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Science Tuesday - Food, TB, and Elk
Dec. 18th, 2007 09:56 am
The Way We Live Now: Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN, The New York Times, December 16, 2007
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
( Read More )
A replica of the fossil found in a quarry in Turkey, right. A stylus points to lesions from tuberculosis.
Signs of TB in Ancient Skull Support Theory on Vitamin D
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, December 18, 2007
In the disease-scarred bones of a Homo erectus from Turkey, scientists have found evidence of a peril that human ancestors encountered in their migrations out of Africa: tuberculosis.
Paleontologists examining small lesions etched inside the 500,000-year-old skull said this was the earliest known sign of a form of tuberculosis that attacks the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain. Previously, the earliest physical traces of TB were only a few thousand years old, in mummies from Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru.
( Read More )
National Park Plans to Cull Its Herd of Elk
By KIRK JOHNSON, The New York Times, December 16, 2007
DENVER — The elk population that roams and sometimes rampages through the delicate landscape of Rocky Mountain National Park is out of control and will be reduced through a program that will use sharpshooters to cull the herd, park officials said last week.
The plan, which is expected to receive final approval by the National Park Service next month, would involve killing up to 200 of the animals each year beginning in 2009.
( Read More )
By MICHAEL POLLAN, The New York Times, December 16, 2007
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
( Read More )
A replica of the fossil found in a quarry in Turkey, right. A stylus points to lesions from tuberculosis.
Signs of TB in Ancient Skull Support Theory on Vitamin D
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, December 18, 2007
In the disease-scarred bones of a Homo erectus from Turkey, scientists have found evidence of a peril that human ancestors encountered in their migrations out of Africa: tuberculosis.
Paleontologists examining small lesions etched inside the 500,000-year-old skull said this was the earliest known sign of a form of tuberculosis that attacks the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain. Previously, the earliest physical traces of TB were only a few thousand years old, in mummies from Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru.
( Read More )
National Park Plans to Cull Its Herd of Elk
By KIRK JOHNSON, The New York Times, December 16, 2007
DENVER — The elk population that roams and sometimes rampages through the delicate landscape of Rocky Mountain National Park is out of control and will be reduced through a program that will use sharpshooters to cull the herd, park officials said last week.
The plan, which is expected to receive final approval by the National Park Service next month, would involve killing up to 200 of the animals each year beginning in 2009.
( Read More )
