Posts

April 04, 2013

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4:40 PM | Why did 28,000 rivers in China suddenly disappear?

Amar Toor, writing for The Verge: “Our research has shown that in some areas, especially in north China, rivers are drying up or turning into seasonal rivers,” Ma said in a phone interview with The Verge. There are several explanations for this phenomenon, including deforestation and, to a less certain extent, climate change, though Ma [...]∞

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10:14 AM | Men, STEM, and Balance: Gilbert

What do you do when the old model no longer works? Our culture used to take it for granted that women would sacrifice their careers to raise the kids, while men sacrifice their family life to build their career. It’s still tilted that way despite decades of effort toward a more egalitarian society. But the [...]

April 03, 2013

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4:59 PM | L.A. synchronizes its stoplights

Ian Lovett, reporting for the New York Times: Other cities have chased to keep up, adopting centralized control of at least some traffic signals. But Los Angeles has remained at the forefront, with a system that is not only more widespread, but also faster and more autonomous than most others. Now, the magnetic sensors in [...]∞

April 02, 2013

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9:27 PM | Shorts: Radiolab Presents: TJ & Dave

Improv comedy puts uncertainty on center stage -- performers usually start by asking the audience for a prompt, then they make up the details as they go. But two actors in Chicago are taking this idea to its absolute limit, and finding ways to navigate the unknown.

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6:17 PM | Correlation, Speculation and the Periodicity of Environmental Journalism

Thomas Hayden, writing for The Last Word on Nothing: So if it’s not sun spots, and it’s not just an inherent societal attention span, what else could be driving the ups and downs of environmental reporting, at mainstream outlets at least? I think it comes back to the faddishness of journalism. The news business is [...]∞

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5:34 PM | “Endling”

Wikipedia: An endling is an individual animal that is the last of its species or subspecies. Once the endling dies, the species becomes extinct. (Via Lucas Brouwers.) ∞∞

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4:13 PM | A Slice of London So Exclusive Even the Owners Are Visitors

Sarah Lyall, reporting for the New York Times: Along Elizabeth Street, home to a Poilâne bakery outlet and tony boutiques, foot traffic the other day was very slow. A Belgravia resident from Colombia, who was shopping at a pet store where dog beds go for $358 and cat blankets for $289, said that there were [...]∞

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3:59 PM | The less obvious impacts of glacier change

Once again, health issues have limited my online time over the past few weeks. But I made sure to meet my prescheduled commitment to the CSWA blog: a post covering [...]

April 01, 2013

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5:20 PM | Men and Work-Life Balance in STEM Careers

A recent article at Double X Science expressed a fundamental fed-upness with the way the media profiles women in science. The problem is the inordinate focus on things typically considered a woman’s work – “however do they balance all that lady stuff and a career?!” Gosh. Oh, and here’s a little bit about the science. [...]

March 29, 2013

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5:41 PM | $230 billion

That was the cost in 2010 of China’s environmental degradation, according to the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning. Put another way, it’s 3.5 percent of GDP. This being an “official” number from the Chinese government, I’m guessing it’s a low-ball estimate. ∞∞

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4:32 PM | Mystery (maybe) solved

John Noble Wilford, reporting for the New York Times: The reddish barren spots, thousands of them, are called fairy circles, the name itself an invitation to try to solve the mystery of their origins. They dot a narrow belt of desert stretching from Angola through Namibia into northern South Africa. For no obvious reason, the [...]∞

March 28, 2013

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7:09 AM | Zonia Baber: “The Public May Be Brought to Understand the Importance of Geography”

Zonia Baber (1862-1955) is one of those people you aspire to be and fear you will never manage to become even half as good as. And I only chose her as our first Pioneering Woman in Geology because of her name. I had this list of women I knew next to nothing about, and I [...]

March 27, 2013

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3:01 PM | ■ Can you tell urban from rural?

If you were given a section of a map, could you tell if was from a city or the countryside? The answer to that question may be trickier than you expect. I pondered this a year and a half ago when I wrote, “ ‘countryside’ is inherently interpretable term, one that depends more on how the [...]

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12:38 PM | Pioneering Women in the Geosciences: Introduction

When asked for early geologists, all of us can rattle off names. Some of us may remember Nicolas Steno, the father of stratigraphy. We certainly mention James Hutton (father of deep time) and Charles Lyell (father of modern geology). Some of us would even throw Charles Darwin’s name in there for his work on volcanic [...]

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1:55 AM | Mid-21st Century Modern

Matt Novak takes a delightful look at how 1960s Space Age architecture influenced The Jetsons. ∞∞

March 26, 2013

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10:00 PM | Are You Sure?

This hour, we walk the tightrope between doubt and certainty, and wonder if there's a way to make yourself at home on that razor's edge between definitely...and not so sure.

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6:15 PM | The Suburban Idea

Graeme Davidson: For more than 150 years, Australia was itself a mental suburb of England, taking many of its ideas ready-made from the world’s metropolis, London. Clever. Suburbanism isn’t necessarily based on location, but a state of mind. I couldn’t agree more. Having grown up near a big city, people often referred to my town [...]∞

March 23, 2013

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6:14 PM | Ice Jams: A Powerful & Messy Problem

It’s spring in our northern cold climates, and that usually means ice jams. Got a shot yesterday of a small one on the Oldman River, just south of Lethbridge. Why [...]

March 22, 2013

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8:34 PM | Long Exposure Tree Landscapes

Stunning photography by Pierre Pellegrini. (Via David Dobbs.) ∞∞

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4:56 PM | What Shall We Conserve?

Hillary Rosner, writing for Ensia: For years, conservation has centered on species: the gray wolf, the spotted owl, the Devils Hole pupfish. We go about protecting ecosystems by first protecting the singular species that live there. So what happens when that “singular” species turns out to be two or six or 10 genetically distinct types [...]∞

March 21, 2013

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8:20 PM | Danger Zone! The New Madrid Seismic Zone

Malachite asked an excellent question I’m actually well-placed to address without further research. Yay! New curiosity: what the heck is that danger zone where Missouri meets Tennessee? Heh. Pretty startling, innit? That great big target painted on Middle America, my friends, is the New Madrid Seismic Zone. In 1811, it broke in a big way, [...]

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4:20 PM | What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?

Annalee Newitz, writing for io9: You hear a lot about “next gen” science and technology, but not so much about will happen to human societies and cultures in the future. To fill the gap, we asked three futurists and one science fiction writer what social changes we should expect to see in the next century. [...]∞

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10:21 AM | On The Necessity of Geology

There is an urgent need for talking and teaching geology. Many people don’t know it. They think geology is rocks, but if they’re not rock aficionados, it’s nothing to do with them. So our K-12 schools inadequately teach the earth sciences (pdf). People don’t learn about geology, and they grow up to move to hazardous [...]

March 20, 2013

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4:41 PM | From really bad to pretty bad

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the state of America’s infrastructure every year. Good news: We rated a D+ this year, up from a D last year. Hooray? ∞∞

March 19, 2013

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9:00 PM | REBROADCAST: Emergence

This spring, parts of the East Coast will turn squishy and crunchy -- the return of the 17-year cicadas means surfaces in certain locations (in patches from VA to CT) will once again be coated in bugs buzzing at 7 kilohertz. In their honor, we're rebroadcasting one of our favorite episodes: Emergence.

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7:07 PM | Apple MapKit vs. Google Maps SDK

Michael Grothaus interviews app developers Lee Armstrong and Bryce McKinlay about their experiences with Apple’s and Google’s mapping software development kits, or SDKs. Surprise: Neither is perfect. ∞∞

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6:44 PM | Crowdsourcing Pioneering Women in the Geosciences

Did you know it was a woman who discovered that the earth has a solid inner core? Or that Bascom Crater on Venus was named for the first woman geologist hired by the USGS? Were you aware that two 19th century women wrote and illustrated the standard reference work on British graptolites? Or that a [...]

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5:50 PM | Data mining 101

Brooke Borel has a nice primer on data mining over at Last Word On Nothing. ∞∞

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4:15 PM | Is It Time to Move Past Urban Studies and Toward Urbanization Science?

Eric Jaffe, reporting for the Atlantic Cities: Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to [...]∞

March 15, 2013

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2:04 PM | ■ What are the odds a meteor will destroy a city?

Sources: Ivezic, Zeljko. 2013. Personal communication. Schneider A., Friedl M.A. & Potere D. (2009). A new map of global urban extent from MODIS satellite data, Environmental Research Letters, 4 (4) 044003. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003

Schneider A., Friedl M.A. & Potere D. (2009). A new map of global urban extent from MODIS satellite data, Environmental Research Letters, 4 (4) 044003. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003

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