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Where there’s a will there’s a way! Can internet technologies help combat global warming?
01 08 2010 Image from Coalition of the Willing web page The Federal Environment Agency (UBA) of Germany has just released an interim report entitled “Environmental and economic effects of the Copenhagen pledges and more ambitious emission reduction targets.” The report describes the...
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Attack of the Buttock-Biting Spider and Other Myths
01 08 2010 “The trouble with the world is not that people know so little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.” This observation from Mark Twain is one of many illuminating quotes in an examination by Richard Vetter of...
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Why do referees sometimes get it wrong?
12 07 2010 I think everyone would agree that soccer referees have a very difficult job. They have to keep a close eye on a fast-moving game in which incidents often occur away from the ball, and need to make decisions in an...
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Travel advice: Watch out for the mozzies!
09 07 2010 The Hand Picked blog is not perhaps a place where you'd normally expect to find pictures of celebrities. And fear not, we're not going down the route of showbiz gossip. But sometimes celebrity news and serious topics overlap. And the...
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What can you do with 12,000 solar cells?
08 07 2010 Image from solarimpulse.com Power an airplane, of course! A team of Swiss engineers, led by Mr. Andre Borschberg and fellow aviator Bertrand Piccard, have been doing just that for the past few years - building an airplane powered entirely by...
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What can you do with 12,000 plastic bottles?
08 07 2010 Plastiki departing from San Francisco-photo by Catherine Sparks How about a 20-metre catamaran? That’s what British adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild and his crew of scientists and ecologists are sailing on, from San Francisco to Sydney since mid-March. Read...
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Cutting The Salt
08 07 2010 Salt reduction is a hot topic at the moment in the US and the UK as officials react to research that suggests decreasing salt intake could decrease levels of stroke in the population. Consumers can do a lot to reduce...
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Health Literacy in action
01 07 2010 This blog is contributed by Dr. Arthur Culbert, a member of the Global Health advisory board, and Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Health Literacy Missouri (HLM), USA. On May 27, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released...
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Luxury insect hotels
30 06 2010 Today is the last day of National Insect Week in the UK. Now that England are out of the World Cup we might all be spending a bit more time in our gardens! So I thought I’d finish the week...
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New hope for vultures?
30 06 2010 The vulture population in South Asia has declined catastrophically in the last 2 decades, with population decreases since 1992 reported to be over 97% (Senacha et al., 2008). With populations of three of the Asian vulture species decreasing from the...
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Darwin’s finches threatened by invasive nest maggots in the Galapagos Islands
30 06 2010 Contents of a Darwin’s finch nest: dead nestlings with larval feeding wounds surrounded by parasitic larvae of the introduced fly Philornis downsi. As mentioned in another entry on this blog a few weeks ago, 2010 has been declared International Year...
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Entomotherapy: Revolting Recipes or Marvellous Medicine?
30 06 2010 During our daily job of searching through journals for articles to add to CAB Abstracts database we came across an article all about entomotherapy (use of insects for medicinal purposes) in tribal communities in Arunachal Pradesh, India. So I’d like...
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Bad times for bees and the budget!
22 06 2010 The first UK government budget is out today and, just as importantly, this week is National Insect Week. Continue reading to find out why, just as the UK budget, bees and other pollinators are going through tough times. Honeybees, bumblebees,...
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Celebrating insects
22 06 2010 This week is National Insect Week in the UK. With over 900,000 different species, insects comprise over 70% of all known species and inhabit all habitats apart from deep ocean, so it’s hardly surprising they get a whole National Week...
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Time to become greener and cleaner
16 06 2010 Photo credit: Katherine Bourg That is what US President Barack Obama suggested, during his first national address from the Oval Office since he took office, and it comes the evening before his crucial meeting with BP's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, and...
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Greening the FIFA World Cup 2010
13 06 2010 As this year's biggest world sporting event 'the FIFA World Cup 2010' opened today in sunny South Africa, I couldn't help but wonder 'how 'green' is this major sporting event?' It turns out it might be greener than I thought!...
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Nanotechnology, Miracle or Menace?
10 06 2010 This debut blog is contributed by our editorial intern Elizabeth Milway, an Oxford University graduate with a background in biochemstry & bionanotechnology. Recently wherever I turn nanotechnology keeps cropping up! At first I thought - maybe it’s one of those...
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HIV transmission and maize consumption in subSaharan Africa
10 06 2010 A BBC World Service news item alerted me this morning to a landmark study hypothesizing a link between consumption of fumonisin-contaminated maize and HIV transmission. The report suggested that HIV rates in subSaharan Africa could be significantly reduced by altering...
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Many species, one planet, one future
10 06 2010 'Many species, one planet, one future’ was the theme for this year’s UN World Environment Day (WED), which was celebrated last Saturday 5th June and it echoed the urgent call to conserve the diversity of life on our planet. Read...
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The greenest government ever?
02 06 2010 Image from govtech.comThe new UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced recently, during his first visit to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in London, that the UK central government is aiming at cutting their emissions of CO2 by...
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'orrible things you find in your food
28 05 2010 The other day, I purchased pork & apple burgers from the local farmers’ market. The first 3 went down a treat, shared between myself, my daughter and my husband. But suddenly in the 4th one, my husband discovered a squashed...
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Highlighting International Day of Biodiversity – 22 May 2010
28 05 2010 Saturday 22nd May 2010 is International Day of Biodiversity. In fact, the UN designated this whole year of 2010 as ‘International Year of Biodiversity’ and I’ve been writing news articles for the CABI Environmental Impact database (EI) throughout the year...
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Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation
28 05 2010 As Vera pointed out in her blog yesterday, this Saturday (22 May) is the International Day for Biodiversity. The theme for this year is ‘Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation: Recognizing the Role of Biodiversity for Human Well-Being’. Poverty alleviation is...
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Pesticidal plants help poorer farmers reduce crop losses
28 05 2010 Earlier today I was leafing through the latest issue of Kew Scientist, and was interested to read about Kew's work with pesticidal plants in Africa. Providing poorer farmers with environmental benign alternatives to expensive, synthetic pesticides, native species with pesticidal...
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Climate change: individuals who are making a difference
14 05 2010 There are probably many environmentally conscious people out there who, like me, feel that the measures taken by governments worldwide to tackle CO2 emissions are moving too slowly to halt the inexorable rise in global temperatures. In a week when...
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