You’ve got your lentic environments and your lotic environments, and then you have your beaver dams deparating the two. Researchers with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments wanted to know what the effect of the latter was on the former. In other words, they wanted to know if Read More

One of the difficulties in assessing environmental change is the lack of adequate baseline data. As tools become more complex we can do analyses today that were impossible just a few years ago, so there’s nothing to compare to. On the other hand, there are some built-in monitors of environmental health: that robustness of the Read More

It’s encouraging to see that (in our growing hunger for both food and money) we still are concerned about the impacts of our actions on the environment.  An example: In the Pacific Hake Fishery there are two types of quotas.  First, a quota on the total annual catch.  Second, a quota limiting the allowable bycatch Read More

This video demonstrates the steps necessary to prepare agar media for lab use.  As one of the commenters points out, the video is mislabelled as “How to Prepare Tissue Culture Media.”  It is, however, how to prepare bacterial or microbial growth media.  Having said that, the steps are all here, including that all-important first one: Read More

Mass is one of the most important constraints on a space mission — you’re talking around $10,000 a pound to get to Earth orbit.  The center-of-mass is also an important parameter, as attitude control and propulsion systems work through, or around, the center of mass of a spacecraft.  That’s why engineers put a lot of Read More

If you’re the State of California Department of Transportation you want to be sure that the material production plants you work with are providing products up to your standard.  When the material you’re purchasing is aggregate, where the properties of the final product (a roadway, for example) depend upon the precise composition of the material, Read More

As we’ve mentioned before, when you’re raising livestock, weight trumps all.  So when you’re adjusting your husbandry practices you’d like to monitor the effect of your changes on finish weight. To get the most precise control, you’d want to frequently weigh your cattle on a platform scale. But that means disturbing the routine of the Read More

With livestock, it’s all about the weight. Breeding programs, husbandry protocols, feed selection — if it doesn’t increase the finish weight or decrease the time to market weight then it’s not going to get done. So anytime new procedures are evaluated the primary metric is weight, and the primary tool for measuring weight is the Read More

There’s usually a decent overlap among the population of people who strongly decry industrial pollution and the population who argue for a return to a simpler time with a return to the land.  Think about it, though, if we had enough horses to carry us all the miles that our cars do we’d be knee-deep Read More

“Oh give me a home, where the cotton bolls roll…” Okay, so those aren’t the words that come to mind when thinking of the American southwest, but maybe they should be. Cotton is an agriculturally important product in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, where it grows in high desert regions. Well, farmers try to grow Read More