Protecting our genetic trust fund, the impact of software on electricity consumption and climate change skeptics make my list of most interesting stories from this past week.
An article from today’s San Francisco Chronicle notes that a wave of extinctions, comparable to the one that eliminated Dinosaurs from earth is tracking. Solid science indicates that human driven climate change is a major, if not the major, cause.
A point not mentioned in this article per se, but one that bears noting, is that for all the fear-mongering over how legal and policy based agreements limiting carbon emissions will damage the U.S. (or for that matter the not-so-longer-emerging Chinese) economy, how about the damage to medicine and pharmacology? Most medicines are based on ecosystems. What is the cost of losing all this bio-diversity to the process of 21st century Medicine?
https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/12/19/MNVS1B6E4C.DTL
— Social networking uses PHP and other languages, and as many have long suspected, due to how they run on servers, they use more electricity. Fascinating post below from Slashdot.
— Heavily publicized, but not so apparently heavily peer-reviewed scientist/lab at Duke University, refuses to turn over software used to support his results and assertions: