Editor's Take: May 16, 2008
The resourceful stickleback.
Friday Fish Tales
Spring has arrived. It’s Bike to Work Day, and the lure of a warm weekend brings thoughts of dusty rods and reels in the closet. In the news, fish are doing some wild stuff around the region – like evolving in reverse in Lake Washington. At the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia, a really big ball of 60,000 sturgeon baffles scientists.
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Your editor today is Kristin Kolb | View All Today's News
A Little Fish's Evolution Revolution
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
05/16/2008
For most locals, getting the sewage out of Lake Washington beginning in the late 1960s was a good thing. Not so for the threespine stickleback. For the little fish, the pollution and associated algal murk was good cover to protect it from hungry trout.
When the waste and water cleared, the stickleback faced a genetic scramble to evolve into a more protected, armored and ancestral version of itself.
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60,000 Sturgeon Have a Ball
Portland Oregonian
05/16/2008
When sonar surveys spotted a vast pile of rubble in the Columbia River below Bonneville Dam late last winter, officials suddenly worried that part of the dam structure was eroding into the river.
What they found below the spillways in February was not a giant pile of rock at all, but a humongous pile of thousands upon thousands of sturgeon -- some of them 14 feet long or longer -- lounging together in frigid water at the bottom of the river.
Go to article.
California Senate Bill Would Ban Suspect Plastic
San Francisco Chronicle
05/16/2008
If the measure becomes law, California would be the first state in the nation to ban the plastics ingredient bisphenol A in any consumer product.
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Bush Strikes Clean Air Rules Protecting Parks
Washington Post
05/16/2008
The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.
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Unnatural Preservation
Missoula Independent
05/16/2008
In the age of global warming, public land managers face a stark choice: They can let national parks and other wildlands lose their most cherished wildlife. Or they can become gardeners and zookeepers.
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Study on Native Addiction Brings Elders to Tears
Toronto Globe and Mail
05/16/2008
A new public health study that looked at more than 500 young aboriginal drug users in two British Columbia cities produced such shocking data that people wept openly when it was first presented to a panel of elders.
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Canada OKs Over-the-Counter Morning-After Pill
Vancouver Sun
05/16/2008
The emergency contraceptive pill Plan B will now be sold on the front shelves of Canadian pharmacies without any medical consultation after a landmark decision came down Thursday to make the drug more accessible.
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Whales Inspire Better Blade Designs
Christian Science Monitor
05/16/2008
The bumps on a humpback's fins inspire a new line of green-tech blades for turbines, fans, and maybe the home.
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Views: Nickel and Dimed in Oregon
Portland Oregonian
05/16/2008
While Oregon ranks at just about the national average in the percentage of its workers who have good jobs, that's not particularly good news: Nearly three out of every four Oregon jobs pay less than $17 an hour or don't provide health care and pension benefits. And the situation is likely to worsen soon because wages are not keeping pace with rising food and energy prices.
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Views: New Urbanism's Contrarion
Toronto Globe and Mail
05/16/2008
New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning's equivalent of the "compact SUV."
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