Consider the Source: Farm runoff, chlorination byproducts, and human health

EWG Report || Consider the Source: Farm runoff, chlorination byproducts, and human health: "The first ever nationwide assessment of chlorination byproducts in drinking water, released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), shows that more than one hundred thousand women are at elevated risk of miscarriage or of having children with birth defects because of chlorination byproducts (CBPs) in municipal tap water. CBPs are formed when chlorine reacts with organic material in the water. The Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC lead the list for the number of pregnancies at risk in individual communities or water systems, while Texas tops the list for number of pregnancies at risk statewide.

Chlorine is added to tap water to kill microbes. But chlorine also reacts with organic matter, including sewage, animal waste, and soil and plant material that comes from run-off caused by agriculture and urban sprawl to form harmful CBPs. At least ten major peer-reviewed epidemiological studies have shown elevated risks of birth defects and miscarriages for women drinking chlorinated tap water. In addition, the U.S. EPA has estimated that CBPs cause up to 9,300 cases of bladder cancer nationwide every year. [...]"

Africa 'makes excuses on climate'

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Africa 'makes excuses on climate': "Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, says African governments should do more about climate change..."

"She criticised the way in which firewood and charcoal cost people less than electricity. "In the long term", she said, "using wood will cost us more. It's a very expensive resource.

"The tree is an empowering symbol: when you've planted one, something happens to the environment. It's not the only solution, but it's something most of us can do. [...]"

Peace gives hope in land of cattle and guns

Guardian Unlimited | Christmas appeal | Peace gives hope in land of cattle and guns: "...Milk is fine for fattening children but sorghum, the red-eared cereal that towers above men's heads, is the staple food.

In the clearing in front of Mrs Yak's mud hut, two of her daughters use long wooden poles to pound sorghum grains into a paste. Her harvest was poorer than she hoped, but at least there is something to eat.

'We eat once a day, before we go to bed,' she said. 'I make ugali [mash] from the sorghum and we have it with okra stew, mixed with a little fish.'

The crop was grown from seeds lent to the family by the village seed bank. Funded by the aid agency Concern, the seed bank is run by local elders who distribute sorghum, groundnut and cowpea seeds to the neediest families.

In Yirol and the neighbouring county of Awerial, Concern is finding ways to help farmers boost their yields. Scarcity of seeds is one problem. Another is the fact that cultivation is traditionally done by hand.

Aid workers have shown locals how to harness those prized bulls to pull ploughs. The ox-drawn plough has vastly extended the acreage which can be brought under cultivation.

There are hopes of a brighter future for south Sudan after a peace deal signed between the government and rebels in May, but the long years of war have left the south desperately underdeveloped. [...]"

fun with plastic bags

Bernie DeKoven's FunLog: The Sack Circle: "Insofar as it is a ring made out of a plastic grocery sack, we're calling it the Sack Circle. Invented by field researcher Elyon, my son the doctor, DeKoven, the grocery store plastic Sack Ring brings a new source of games for junkyard sporting. "

NPR : Retelling the Tale of the Feather Trade

This story is a perfect example of popular culture changing unsustainable consumer habits.

NPR : Retelling the Tale of the Feather Trade: "An article in Audubon Magazine recalls the 19th century effort that ended the feather trade. Until a public outcry stopped the practice, thousands of birds across North America were slaughtered to provide decorations for women's hats."

Natural History: Mothers and Others - cooperative breeding

Natural History: Mothers and Others - cooperative breeding: "So how did our prehuman and early human ancestresses living in the Pleistocene Epoch (from 1.6 million until roughly 10,000 years ago) manage to get those calories? And under what conditions would natural selection allow a female ape to produce babies so large and slow to develop that they are beyond her means to rear on her own?

The old answer was that fathers helped out by hunting. And so they do. But hunting is a risky occupation, and fathers may die or defect or take up with other females. And when they do, what then? New evidence from surviving traditional cultures suggests that mothers in the Pleistocene may have had a significant degree of help--from men who thought they just might have been the fathers, from grandmothers and great-aunts, from older children.

These helpers other than the mother, called allomothers by sociobiologists, do not just protect and provision youngsters. In groups such as the Efe and Aka Pygmies of central Africa, allomothers actually hold children and carry them about. [...]"

The Damnable Persistence of Human Nature

BrothersJudd Blog: : "But there is an important qualifier. When primates compete, they do so in ways that increase the survival chances of their offspring. In other words, they do it for their children. ''At this moment in Western civilization,'' Hrdy says, ''seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care. So it's not that women aren't competitive; it's just that they don't want to compete along the lines that are not compatible with their other goals. [...]

This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of job-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.

Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men. [...]"

Non-Western Folk Belief: Another Way To View Procreation

Science Blog -- Non-Western Folk Belief: Another Way To View Procreation: "The standard evolutionary scenario argues that these behaviors were replaced by an arrangement where men and women foraged for different resources and males provisioned females and their young in return for paternity certainty from females who were now receptive year round. However, this scenario assumes that the Western folk belief about how children are conceived is universal.

'Not only does the contrary idea of partible paternity exist in many South American groups, but these groups have managed to create societies where families exist and successfully raise children even though they have multiple fathers,' said Beckerman. 'In fact, there may be an evolutionary benefit to children in having more than one responsible father.'

Two previous studies indicate that children with multiple fathers have higher survival rates than children with only one recognized father. The secondary fathers accept a responsibility to the child and may supply meat or fish to the mother for the child, or protect the child from various childhood dangers."

dam research

Geyler: "For over 50 years, Arch Hurley Conservancy District has used the approximately 40 miles of main canal and 350 miles of smaller ditches and laterals constructed as part of the Tucumcari Project to deliver water, on average, to almost 700 different parcels of irrigated land. We deliver annually about 1.33 acre-feet of low-cost irrigation water to over 42,000 acres of irrigable land. Project water is used mainly for cattle, cattle feed, wheat and other cereal grains. The average value of these crops is $2.7 million dollars, or approximately $80 per acre of irrigated land.

To date, this area has not realized the full economic benefit of the irrigation project's water. While the per-acre yield from these irrigated lands is markedly higher than for most of their nonirrigated neighbors, these irrigated lands are used basically to produce the same crops grown on a 'dryland' basis on adjacent acreage. Only sporadically over the project's fifty-year history have these irrigated acres been used to produce higher dollar value crops. Until this transition occurs permanently, the dream of Messrs. Briscoe, Freeland, Hurley, and Jones will not be truly complete."