The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did).”

First, the “damned if you could (but you can’t)”. On April 4 at 3:40 p.m.,  a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Baja, Mexico, and was felt well north. The event elicited the following post on Twitter 16 minutes later from New Age lifemeister Dee­pak Chopra: “Had a powerful meditation just now--caused an earthquake in Southern California.” (Lawrence Krauss, too, lays into Deepak on page 36 for his lack of understanding of quantum physics. There’s plenty to bust Chopra about.)

With rhinoceros poaching in Africa approaching an all-time high , one nature preserve owner has had enough. Ed Hern, owner of the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve near Johannesburg, South Africa, is experimenting with injecting cyanide into his rhinos' horns. He believes the poison will not harm the rhinos, because there are no blood vessels in the horn to carry the poison the rest of the rhino's body. But if anyone kills the animals and sells the horns for use in traditional Asian medicine, the end-consumer could pay the ultimate price. [More]



South Africa - Africa - Poaching - Rhinoceros - Medicine

With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute ( www.earth.columbia.edu ). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I will use this last regular column to say thank you and take stock of the deepening crisis of sustainable development.

During the four years of this column, the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable. Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated. Sadly, this year will quite possibly become the warmest on record, yet another testimony to human-induced environmental catastrophes running out of control.

For decades, apocalyptic environmentalists (and others) have warned of humanity's imminent doom, largely as a result of our unsustainable use of and impact upon the natural systems of the planet. After all, the most recent comprehensive assessment of so-called ecosystem services -- benefits provided for free by the natural world , such as clean water and air--found that 60 percent of them are declining. [More]



Drinking water - Environmentalism - Human - Environment - Water

Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their seventh blog post for Scientific American.

The rooster in the room next to us crowed loudly at sunrise, and we despondently got out of bed with the goal of finding Fundi [see photo at left] , the town of Kalinzi's elusive stove maker. We found him farming and arranged to meet with him after work at the seventh hour of the Swahili clock, 1 p.m. international time (Swahili time starts with the first hour of sunlight and is therefore six hours behind). [More]



Tanzania - Swahili language - Engineering - Dartmouth College - Thayer School of Engineering

How much will it cost to protect an endangered fish in South Carolina? The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wants local utility Santee Cooper to make several changes to its dams on Marion and Moultrie lakes, which would help endangered shortnose sturgeon ( Acipenser brevirostrum ) to pass through the dams and breed. But Santee Cooper says the changes NMFS wants will cost more than $100 million. [More]



National Marine Fisheries Service - South Carolina - Santee Cooper - Endangered species - Fish

“ ’Tis the gift to be simple,” the Shakers sing. Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks take vows of poverty. Why? A new study published online in May in Psychological Science offers a hint. Money--even the thought of it--reduces satisfaction from life’s simple pleasures.

Studies have shown that a person’s ability to savor experiences predicts their degree of happiness. Savoring is defined as the emotions of joy, awe, excitement and gratitude derived during an experience. Psychologist Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liège in Belgium and his colleagues divided 374 adults, ranging from custodians to senior administrators, into two randomly assigned groups. The first group was shown a picture of a stack of money; the control group was shown the same picture blurred beyond recognition. Then the participants were given psychological tests to measure their ability to savor pleasant experiences. The results showed that people who had been shown the money scored significantly lower.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report from the group working on global warming's impacts contained at least one error. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate," the report notes. [More]



Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Climate change - Climate Change: The Ipcc Response Strategies - Environment - Global warming

Imagine that you are looking at a dog that is standing behind a picket fence. You do not see several slices of dog; you see a single dog that is partially hidden by a series of opaque vertical slats. The brain’s ability to join these pieces into a perceptual whole demonstrates a fascinating process known as amodal completion.

It is clear why such a tendency would have evolved. Animals must be able to spot a mate, predator or prey through dense foliage. The retinal image may contain only fragments, but the brain’s visual system links them, reconstructing the object so the animal can recognize what it sees. The process seems effortless to us, but it has turned out to be one of those things that is horrendously difficult to program computers to do. Nor is it clear how neurons in the brain’s visual pathways manage the trick.

Last September I wrote my first column for Scientific American , and this September marks my last one. In writing on science issues relevant to our culture and society, there is an inevitable tension between sticking just to science issues and commenting on potentially hot-button social issues. I have tried during the past 12 months to strike some balance, but without fail those issues that stir the greatest outrage also stir the greatest interest.

Nothing seems to stir more discussion than pieces about science and religion, an observation that reminds me of the comment that Henry Kissinger reputedly made about academic disputes: they are so vicious because the stakes are so small. After all, science will continue irrespective of religious opinions, and I expect organized religion will continue to be a part of the cultural landscape, too, largely unaffected by the ongoing march of human knowledge, as it has been for centuries.

It looks like a solar-powered treadmill, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) say they have created a flat, conveyor belt–like device that could clean up oil slicks far more efficiently than anything used at the Deepwater Horizon site. They key is a nanoparticle-infused, water-repelling mesh coating a conveyor belt. As important is the device's ability to work autonomously as part of a larger team of devices, which M.I.T. calls a Seaswarm . [More]



Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Oil spill - Conveyor belt - Oil - Deepwater Horizon

SEPTEMBER 1960 EVOLUTION OF MAN-- “Mutation, sexual recombination and natural selection led to the emergence of Homo sapiens. The creatures that preceded him had already developed the rudiments of tool-using, toolmaking and cultural transmission. But the next evolutionary step was so great as to constitute a difference in kind from those before it. There now appeared an organism whose mastery of technology and of symbolic communication enabled it to create a supraorganic culture. Other organisms adapt to their environments by changing their genes in accordance with the demands of the surroundings. Man and man alone can also adapt by changing his environments to fit his genes. His genes enable him to invent new tools, to alter his opinions, his aims and his conduct, to acquire new knowledge and new wisdom. --Theo­do­s­ius Dobzhansky”

Once upon a time the factory, with its dirty, noisy machinery, was the standard workplace of industrialized nations; today it’s the office. Hundreds of millions of people--at least 15 percent of the population in developed countries--work at a desk, with or without a partition that separates them from the desks of their co-workers. That’s an awful lot of swivel chairs.

But a cubicle is more than a mere physical workspace. In recent years social and organizational psychologists have begun to amass evidence that the character of people’s personal work environments affects their performance in profound and surprising ways. The size of our desks, our proximity to natural light, the quality of the air we breathe and our privacy (or lack thereof)--all are major predictors of our comfort, our contentment and our productivity.

The Age of Digital Entanglement By Danny Hillis

A massive 245-hectare fire near the town of Moapa, Nev., did $2.5 million worth of property damage in July and destroyed the Warm Springs Oasis , home to the little-known moapa dace ( Moapa coriacea ), an endangered fish that lives in the springs. But despite fears to the contrary, the fish were able to get out alive, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reported.

The fish have the hard work of a lot of people to thank for their survival. As I reported in 2009, employees at the Moapa Valley National Wildlife Refuge , which is run by FWS, have spent the last couple of years cleaning nearby rivers and expanding the habitat for the tiny, temperature-sensitive fish. Those newly cleaned rivers provided the fish with an exit from their regular habitat when it was being devastated by the fire.

Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their sixth blog post for Scientific American.

After hearing many rumors, we finally received confirmation that the famous Dr. Jane Goodall was actually in town to celebrate 50 years of chimpanzee research in Gombe National Park . This discovery came about after finding out that the Land Cruiser that we had reserved to drive to Kalinzi had been used to escort Dr. Jane Goodall to one of the villages. We took our unexpected delay with alacrity as we considered how incredible of an opportunity it was to be in the presence of a living legend. When we finally arrived in Kalinzi, we made our way past the cornucopia of emerald green bananas at the market to the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) field station, which would serve as our headquarters for the rest of the summer. [More]



Jane Goodall - Tanzania - Jane Goodall Institute - Chimpanzee - Gombe Stream National Park

All things must come to an end, but we humans have an endless fascination with the inevitable. Our September 2010 special issue and our web exclusives explore some of those endings. Writers and filmmakers, of course, have been tackling apocalyptic themes for decades, at times using them to highlight emotional aspects of sacrifice, heroism and dedication, to varying degrees of success. [More]



Apocalypse - Human - Art - Death - Writers Resources

The "War on Drugs" has failed, particularly with regard to the spread of HIV in middle-income nations and some developing nations in Asia. The disease is now starting to bleed into Africa as well. [More]



War on Drugs - Drugs - HIV - Health - Africa

In our experience, nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a point sometime in the future when there is no “after”? Depressingly, modern physics suggests the answer is yes. Time itself could end. All activity would cease, and there would be no renewal or recovery. The end of time would be the end of endings.

This grisly prospect was an unanticipated prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which provides our modern understanding of gravity. Before that theory, most physicists and philosophers thought time was a universal drumbeat, a steady rhythm that the cosmos marches to, never varying, wavering or stopping. Einstein showed that the universe is more like a big polyrhythmic jam session. Time can slow down, or stretch out, or let it rip. When we feel the force of gravity, we are feeling time’s rhythmic improvisation; falling objects are drawn to places where time passes more slowly. Time not only affects what matter does but also responds to what matter is doing, like drummers and dancers firing one another up into a rhythmic frenzy. When things get out of hand, though, time can go up in smoke like an overexcited drummer who spontaneously combusts.