It happens every summer when tourists pass through the ancient burial caves on their way to Mt. Pulag in the Philippines: they can’t keep their hands off the mummies. According to the Philippine Inquirer, local officials are still promoting the popular trek this year, but they “have a piece of advice for visitors: respect the…Continue Reading…
Right now the biggest contagion is fear. So if you’re looking for varied, broader perspective, the N.Y. Times provides it here.
In the coming days, lots of people are going to be dazed and confused (and increasingly edgy) from the Swine Flu-athon already in media overdrive. I’ve been trolling around for a one-stop shop that offers virus authority in a readable, lighthearted manner. Maggie Koerth-Baker to the rescue, courtesy of boingboing.
This thoughtful essay argues for reconciling the institutional divide between history and archaeology. Daniel Lord Smail, a professor of history at Harvard, writes that The discovery of “˜deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of biology, archaeology and geology. We are only…Continue Reading…
Uh oh, looks like someone’s stuck in reverse. Must be a slow day on the global warming “media stunner” watch if Romm’s picking over a three-week old interview, as if it was a fresh scab. I guess he didn’t read part one and part two of this colorful memo from one of his Grist colleagues.
Still can’t fathom why global warming isn’t more of a bugaboo to the average American (unlike, say, a case of pandemic hysteria)? Read Nate Silver’s take on this survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication. The survey contains various permutations of questions and lots of…Continue Reading…
Half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people already rely on emergency food aid. Now, according to this UN dispatch, food shortages are being compounded by elephants eating and trampling the villagers’ crops. The scenes sound like something out of a Hitchcock movie, with villagers also guarding their agricultural fields from marauding baboons, wild pigs, and flocks…Continue Reading…
I’m confused. Several weeks ago Stephen Payne at Oil and Gas Investor said the latest James Bond movie taught him a valuable lesson, which he boiled down to this: in order to have access to oil, geopolitics unfortunately requires politicians to have a sort of flexible morality when it comes to from where we import…Continue Reading…
Discovery. You just never know what’s going to turn up during that pre-trial phase.
This op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that “environmental engagement” could serve as sort of a back-door channel for easing U.S.-China tensions: Environmental collaboration is unlikely to hit politically sensitive buttons, and thus offers great potential to deepen dialogue and cooperation. Military-to-military dialogue can facilitate the sharing of best practices on a range of…Continue Reading…