Traces of Red Panda Found in Tennessee
It has the face of a giant panda bear and the body of a small raccoon. This unusual, cuddly-looking animal is the red panda, and until recently, was only believed to be native to the mountains of Nepal, Burma and China.
Now, according to recent fossil findings, it appears the enigmatic red cousin to the black-and-white panda once roamed the long-ago forests of Tennessee.
Red pandas or lesser pandas (Ailurus fulgens) only real relation to giant pandas is they are both bamboo eaters. Lesser pandas also eat berries, fruit, mushrooms and lichens. Considering its modern diet and geographic distribution – areas where bamboo grows in the wild – I wonder if the Tennessee of 4 million years ago had wild bamboo forests. A good scientific journal article on the red or lesser panda here – Genetic Diversity and Population History of the Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens) as Inferred from Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variations. Taxonomic adjustments as to where to place an animal are made all the time and thus lesser pandas have had a taxonomic journey that included being grouped with bears and cats. DNA analysis has made modern taxonomy more exact than ever. Lesser pandas now have their very own family designation Ailuridae and fall under the superfamily Musteloidea, which includes weasels, raccoons and skunks. Red pandas are endangered in every territory they are known to exist.
Biodiesel from algae may not be as green as it seems
BUBBLING green tubes filled with algae gobbling up carbon dioxide and producing biodiesel may sound like the perfect way to make clean fuel, but it could generate nearly four times the greenhouse emissions from regular diesel.
How we farm algae is crucial to making algal biodiesel environmentally viable, says Anna Stephenson at the University of Cambridge. She has developed a computer model that calculates the carbon footprint of producing, refining and burning algal biodiesel.
When algae are farmed in perspex tubes, she says, the energy needed to pump the algae around to ensure adequate exposure to sunlight results in a carbon footprint of 320 grams per megajoule equivalent of fuel. This compares with 86 g/MJ to extract, refine and burn regular diesel (Energy and Fuels, DOI: 10.1021/ef1003123).
One of the obvious reasons that corn-based ethanol fuels do not make sense on a mass scale ( corn or corn by-products might be fine for some niche areas like a farm co-op) is the amount of fuel, water, land and fertilizer that goes into producing a gallon of fuel. It’s a Rube Goldberg ( see the self operating napkin at link) way to produce fuel. Algae based fuels are produced on the same general principles. Again, maybe OK for a niche area like a small coastal fishing village in Africa, but a disastrous strategy for producing fuels for masses of people.
I think I have this figured out
CentraCan, Inc., a sustainable energy company, has announced that PerfPower(TM) Alkaline Batteries, with free recycling, are now available through The Food Emporium, a chain of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, and consumers can purchase the eco-conscious batteries at all 16 locations in Manhattan, New York City.
Sounds nice, but it would be nice to see a cost benefit analysis between PerfPower and rechargeable lithium based batteries.
‘Tapped’: Just Another Excellent Indie Documentary Likely To Bring You Down
Basically, the film contends, the bottled water industry is an ecological and consumer nightmare from end to end. Corporations like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle mine public water sources and sell it back to the public at criminal markup. (Forty percent of bottled water is just recycled tap water from municipal sources.)
Of course, all of this water has to be transported, processed, packaged and retailed – with attendant energy costs. Most of those plastic bottles end up in landfills, or the ocean. The statistics are dispiriting. According to the film, Americans buy 29 billion single-serve bottles of water each year. About 20 percent are recycled. Transporting the water uses about 18 million gallons of oil. The numbers roll on.
We have developed a national addiction to small containers of beverages – water, soft drinks and individual cartons of fruit juice.
Economics is not usually very funny. There are occasional exceptions – Conservative media advance dubious claim that Bush tax cuts drove economic recovery
tangledwing 