US to Meatpackers: Don't Do Mad Cow Test

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to
keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered
cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted
beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all
of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested
its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the
expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The
ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said
Tuesday it would appeal - effectively delaying the testing until the
court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. The first,
in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been
imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The
third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to
a false positive that would harm the meat industry. U.S. District Judge
James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the
government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority
to restrict it.

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Algae Biodiesel May Soon Be Reality

by Green Options Blogger Clayton Bodie Cornell. Originally published May 24, 2007.



The biodiesel community has always been marked by spirited enthusiasm, a clear sense of mission, and the dream that biodiesel could one day play a significant role in our energy future. That dream may soon be a reality. Researchers at Utah State University say that farming algae, with reported oil yields of 10,000 gallons per acre, could become an economically feasible biodiesel feedstock by the end of the decade.



This is the Holy Grail of biodiesel: an oil source that could make a serious dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Our most productive feedstock today, the oil palm, doesn’t even come close with yields of 635 gallons/acre, and is followed distantly by the U.S. standard, soy, at 48 gallons of oil/acre.





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Pentagon Limits Troops' Web Access...

Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in
Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then "to basically keep my friends and family up to date" back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers. No more using the military's computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the
Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department's computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

"I put my blog on there and my family reads it," said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

"It scares the crap out of them sometimes," he said.

"I keep it as vague as possible," he said. "I'm pretty responsible about it. It's just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here" he said.

He's regularly at a base where he doesn't have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He'll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department's network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Gore sees 'spiritual crisis' in warming

Playing equal parts visionary, cheerleader and comedian, Al Gore brought his message of how to fight global warming to a capacity crowd of receptive architects Saturday in San Antonio.

The former vice president referred continually to a "new way of thinking" that is emerging in the country and offered hope in the battle to control the effects global warming will have on the planet.

"It's in part a spiritual crisis," Gore told the crowd in the Convention Center at the American Institute of Architects national convention. "It's a crisis of our own self-definition — who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not."

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S Pacific to stop bottom trawling

BBC News



A quarter of the world's oceans will be protected
from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South
Pacific nations have agreed.

The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which
experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that
suffocate marine life.

Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.

The South Pacific contains the last pristine deep-sea marine environment.

It extends from the Equator to the Antarctic and from Australia to the western coast of South America.

The high seas encompass all areas not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a country.

'Precautionary measures'

The agreement reached in the coastal town of Renaca in Chile will come into force on 30 September.

It will close to bottom trawling areas where vulnerable
marine ecosystems are known or are likely to exist, unless a prior
assessment is undertaken and highly precautionary protective measures
are implemented.

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Memo to media and pundits:

The public wants Dems to be confrontational with Bush and the GOP.



TMP Cafe



"...the choice the public faces isn't between "fighting" and "gridlock" on the one hand, and "bipartisan cooperation" on the other. Rather, it's between (a) accepting the disastrous Bush/GOP status quo; and (b) backing Democratic efforts to change it. And the public supports the latter. Even though those efforts are partisan and confrontational. Is that really so hard to fathom?



In a front page Washington Post article today by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton about how the Democratic Congress is faltering, the reporters quote Leon Panetta making the case that  Dems had better watch out and not be too confrontational with the White House:



    "The primary message coming out of the November election was that the American people are sick and tired of the fighting and the gridlock, and they want both the president and Congress to start governing the country," warned Leon E. Panetta, a chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House. "It just seems to me the Democrats, if they fail for whatever reason to get a domestic agenda enacted ... will pay a price."



Panetta, it appears, has become the go-to person for reporters eager to make the case that Dems are at risk of overreaching or failing. Indeed, it just so happens that this is the second time in just over a month that WaPo has gone to Panetta to get a quote arguing this. Funny coincidence, that.



But let's put that aside and ask a larger question: Is it really true that the public is fed up with partisanship and "sick and tired of the fighting," as Panetta says, and as David Broder and Joe Lieberman keep lecturing?



No doubt one could dig up polls showing that people don't like generically defined "fighting" or "gridlock." But here's another way to look at this: The polls show clearly that the public strongly supports efforts by Dems to confront Bush both on Iraq and on corruption. Check out the numbers in this recent Pew poll:

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Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

ROME (AP) — Organic food has long been
considered a niche market and a luxury for wealthy consumers. But
researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to
organic agriculture could actually help fight world hunger while
improving the environment.

Crop yields initially can drop as much as 50%
when industrialized, conventional agriculture using chemical
fertilizers and pesticides is converted to organic. While such
decreases often even out over time and promote other benefits, the
figures have kept the organic movement largely on the sidelines of
discussions about feeding the hungry.

Researchers in Denmark found, however, that
there would not be any serious negative effect on food security for
sub-Saharan Africa if 50% of agricultural land in the food exporting
regions of Europe and North America were converted to organic by 2020.

While total food production would drop, the
amount per crop would be much less than previously assumed, and the
drop in world food prices that resulted could be mitigated by
improvements in the land and other benefits, the study found.

A similar conversion to organic farming in
sub-Saharan Africa could help the region's hungry because it could
reduce their need to import food, Niels Halberg, a senior scientist at
the Danish Research Center for Organic Food and Farming, told the U.N.
conference on "Organic Agriculture and Food Security."

FIND MORE STORIES IN: UN | Food and Agriculture Organization | Crop | David Paul Morris | Organic

Farmers who go back to using traditional
agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive
chemicals and would grow more diverse crops that are more sustainable,
the report said. In addition, if their food is certified organic,
farmers could export any surpluses, bringing in cash since organic food
has such premium prices.

Alexander Mueller, assistant director-general of
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, praised the report
and noted that projections indicated that the number of hungry people
in sub-Saharan Africa was only expected to grow.

Considering that the impact of climate change
will target the world's poor and most vulnerable, "a shift to organic
agriculture could be beneficial," he said.

The Rome-based FAO's Nadia El-Hage Scialabba,
who organized the conference, pointed to other studies of a
hypothetical food supply that she said indicated that organic
agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the current
world's population.

One such study, by the University of Michigan,
found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least
2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world's current
production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per
day, researchers reported.

"These models suggest that organic agriculture
has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional
agriculture today, but with reduced environmental impacts," Scialabba
said in a paper presented to the conference.

However, she stressed that the studies were only that — economic models.

The United Nations defines organic agriculture
as a "holistic" food system that avoids the use of synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the
health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in
120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba
said.

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Researchers: Organic push won't hurt world food supply

ROME (AP) — Organic food has long been
considered a niche market and a luxury for wealthy consumers. But
researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to
organic agriculture could actually help fight world hunger while
improving the environment.

Crop yields initially can drop as much as 50%
when industrialized, conventional agriculture using chemical
fertilizers and pesticides is converted to organic. While such
decreases often even out over time and promote other benefits, the
figures have kept the organic movement largely on the sidelines of
discussions about feeding the hungry.

Researchers in Denmark found, however, that
there would not be any serious negative effect on food security for
sub-Saharan Africa if 50% of agricultural land in the food exporting
regions of Europe and North America were converted to organic by 2020.

While total food production would drop, the
amount per crop would be much less than previously assumed, and the
drop in world food prices that resulted could be mitigated by
improvements in the land and other benefits, the study found.

A similar conversion to organic farming in
sub-Saharan Africa could help the region's hungry because it could
reduce their need to import food, Niels Halberg, a senior scientist at
the Danish Research Center for Organic Food and Farming, told the U.N.
conference on "Organic Agriculture and Food Security."

FIND MORE STORIES IN: UN | Food and Agriculture Organization | Crop | David Paul Morris | Organic

Farmers who go back to using traditional
agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive
chemicals and would grow more diverse crops that are more sustainable,
the report said. In addition, if their food is certified organic,
farmers could export any surpluses, bringing in cash since organic food
has such premium prices.

Alexander Mueller, assistant director-general of
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, praised the report
and noted that projections indicated that the number of hungry people
in sub-Saharan Africa was only expected to grow.

Considering that the impact of climate change
will target the world's poor and most vulnerable, "a shift to organic
agriculture could be beneficial," he said.

The Rome-based FAO's Nadia El-Hage Scialabba,
who organized the conference, pointed to other studies of a
hypothetical food supply that she said indicated that organic
agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the current
world's population.

One such study, by the University of Michigan,
found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least
2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world's current
production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per
day, researchers reported.

"These models suggest that organic agriculture
has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional
agriculture today, but with reduced environmental impacts," Scialabba
said in a paper presented to the conference.

However, she stressed that the studies were only that — economic models.

The United Nations defines organic agriculture
as a "holistic" food system that avoids the use of synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the
health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in
120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba
said.

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Freeze 'condemned Neanderthals'

A sharp freeze could have dealt the killer blow
that finished off our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals, according
to a new study.

The ancient humans are thought to have died out in most parts of Europe by about 35,000 years ago.

And now new data from their last known refuge in
southern Iberia indicates the final population was probably beaten by a
cold spell some 24,000 years ago.

The research is reported by experts from the Gibraltar Museum and Spain.

They say a climate downturn may have caused a drought,
placing pressure on the last surviving Neanderthals by reducing their
supplies of fresh water and killing off the animals they hunted.

Sediment cores drilled from the sea bed near the
Balearic Islands show the average sea-surface temperature plunged to 8C
(46F). Modern-day sea surface temperatures in the same region vary from
14C (57F) to 20C (68F).

In addition, increased amounts of sand were deposited in
the sea and the amount of river water running into the sea also
plummeted.

Southern refuge

Neanderthals appear in the fossil record about 350,000
years ago and, at their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters
dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to
Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago.

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Climate change 'can be tackled'

The growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed
at reasonable cost, experts at a major UN climate change conference in
Bangkok have agreed.

Boosting renewable energy, reducing deforestation and improving energy efficiency can all help, they said.

This is the third report this year from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and aims to set out
the costs and benefits of various policies.

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri said the report was "stunning".

Full Article

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Organism found at SRS amazes scientific world

By Rob Pavey| Staff Writer
Augusta Chronicle

Monday, April 30, 2007

One of the world's tiniest celebrities hails from one of the planet's toughest neighborhoods.

Its story began a couple of years ago, when scientists fished a
strange slime off a probe used to examine decades-old, high-level
nuclear waste inside tanks stored at Savannah River Site.

"At first, nobody was sure what it was," said Christopher "Kitt"

Bagwell, a senior scientist at the top-secret Savannah River National
Laboratory.

Turns out, the greenish-orange slime was alive.

The more it was studied, the more it enamored scientists who were
fascinated with its ability to survive radiation doses thousands of
times greater than what is considered lethal to humans.

"Finding an organism in such a toxic environment is very unexpected," said Dr. Bagwell, who will present a paper about the bacteria - dubbed kineococcus radiotolerans - to the American Society for Microbiology next month.

In addition to thriving in the face of normally-lethal radiation, the organism also demonstrates remarkable survival characteristics in terms of its DNA.

Humans and most organisms can tolerate few breaks in DNA molecules, he said, but kineococcus radiotolerans has the ability to reassemble itself.

"With this organism, we can take an intact DNA molecule, blast it
into little pieces, and in five to six hours the organism is restored
and growing normally again," Dr. Bagwell said.

Dr. Bagwell and others who have studied the organism hope further
research will yield clues that could aid in medical research, cancer
studies and other areas.

"There's a lot of excitement about this organism because of its
ability to withstand tremendous abuse," he said. "What we don't know is
how it does these things - and what more it can do. That's the
direction we're going now."

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