The National Agricultural Statistics Service of the United States Department of Agriculture has released its honey report for 2014 and found it's boom times for bees.Hives increased again, another 4 percent, up to a whopping 2.74 million colonies, and honey production is up 19 percent. Yield per colony averaged 65.1 pounds, which is up 15 percent.If there is a Beepocalypse, the...
read moreA few years ago, bees suddenly had a sharp decline in numbers. This "Colony Collapse Disorder" as it is called, is a disorder in the sense that it is a recurring phenomenon, detailed for the last 1,000 years even when record-keeping just consisted of sporadic anecdotes. It was noted more frequently as record-keeping became more thorough. so it appeared far more often by the 1800s. By the 1900s,...
read moreNorthern British Columbia's First Nation leaders repeatedly rejected the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines from Alberta and so oil companies are shipping more oil by rail, which requires no new approval, and is inherently more environmentally risky than the pipeline they said was too risky. If you are more familiar with U.S. scientization of politics, it is like the Obama...
read morePeak Oil, which was supposed to have happened in 1992, set off the craze of declaring 'peak' everything, to such an extent it is a running joke now.(1) The good news for Peak Oil believers is that they are going to be right eventually. Oil is a 'fossil' fuel and we aren't making any more giant dinosaurs. Even in the 1970s, when the peak oil date was floated, no one outside environmental doomsday...
read moreOne of the biggest struggles in toxicology is creating the correct parameters so you are modeling the real world as closely as possible. It's an enormous task to model the environment with its millions of factors, so controlled studies are done using animals.Scientists design experiments that give an animal a lot of something at once and that can tell them 'this is the threshold where more...
read moreThe European Food Safety Authority, most famous for declaring that water does not cure thirst, is now thinking about how to ban acrylamide, which is a chemical that can form in some foods during frying, roasting, or baking. No, it is not due to BPA, it has been present for as long as mankind has cooked food, but it was only discovered in 2002 and then in 2010 a paper was written showing it could...
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