Recent Stories with tag science

Remember the bee crisis? I still remember the peculiar mixture of disbelief and shock that arrived with the news. Bees, such indomitable, energetic creatures, were mysteriously dying off. And you know what? The epidemic is still in full swing: The U.S. honeybee population may be in terminal decline.

At the final screening of Queen of the Sun at SIFF, I spoke with Portland filmmakers Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz about their wild, entertaining, and thoughtful documentary on global bee health and welfare. Local note: cellist Jami Sieber did the score. (They're working on a theatrical release, so stay tuned. I vote for "Mead Night" at Central Cinema.) 

Siegel mentioned he remembers the shock to his system when he first saw an article on colony collapse disorder, years ago. At the time, his daughter was three years old, and he had visions of the fruitless, un-pollinated world that might await her.

Bee fact! "The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination." No bees, no almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon....

I know, if you survey a shelf of recent documentaries, you might be tempted to conclude that the jig is up, and we might as well all look into assisted suicide. We plunge from crisis to crisis, from peak oil, global warming, and global economic meltdowns, to food that's killing us, superbugs, and the autism epidemic. 

But while Queen of the Sun opens with colony collapse, and spends time rounding up the likely suspects (varroa mites, the acute paralysis virus), Siegel and Betz have really made a poignant film about relationships. Siegel said that while he started making the film as a response to the crisis, he soon realized that human-bee relations (out of balance as they are currently) was his real, more instructive subject, not a parade of people saying, "There's a real problem here! And here's how we solve it." He and Betz decided that there was an untold love story that needed telling, instead.

And they would add one more twist....

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Science is happening as these government employees feed radioactive waste to sheep at Hanford!

For people of a certain age, each new ecological horror story that emerges from the Hanford clean-up project holds a special fascination. It reminds us of the glorious, prelapsarian days of the late Cold War, when we didn't have to worry about global warming or Islamic terrorists because we all knew we were going to die in a nuclear apocalypse. Ah, childhood!

So it was with sweet memories of grade school and my dad forcing me to watch Red Dawn (because "this is going to be you some day") rolling through my head, that I read this morning's New York Times story on how the feds are searching out radioactive rabbit droppings by helicopter.

Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.

Frankly, I'm just impressed anything can live there at all. Mother Nature is truly impressive. Oh, and do I need to point out this was paid for with $300,000 in stimulus money? Apparently locating radioactive critters wasn't important enough to include in the main operating budget.

If you share my fascination with this disgusting hell-on-Earth that science has created for us, don't forget that Hanford is now the most sought-after tourist destination east of the Cascades! Last year, the Department of Energy opened a limited number of public tours that booked within hours. There's no set date yet for when registration for 2010 tours opens, but you can check at this link. It's Super Fund for the whole family!

And one final note: Why the hell are they remaking Red Dawn?

This Saturday at the Central Library downtown at 11 a.m., team-members from MIT's SENSEable City Lab will be in town to discuss their TrashTrack program. Over the summer, MIT researchers dropped tiny tracking devices into the garbage in NYC and Seattle to track their progress through the waste-management system and see where they wound up. Well, this week is presentation time, as the NY Times noted in an article this morning. The results can be fascinating, some of which are available on the program's blog. But the big news will all be on display starting this weekend. There's a presentation from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Microsoft Auditorium, followed by a reception from 12:30-1:30 on the fifth floor.