Today's Fresh Blogs...

• NYTimes ScienceTimes: About us humans — 237 reasons for sex, game playing, the subconscious (and other topics too)

  Published: July 31, 2007, 11:21 am

  Tags: Science Stories, Health Amp Medicine Stories, Environment Stories

  Today’s p.1 in ScienceTimes coheres thematically around why we do what we do. The three up front: one from John Tierney in his Findings column on a survey’s 237 conscious explanations for having sex (variations on lust, procreation, prestige, love, just-gotta-have-it, duty…); a marvelous and surprising lead piece by

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• Seattle PI: Off Washington, a first for US - reef of glass sponge

  Published: July 30, 2007, 2:59 pm

  Tags: Science Stories, Environment Stories

  The picture is great and Lisa Stiffler has a good yarn to go with it in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A U of Washington (or you-dub to locals) geologist found a reef dominated by glass sponges recently, about 30 miles off shore and 650 feet down. Until not so long ago, it says here, scientists only knew glass sponge reefs from fossils. Then some

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• NYTimes: In Uncertain Texas, a singular lake targeted for extreme makeover

  Published: July 30, 2007, 2:36 pm

  Tags: Environment Stories

  This may be news to lots of us. Texas has just one lake of the natural kind. One hundred sixty five out of 166 “lakes” are artificial reservoirs and such. The Times’s Ralph Blumenthal visits that 166th one (shared with Louisiana) near the town of Uncertain. There wildlife biologists and crews working for them are about to wham

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• AP, dailies, etc: Hurricanes and global warming, another roundy-round among dueling researchers

  Published: July 30, 2007, 1:31 pm

  Tags: Environment Stories

  of blowhards ). Other stories: USA Today Dan Vergano; Miami Herald Martin Merzer; Irish Examiner John von Radowitz; Bloomberg Jim Efstathiou Jr. ; BBC Matt McGrath; LA Times (via Newsday) Thomas Hayden; LiveScience Andrea Thompson; Grist for the Mill: NCAR Press Release; Georgia Tech Press Release;

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• Canadian Dailies: Wind power - booming, or cooling?

  Published: July 30, 2007, 10:18 am

  Tags: Environment Stories

  Canada has dithering schisms similar to those of the US and most European countries on energy, climate change, and the whole green energy quest. To wit, a fine contrast in wind power coverage is blowing across the northern landscape (presuming a few newspaper copies always wind up as rolling trash). First up is in the National Post, by Dakshana

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• AP: The KillaCycle. Maybe this is how to make macho guys into energy-sipping eco-freaks

  Published: August 1, 2007, 11:45 am

  Tags: Science Stories, Environment Stories

  The AP’s Aaron Clark had a story the other day that’s about burnt rubber and the local drag strip. Its topic is one of the swifter drag bikes on the tour. Power is by rechargeable, lithium-ion batteries of the sort that General Motors wants to use in its 100-mile-per-gallon vehicle. (The car could be available in 2010 if it can get

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• New Scientists, LA Times, SF Chronicle, etc: Is the office printer a micro-particle polluter too?

  Published: August 1, 2007, 1:11 pm

  Tags: Health Amp Medicine Stories, Environment Stories

  Environmental Science and Technology, an American Chemical Society journal, is a report from Australia raising a sharp news ripple. It says laser printers emit a worrisome number of ultra-fine particles, chemistry unknown but potentially hazardous. The study is from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, and from the Queensland Dept

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• SF Chronicle: In China’s Anyemagen Mountains, melting glaciers spell trouble

  Published: August 1, 2007, 11:05 am

  Tags: Environment Stories

  Here’s an enterprising and well-reported piece by a roving Chronicle reporter and editor, Robert Collier. He reports from Qinghai Province, next to Tibet and mountainous in its own right, that glaciers are shrinking fast, that local and national officials all agree that it’s due to greenhouse warming, and that they say the plateau is

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• BBC, Agence France Presse, etc: Asian Brown Cloud warms lower atmosphere

  Published: August 2, 2007, 12:22 pm

  Tags: Environment Stories

  would of course persist. -CP Stories: Scientific American David Biello; AFP (via Melbourne Herald Sun); AP; ABC (Australia) Timothy McDonald; Bloomberg Joi Preciphs (wotta byline. Evokes happy rain); New Scientist Kate Ravilious has that, on a planetary scale, light-scattering aerosols in the cloud still seem to tip to an overall cooling; Daily

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• Santa Cruz Sentinel: Man on jet ski shoos lost whale back to sea. Uh oh. Could mean illegal marine mammal harassment.

  Published: August 2, 2007, 1:31 pm

  Tags: Environment Stories

  The other day a young gray whale found itself swimming around and possibly confused in the harbor at Santa Cruz, California. yesterday morning it was gone. Now it turns out a local with a jet ski went to work like a sheep dog Tuesday night. He shooed it back into vast Monterey Bay, a broad, open bight through which the whales migrate annually. The

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• Autoweek, NYTimes: X-Prize contest for best 100 mile per gallon car

  Published: August 2, 2007, 9:22 am

  Tags: Environment Stories

  The X-Prize organization sponsored a contest for the first sub-orbital passenger rocket (won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen’s SpaceShip One) and has an ongoing competition underway for a real long-shot, a space elevator. Now along comes one that ought to get plenty of qualified entries. Autoweek’s Joe Kovach has an account of it

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• New Yorker, KQED-TV: Bee colony collapse, long form…

  Published: August 2, 2007, 9:19 pm

  Tags: Science Stories, Environment Stories

  We’ve seen plenty on bee colony collapse disorder, that mysterious malady that is emptying bee hives as the adults fly off, sick and confused, and don’t come back. Maybe virus, maybe cyclical and no big deal, maybe it’s an apocalypse for domesticated pollinators so farmers will need to court moths, wasps, butterflies, native

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• Wires: UN getting into high gear for a post-Kyoto protocol treaty

  Published: August 3, 2007, 11:18 am

  Tags: Environment Stories

  likely provisions. -CP More stories: Reuters Evelyn Leopold (with Deborah Zabarenko); Environment News Service; Xinhua (via People’s Daily); Grist for the Mill: UN Sec’y General Statement Press Release; Related News: Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Australia of 21 finance ministers seems to resonate, without much

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• Tampa Trib, St. Petersburg Times: A dynamo to feed on wave power

  Published: August 3, 2007, 11:51 am

  Tags: Science Stories, Environment Stories

  Efforts to harness the sea’s surging, heaving energy are not new, but not old and tired enough either to deter inventors and other technologists from giving it a try. The Tribune’s Russell Ray takes readers to visit one such effort near St. Petersburg. There engineers from SRI International and U. of So. Florida are rigging up a

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• AP: Hot dry rocks: lots of energy, free for the getting, green as can be, but not cheap either

  Published: August 6, 2007, 12:19 pm

  Tags: Environment Stories

  Drill deep enough, pour in water, and a return line will deliver high pressure steam. Sounds like just the thing to run through a turbine and generator for electricity with no carbon and hardly any other big pollution problem. There is nothing fundamentally new in such geothermal energy schemes. But The AP’s Elaine Engeler and Alexander G.

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