Palin: fruit fly research has gotta go!

Oh for crying out loud...



One of the major benefits of taking biology classes over the last several years has been learning about lab research. Fruit flies are one of the best model organisms to study to help us understand genetics, neurology, and a variety of human diseases. Scientists are currently using fruit flies as genetic models to study diseases such as Parkinson's, Huntington's, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. Sigh. It sure is easy to discount scientific research when you don't take the time to really understand what you're talking about, you betcha!

I've already voted. And you can bet I didn't vote for the ticket that is the most likely to give us another 4 years of ignoring science and research.

Bio lab on barrier island... huh?

The University of Texas will open a new facility next month to study some of the deadliest viruses on the planet, including Ebola, anthrax, tularemia, West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, bubonic plague, avian influenza and typhus. Great, we need to learn more about these viruses! But where is the new facility located? On Galveston Island, a barrier island that is extremely susceptible to hurricanes. It seems like a seriously bad idea to locate a facility like this on an island that will get hit again by a hurricane much worse than this year's category 2 Ike.

I'm one of the weirdos who don't think people should build anything on barrier islands. I've watched over the years as condos and other structures at my favorite beach vacation spots suffered catastrophic damage (some have gotten hit 3 times in my short memory) as hurricanes blew through. Well, let me rephrase that. People should be free to build homes or businesses on barrier islands, but they shouldn't get any federal relief when a hurricane blows through and destroys their home. That might sound harsh, but barrier islands are just not smart places to build anything.

So... I'm just speechless about this lab, especially now that we're entering a more active hurricane cycle. It seems completely crazy and irresponsible to me.

Last-minute presents from the President

Ug, I can't believe that even though the election is in 14 days (14 days!!) we still have to put up with Bush for another 2 months after that. And it sounds like he's trying to make his final mark on Appalachia before he leaves:

The Bush administration is writing one more sad chapter in the long, tortured history of Appalachia’s coal-rich hills. Last week, the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining proposed a revision, amounting to a repeal, of one of the last regulatory protections against an environmentally ruinous mining practice called mountaintop removal.
...
In 2002, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency found itself inconvenienced by a rule explicitly prohibiting the use of mining waste as “fill” in streams and wetlands for development and other purposes. So the administration simply rewrote the regulations.

The nettlesome buffer zone rule still remained in place, so in 2004 the administration began a systematic effort to weaken it as well. That culminated Friday when the Office of Surface Mining sent its proposal for gutting the rule to the E.P.A., whose concurrence is required.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have said in the last month that they oppose mountaintop removal, which may explain the administration’s mad dash to rewrite the rule before a more conservation-minded administration arrives in town. Their opposition also inspires slim hopes among environmentalists that Stephen Johnson, the E.P.A.’s administrator, would withhold his approval. That would be an enormous surprise, but also enormously welcome.

I wonder what other last-minute decisions we can look forward to?

Big Frog

"You know, a guy got killed by a bear up there a few years ago," my friend Angela mused as we discussed our weekend backpacking trip to the Big Frog Wilderness on the Tennessee/Georgia border.

"Oh we'll be fine, I have pepper spray!" I responded.

But in all seriousness, planning a trip to the Big Frog does require some planning. Guidebooks note that many of the trails are unmarked (usually because bears claw up signs) so you have to be able to read a map and use a compass. Most trails feature steep elevation gains (3,000 feet in many cases), so hikers must be in good condition. Plus, encountering a bear is a real concern; hikers must know what to do if they encounter a bear, not to mention know how to keep a clean camp so bears don't think your campsite is a dinner buffet.

We got to our trailhead early in the afternoon, and saw several small groups of car campers lounging around in very nice campsites under the dark hemlock canopy. The trail immediately started uphill, winding back and forth through nice oak/hickory forest. The trail often seemed to cling to the edge of a mountain, with steep dropoffs down into more heavily forested terrain. We kept going up. And up. And up. My legs started to ache. I ate a Snickers to give myself a boost. It didn't work. Finally, after gaining probably 2,500 feet, we gained the top of a ridge, and the uphill jaunts became less tiresome. We encountered a trail marker that was simply a piece of wooden 4x4 stuck into the ground, covered with very large claw marks. The actual sign marking the trails was gone. Someone had written the trail names on the marker in pen (very useful!).

We started looking for a campsite, but everything we'd seen so far had been a steep slope uphill, or a steep slope downhill. No flat spots anywhere, except right in the middle of the trail. We finally came to a saddle that was relatively flat. A small trail led downhill and to the right. There was no trail marker, except for a pile of rocks, so we though "hmm, maybe this leads to a nice campsite." Angela checked it out, and the trail was well used, led to no flat spots, and kept going.

We finally decided that the flat spots along the side of the ridgetop trail were the best we were going to find before dark, so we stopped and set up camp. The view was spectacular. We were very high up by this point, and could see for miles both east and west. Sunset painted the sky vivid red, and lingered long after dusk. We were careful with our food, didn't spill anything, and hung our food on a string well out of reach of bears, or any other clawed creatures that might happen by our camp in the night. I will admit I kept my pepper spray next to my pillow, just in case.

I got up early the next morning to find fog clinging to all the valleys on both side of the ridge. Simply gorgeous. After lounging around drinking coffee then packing up, we headed up the trail (yes, still going uphill). According to the map, the next turn we needed to take was not too far ahead. We hiked a good bit farther that we thought we should. We hadn't seen any other trail markers, so kept going. Finally, we reached another 4x4 trail marker, again with no signs. We looked at the map and thought we knew where we were, and chose the trail we thought was correct. According to the map, the trail would start downhill on a ridge, then head sharply downhill on the side of the mountain. We headed downhill on a ridge. And stayed on a ridge for several miles. We were on the wrong trail. We eventually figured out that the pile of rocks we saw next to the obscure trail Angela checked out was the trail we should have taken.

But we knew which trail we were on, and it just came out of the wilderness a mile or so away from our vehicle. We kept going. We passed yet another trail marker, this time with the actual trail names (along with more bear claw marks and a tuft of bear fur). Eventually, we popped out on an old Forest Service road, which is what we expected. But we had evidently veered off on a side trail, and reached the road much sooner than we should have. We walked for probably 3 miles on this road until finally reaching the road leading to Angela's truck. We walked another couple of miles on the road back to the truck (and happily for me, a peanut butter sandwich). Because of our wrong turn (it was the bear's fault!) we hiked about 5 more miles than we'd planned, gained 3,500 feet in elevation overall, but it was worth it.

For anyone who cares, we started at trailhead 3 on the map, turned left on trail 2 (which featured the first clawed-up sign), and camped near the junction to trail 4. Trail 4 is the one that we missed, marked only by a pile of rocks. We meant to take this trail back to the truck. We continued to Big Frog Mountain and turned north on trail 5 (also unmarked except by a clawed up 4x4) until we reached the road.

The Big Frog was really a treat. It's true wilderness. Even though we didn't actually see a bear, we saw so many signs of bears that we knew they were nearby. I was happy to be in a part of the country where such wild creatures not only live, but evidently thrive.

The coming decline

This is lovely. Not only has the Bush administration and today's GOP destroyed America's moral standing in the world, trashed our economy, socialized our banking system, and broken our debt clock, now I read that the current economic crisis will almost certainly have a disastrous impact on our place as the world's science and technology leader:

Now signs of changing times are more stark, with world leaders frustrated and even angry over a global financial crisis many see as caused by American policy mistakes. Meanwhile the monetary meltdown is likely to force cuts in public and private science and technology investment — a cornerstone of the American economic engine that has historically driven the nation's preeminence.
...

"Long term, I think prospects also get shakier," he said. "We are the world’s science and technology leader. Graduate students want to come here to study, and often to then work. This has been slipping as industrializing countries enhance their own R&D [research and development] capabilities and universities, and as terrorism fears make it harder to come here. I would anticipate that the next U.S. administration will have to face the reality of balancing its budget or face bankruptcy. That will likely squeeze federal R&D funding, worsening these trends."

It won't be just U.S. researchers that suffer, of course.

There could be "very dramatic reduction in available funds for research in all sorts of countries," said Richard Leakey, a paleoanthropologist who has unearthed important fossils of ancient humans in Africa. Leakey notes that a lot of science funding comes from institutions and donations by wealthy individuals, two sources that are dealing with their own reduced balance sheets. "I think it's extremely worrying for science," he said.

I knew the Bush administration was hostile to science. I guess they've succeeded in ensuring that the next president will be hard-pressed to make research and development a top priority. That's too bad since the way we'll solve our most serious problems (fuel, climate change, food security) are all based on science.

Food production, climate change, and national security

There's a fascinating article on the New York Times webpage about food production and how we need to change the way we look at food in the coming years. I've long thought the way we subsidize farmers to grow huge monoculture crops is pretty ridiculous, but it's actually now becoming dangerous for a variety of reasons. Here are some sobering statistics:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

The article goes on to discuss some really interesting points about how food production is tied to climate change, and even national security. The amount of fossil fuel we use to simply grow food makes us even more reliant on foreign countries. This article has some great ideas on how to reform our food production systems to get away from the glut of fossil fuels, monoculture crops, and get back to real food production.

The ideas outlined in this article include many of the reasons I don't eat hardly any meat, avoid packaged food like the plague, and buy as many veggies as possible from my local farmer's market. If you're interested in climate change, energy issues, and how food production is polluting our world, you need to read this article.

Poem for the day

I was going through some old books and found an enormous English lit text with a tattered post-it note marking the following:

LXXII

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture: I can see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be

A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,

Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,

And with the sky -- the peak -- the heaving plain

Of ocean, or the stars, mingle -- and not in vain.

This is a very short section from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, a writer of the same generation that turned out classics such as Frankenstein. Just thought I'd post this section that jumped out and grabbed me the first time I read it, and still speaks to me today.

Big news for cavers and conservation

For many years I've been a member of a great grassroots conservation organization called the Southeastern Cave Conservancy. They were the first conservancy to focus solely on caves, and they now own more than 1,250 acres, 60 caves23 cave preserves, and over $1.5 million in land assets. The amazing thing is all of their purchases have been funded 100% from donations from the caving community. Just recently the SCC bought yet another, and in my opinion, its best property yet. It's Surprise Pit, part of Fern Cave in Alabama. Surprise Pit is 437 feet deep, the deepest vertical drop in the state, and one of the deepest in the country. It's quite an achievement for this group! The pit is just one small part of a cave complex with five entrances and over 16 miles of very complex passage. In addition, the cave is the winter home to over 1.5 million gray bats.

This is a cave my husband and I really love and spend a lot of time visiting, so we're heading up the fundraising effort for the purchase. We're going to have a lot of work to do as in the coming years, but we're really looking forward to it.

(photo from Willie Hunt's web page: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~willie/)

Here are some other photos from my friend John Van Swearingen IV:


Here's the ledge going out to the pit. It's a 437 drop off to the left...

Oekologie here on November 15

Blogging has been very light lately as I've been busy with a number of things in real life. But one item of note: Oekologie, which has been on a brief hiatus as Jeremy and I have been swamped, will resume here on November 15. If you have a blog post about ecology or environmental science, send me a link and I'll add it to the carnival! Or, just fill out the submission form available here (for some reason you'll have to scroll down to find the submission form).

Oh, and everyone needs to visit Jeremy's blog and harass him about resuming blogging. We miss him!