they’re global killers, too. That’s why the 12-year-old from Dallas invented a robot that drowns the pests using a pump-jet system that traps them underwater using mesh. He submitted his work to the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge earlier this year and is one of the competition’s ten finalists.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/david-cohen-robot-invention_n_5976982.html
Where once there were 15, now more than 1,000 giant tortoises lumber around Espanola, one of the Galapagos Islands. After 40 years’ work reintroducing captive animals, a detailed study of the island’s ecosystem has confirmed it has a stable, breeding population.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29801967
The Kashmir musk deer, which is one of seven similar species found throughout Asia, is endangered due to habitat loss and also because of poachers hunting the animal for its prized scent glands. No members of the species had been seen in Afghanistan by scientists since 1948.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/02/fanged-deer-kashmir-musk-deer-afghanistan_n_6089996.html
They started on the project after learning about the 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa. The girls came up with an experiment that resulted in seriously impressive results that are considered a breakthrough in crop yield technoology: When a gardening project went awry, they discovered a naturally occurring bacteria in soil called Diazotroph. The girls determined that the bacteria could be used to speed up the germination process of certain crops, like barley and oats, by 50 percent, potentially helping fulfill the rising demand for food worldwide.
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/26/1332621/-Three-16-year-old-girls-win-Google-s-global-science-competition-with-breakthrough-project?detail=email
