‘Oddball’ crocs
From National Geographic: Built to move on land, DuckCroc may have been quick-witted, as well as quick on its feet. Scans of DuckCroc's brain shows it surrounded by air pockets — signs that it was a turbocharged organ in need of cooling. DogCroc also shared similar characteristics. You might call them the corvettes of crocodiles. But DuckCroc had an even bigger fore brain that was connected to a very specialized nose - perhaps something like a duck-billed platypus.
Amphibian lovers, set your TiVos. National Geographic is set to unveil a new group of “oddball” crocs at 9pm, Saturday November 21st in “When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs.”
“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, told National Geographic News. “We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t …
The big squat
Today is … World Toilet Day. The theme: “The Big Squat.” For one minute at noon, networks of clean water activists around the world will be squatting to draw attention to the need of the estimated 2.5bn people, or 40% of the world’s population, living without adequate sanitation. For more information on an important message behind a silly minute, click here. Via WaterWired.
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‘Urban Coast,’ Vol. 1, No. 1
Urban Coast, the new journal from the Center for Santa Monica Bay Studies, launches today with offerings by Congressman Henry Waxman and California state senator Fran Pavley on global warming, an article on potable water vs the merely wet kind, case studies from the Santa Monica Mountains and Topanga and more. To see the inaugural issue, click here.
Via Melina Watts at the Malibu Creek Watershed Council.…
Image of the day: Mediterranean climate zones
THIS image of the day from NASA’s Earth Observatory takes composite pictures of global cloud cover for the month of October 2009 to examine what cloud presence alone says about the land below.
According to NASA, the starkest examples are in areas where dry land is bordered by ocean. Sure enough, peeping out from beneath the clouds are the world’s five mediterranean climate zones, which in addition to California include part of the Chilean coast into western Argentina, southwestern Australia, the Mediterranean basin and southwestern South Africa.
Mediterranean climate zones have unique floras adapted to surviving on winter rains then hunkering down into dormancy during prolonged dry seasons. For Californians, who for the last century have grown wet-climate plants such as turf grass with imported water, a switch to native and mediterranean climate zone plants is seen as an essential step as global warming and population growth threaten the …
Item 5
Updated 11/19/2009 9.21am PST
ITEM 5 on the agenda for this Thursday’s board meeting of the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls for the directors to take an October 15, 2009 decision by a Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison to the state Supreme Court.
The Robison decision deemed a 2008 award of water to Las Vegas and the SNWA by the State Engineer of Nevada from three Lincoln County valleys “arbitrary, oppressive and a manifest abuse of discretion.” It then vacated the award for water in the three valleys that are the key first staging grounds of a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline that Las Vegas plans to run into the heart of the state to pump rural groundwater.
Why did the judge rule the way he did? According to Robison, the water — 18,755 acre feet of it a year (or enough for 37,000 homes) — isn’t there. “The state engineer …
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