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Intellectual activity blamed for obesity epidemic
05 09 2008 Its becoming a hobby of mine, spotting odd reasons for the obesity epidemic. Here's the latest: don’t read the next bit too closely and certainly don’t analyse it because the intellectual activity could be bad for your body weight. That’s...
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ICPP 2008
03 09 2008 CABI’s presence was strong at this year’s International Congress of Plant Pathology (ICPP). The 9th congress, entitled “Healthy and safe food for everybody”, was held in the Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino, Italy. There were participants from 84 countries and 1430...
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Pollinator Presence Plummets
03 09 2008 National Wildlife Week in Canada was from 6-12 April and this year’s theme was pollinators. Hot on its heels was National Pollinator Week in Washington D.C. from 22-28 June. I am pleased to see an upkeep of the pollinator profile....
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The first great ape to go extinct?
29 08 2008 A worrying thought indeed that any of our great apes should be facing extinction yet a paper recently published in Oryx reveals the latest figures for orang-utans in the wild ...and it doesn't make for comfortable reading.
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Water recycling - bathing in greywater!
26 08 2008 Yes, it is happening already! Greywater, which is non-industrial wastewater generated from domestic processes such as dish washing, laundry and bathing, comprises more than 50% of residential wastewater. It gets its name from its cloudy appearance and from its status...
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Why do some countries win more Olympic medals?
20 08 2008 Looking at the medal table as the Beijing Olympics enter Day 12, it is clear that while the Olympics include more countries than the United Nations, a relatively small number still dominate the medals. While 76 countries have 'medalled' at...
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Hide and seek: 125,000 gorillas found in Congo
19 08 2008 Thomas Breuer ©WCS-Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology More than 125,000 western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) have been discovered deep in the isolated forests of the Republic of Congo. This new find is a huge boost to their population,...
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If you can’t stand the heat…
15 08 2008 We have often encountered the first law of thermodynamics in this blog, or at least as it applies to obesity. This week the Second Law - the law that governs entropy and the movement of heat -has taken centre stage...
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…get out of the kitchen
15 08 2008 One of the implications of all this energy we waste to swap coffee and wheat is that we're giving climate change a helping hand. The contribution made by today's food production systems to climate change globally will have tremendous impacts...
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How do those Olympic swimmers do it?
15 08 2008 With Michael Phelps well on his way to a record haul of gold medals in the Olympic pool, and much discussion in the media about the 12,000 calorie diet he eats in training (don't try it at home, is the...
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First PEFC certified construction project
14 08 2008 It may look like a large, odd-shaped mud hut but this is actually the Beacon building at the Zaragoza 08 Expo, the water and sustainable development expo running until 14 September in Spain. In July this became the first construction...
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Recent Televison Reviews
13 08 2008 Well it has been a veritable delight of televisual output from the BBC in recent weeks with “Lost Land of the Jaguar” and “Britain from Above”. If you have missed any of these and are lucky enough to have access...
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Protecting our chocolate supplies - controlling cocoa pests and diseases in West Africa
31 07 2008 I love chocolate ' I really do ' but we take it for granted that it will always appear on the shelves of our local shops. Most of us are oblivious to the many pests and disease that are attacking...
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Disease outbreaks on the map
30 07 2008 Earlier this month I came across an article in the BMJ about HealthMap, a website that automatically monitors and disseminates information on disease outbreaks; some of the people involved describe it in more detail in an article1 in PLoS Medicine....
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The Chinese Mitten Crabs US invasion reaches eastern coastline
29 07 2008 The Chinese Mitten Crab (Eriocheir sinensis), originally a native of East Asia, quickly invaded the European coastline as well as the western coast of the US. Now it looks as if their pincher movement to invade the US is complete....
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The Plot Thickens
25 07 2008 Allotments are hip and trendy at the moment, but for how long? Well, a little longer than it would take to eat £15 worth of food from your local grocery store I hope. I am reliably informed that this is...
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EU soil maps atlas
23 07 2008 As readers will know I have a fondness for the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC) and their publications (see previous post). Well they have produced another corker with the Soil Atlas of Europe. The 128 page Atlas can be downloaded...
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Waste no more!
22 07 2008 As I was screening publications for the CAB Abstracts database this morning, I came across an environmentally encouraging bit of news ' Anglian Water is producing enough biogas from its new advanced digestion system to deliver 980kW of energy at...
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You say tomato, I say cardioprotective antiplatelet factor
18 07 2008 Studies directly on platelets show that tomato juice and kiwi fruit juice are both potent at preventing platelet aggregation.
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Obesity & Diet -a new twist
17 07 2008 It's not what you eat but what your mother eats that could set your bodyweight, suggest scientists at Baylor College of Medicine. Robert Waterland and colleagues studying mice with a genetic tendency to overeat found that successive generations of the...
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Pesticides persist in ground water
16 07 2008 Numerous studies over the past 40 years have established that pesticides & herbicides, typically applied at the land surface, can move downward through the soils unsaturated zone to the water table at detectable concentrations. This downward movement of pesticide degradation...
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New tool to fight viruses?
09 07 2008 A new device caught my eye this week. Marketed by Aethlon Medical, it claims to treat HIV and other viral infections by removing viral particles from the blood. Aethlon claims the device could be used against HIV, hepatitis, and biological...
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Beijing in Bloom
04 07 2008 The organizers of the Beijing Olympics have much to contend with at the moment ' including a massive bloom of blue-green algae that is currently engulfing the Qingdao coastline. The BBC, reporting from the region, say that more that 10,000...
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Go with the flow
02 07 2008 This article in the Independent caught my imagination back in March. A company called Marine Current Turbines is using their SeaGen project (pictured) to generate electricity from the tidal movement of water in and out of Strangford Lough in Northern...
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Nutrition at the extremes of life
02 07 2008 The Rank Prize lecture yesterday afternoon was a very interesting romp through the world of public health nutrition with Professor Ricardo Uauy. A difficult name to pronounce for many of us non-Spanish speakers (he’s originally from Chile), but a clear...
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