On our trip to Iceland last year, I fell in love with this unique country, with its stark, fragile natural beauty and its friendly, quirky inhabitants. I learned a bit about the Icelanders, and I think I understand why they want to resume whaling.
Please don’t do it, Iceland.
There are many better ways to assert [...]

Computers are not a green product. Their production, use and disposal consume huge amounts of energy and involve toxic chemicals. At work, I buy and decommission dozens of computers every year, and I worry a lot about the impact of my decisions on our environment. So I find the Greenpeace “Guide to Green Electronics” very [...]

What a week: Snow and Tornadoes in South Africa and a deadly heatwave in the US. In the US, the Midwest and East Coast were cooking - New York declared a heat emergency with temperatures of up to 38°C/101F and a heat index of up to 110F/43°C. Here in Bahama it was sweltering, too, with [...]

Most Germans, I think, would profess to “love nature.” yet, when “nature” has claws and teeth, it must die.
Naturliebe auf Deutsch: gepflegte Waldwege zum Wandern, ein sauberes Gasthaus zum einkehren, ein paar Rehe am Waldrand. Bloss kein Stress. Ein wilder Bär? Ein “Risikobär??” Das kann ja wohl nicht sein! Der muss abgeschossen werden befor [...]

Happy solstice to all you Wiccans!

It’s spring and the wildlife in the woods is going - uh - wild!
Chipmunks
The cats are out hunting every day. They catch frogs, lizards, shrews, and chipmunks. Yesterday I saw Deha, the Siamese, in the driveway, hovering over what I thought was fresh kill. So I went to see what she got, and found [...]

Today is Africa Malaria Day and this year the focus is on the need to provide universal access to artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). ACTs are the newest hope for making serious progress toward defeating the Queen of Diseases.
African children are dying of malaria at the rate of one every 30 seconds. Take a minute to [...]

Julia makes it all the way to the top of “The Rock” at yesterday’s Earth Day Celebration at Duke.

The Nicholas School at Duke had a great Earth Day Celebration. Matt and I manned the Piedmont Biofuels booth.

Last week I finally got to watch this strange movie “Grizzly Man” about Tim Treadwell, the ultimate bear nut. Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in Alaska literally among huge grizzly bears. In October 2003 Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie were killed and eaten in their camp in the park by one of [...]

Shark fin sup is considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark’s fin is “regarded as a tonic food and an aphrodisiac, the Chinese believe shark’s fin strengthens the internal organs and retard aging,” explains a recipe. The sharks that supply their trademark body parts to this dish are caught using longlines. Fishermen then cut off the [...]

As this year’s record-breaking hurricane season officially ends (tell that to Epsilon), the residents of the Canary Islands are picking up from the devastation caused by tropical storm Delta. Delta was the first tropical storm recorded to ever get anywhere near the Canary Islands, according to Jeff Masters. Although is was not officially classified as [...]

What an extraordinary hurricane season! I wonder if this is the first tropical storm recorded to have hit Africa?

Tropical Storm Delta slammed into Spain’s Canary Islands last night at near hurricane strength, killing at least seven people. One man died when he was blown off the roof he was trying to repair, and six African [...]

Hurricane Wilma is another record-breaking phenomenon - let’s hope this monster stays away from land, or at least from densly populated areas. Meteorologist Jeff Masters is pretty excited about Wilma:

There has never been a hurricane like Wilma before. With an unbelievable round of intensification that saw the pressure drop 85 mb in just 12 [...]

Tropical Storm Wilma is the 21st named storm of this season, making this the busiest hurricane season ever. Considering that this season included one of the worst natural disasters on the US mainland (Katrina) and one of the 30 deadliest hurricanes (Stan), as well as one of the easternmost hurricanes ever (Vince), this is a [...]

This is the first time a letter “V” storm was recorded since they started naming storms in the N. Atlantic. And Vince is one of the eastern-most tropical storms ever recorded, Jeff Masters notes:

Vince is in a strange location, but not unprecedented. Vince is pretty far east–16.6 West longitude at the 5am EDT advisory–but there [...]

With his bare hands an Australian surfer fought off a shark that thought he was lunch - the BBC reports:

“He was just sitting on the board waiting for the next wave… and it just hit him from underneath and knocked him off, then actually just took his board and was dragging him and he had [...]

The Discovery Institute does not like all this fuss?! What are they worried about? Isn’t god on their side?

A twist in the case is that a leading proponent of intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, removed one of its staff members from the Dover school board’s witness list and opposed the board’s [...]

With creationism and “intelligent design” in the offensive across America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial has the potential of becoming another Scopes Monkey Trial - the famous 1925 trial that allowed the state of Tennessee to keep anti-Darwinism statutes on the books. Only this time the roles are reversed. In Kitzmiller v. Dover parents [...]

Hurricane Ophelia is pounding the North Carolina coast, and looking at the comments in Jeff Masters Wunderground blog, some of the residents of the Outer Banks are getting a bit nervous. They might be in for 10 hours of 70MpH winds. The N&O’s blogwatch has more.