The Fake Faux-Fur

Is using real fur cheaper than artificial fur? Faux Fur Pas: Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, and Century 21 Found Guilty of Mislabeling Real Fur Coats as Faux, reports Gawker, quoting the DailyMail Online:

The fur trim on three Marc by Marc Jacobs jackets contained the fur of raccoon dogs, which are often skinned alive in China. Other garments purchased at Century 21 were found to contain rabbit fur

For a cute photo of a racoon dog and a gut wrenching account of how they are skinned alive, here’s a report from the Animal Blawg. I could not watch the video.
The corporations who import and market and sell garments to us shrug any responsibility. From New York’s DNAinfo.com:

Century 21 has since issued a statement on its Facebook page, defending itself against the allegations.
It read: ‘Century 21 does not create garment labels, the manufacturers do. It is the manufacturer’s responsibility to provide an accurate account of materials used in the garment and to be transparent with the consumer before his or her purchase.
‘We respect the diligence of the The Humane Society of the United States to uphold state and federal laws in regards to garment labeling.’

The Humane Society published its findings here.

Earth Day 2013

Water on Earth, U.S. Geological Survey

How much water is on Earth?
The large blue drop represents all of Earth’s water. Diameter is about 860 miles, volume about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers.)
The smaller blue drop represents the world’s liquid fresh water. Diameter is about 169.5 miles (272.8 kilometers,) volume 2,551,100 mi3 (10,633,450 km3,) of which 99 percent is groundwater, much of it not accessible to humans.
The smallest blue dot, diameter only 34.9 miles (56.2 kilometers,) volume 22,339 mi3 (93,113 km3) represents fresh water in all the lakes and rivers on the planet. The water life needs every day comes from these precious surface-water sources.

Image Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; globe illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (©); Adam Nieman.
Data source: Igor Shiklomanov’s chapter “World fresh water resources” in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).
Source: ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/2010/gallery/global-water-volume.html

How many people live on Earth?
7,080,461,690
United States population today numbers 313,722,191 (Mon, April 22, 2013, 8:45am PST).
One year ago, on Earth Day 2012, there were 313,465,631 people in USA.
Source: www.census.gov/popclock/
One year ago, we had not reached 7 billion yet. So when did we pass that milestone? The UN officially chose the date of October 31, 2011. The U.S. Census Bureau, which also attempts global population projections, predicts humanity won’t hit the seventh-billion milestone until March 12, 2012, reported National Geographic.
By other estimates, we had not reached 7 billion yet one year ago:

Earth Clock, April 30, 2012

Earth Clock, April 22, 2013

Source: www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/earthclock/

What about growth?

Limits of Growth, revisited

Forty years after the release of the groundbreaking study, were the concerns about overpopulation and the environment correct? Mark Strauss tackles growth for the Smithsonian magazine, April 2012. Australian physicist Graham Turner revisited The Limits to Growth (1972) and compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. Turner, senior research scientist at CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences (previously Sustainable Ecosystems), Canberra ACT, Australia found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”

Prosperity without Growth, is it possible?

Tim Jackson, economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, provides a credible vision of how human society can flourish within the ecological limits of a finite planet in his book, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.

More Earthday links:
Earth Day Network
15 Facts About Our Planet for Earth Day, Bad Astronomy
Earth Day Photos 2013: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Submit your photos to Huffington Post
7 billion: A special year-long series on population from National Geographic magazine, run in 2011.
Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog, looks towards 2050 or so, when the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.

Parasites for health?

Parasites use their hosts. They use us. We are now learning to use them. The impressive-looking Pomphorhynchus laevis inspired researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital to design micro-needles, a better way to attach skin grafts.

Parasite serves as a model for better wound-healing patches

“The unique design allows the needles to stick to soft tissues with minimal damage to the tissues,” Dr. Jeffrey Karp, the study’s senior author, said in a press release. “Moreover, when it comes time to remove the adhesive, compared to staples, there is less trauma inflicted to the tissue, blood and nerves, as well as a reduced risk of infection.”

You have to hand it to the little monster, writes Slate’s Jason Bittel —it just revealed a treasure trove of biomimetic sucking technology. And that’s a heckuva lot more appealing than the other trick up its proboscis: The spiny-headed worm can use mind control to make its host commit suicide.

Science reporter faces scorpion

Let’s pat ourselves on the back, aren’t we science writers terrific! “We are a strange bunch, shy, desperate, ferocious — we want you to know what we know, meet who we’ve met,” writes NPR’s Robert Krulwich, reporting on his friend Destin, the one with the scary scorpion on his face.

Science reporter faces scorpion

This scorpion looks so dangerous, a wizard professor from Harry Potter saw fit to torture one until Hermione stopped him.

Tailless whip scorpion from Amazon, YouTube

Alas, the tailless whip scorpions are completely harmless. Destin, the missile engineer who appears to go by only one name, doesn’t have a death wish, only a youtube channel.

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Notes
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Creepy Critters In Sensitive Places: How Science Reporters Get Your Attention
Robert Krulwich, March 28, 2013, NPR

Last of her kind: Celia, the ibex from the Pyrenees

Celia would have been the first of her kind, the mother of a new line of revived goats, had her clone survived. But even though the kid lived for only 10 minutes after birth, Celia’s clone revived hopes that we can bring species back from extinction. Can we? Should we?

The Pyrenean ibex

Celia died crushed by a fallen tree in 2000, in Ordesa National Park in Spain. The last male had died in 1991. Celia was a Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), Spanish common name bucardo, a goat species whose decline happened in our time, under our deficient watch. From the website The Sixth Extinction:

According to Guy Beaufoy, a policy officer of WWF Spain, the “Pyrenean Ibex had disappeared because the Spanish government acted too late to save it. He said “Although hunting had reduced the animal’s numbers to fewer than a hundred by the turn of the last century, a management plan to preserve it was not put into place until 1993, when only about 10 individuals remained” (McCarthy 2000). In general it can be said that its extinction is Europe’s first great conservation failure of the twenty-first century, as the European Union acted too late as well.

But a year before she died, Celia had been captured by a team including wildlife veterinarian Alberto Fernández-Arias and José Folch, working for the Aragon regional government. The scientists took tissue samples and released Celia. It was known the Pyrenean Ibex did not thrive in captivity. Three years after Celia was found dead, the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. offered to clone her preserved samples. But this was 2003, a mere seven years after Dolly the sheep became the first clone to survive.

Today, ten years after Celia’s clone perished, technological advances once again fuel hopes of bringing species back. The revival of an extinct species is no longer a fantasy, writes Carl Zimmer in the April 2013 issue of National Geographic:

The notion of bringing vanished species back to life—some call it de-extinction—has hovered at the boundary between reality and science fiction for more than two decades, ever since novelist Michael Crichton unleashed the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park on the world. For most of that time the science of de-extinction has lagged far behind the fantasy. Celia’s clone is the closest that anyone has gotten to true de-extinction. Since witnessing those fleeting minutes of the clone’s life, Fernández-Arias, now the head of the government of Aragon’s Hunting, Fishing and Wetlands department, has been waiting for the moment when science would finally catch up, and humans might gain the ability to bring back an animal they had driven extinct.
“We are at that moment,” he told me.

But is it a good idea? Wouldn’t it be best to spend the money and effort to preserve endangered species? And what about space itself, with cities and parking lots and ag fields and suburbia spreading where once animals roamed ?!

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Notes
The Sixth Extinction www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/pyreneanibex.htm

Superman says, I let the meteor burn rather than destroy it

“If I released all of the meteor’s energy at once by destroying it, I would have made it much worse,” Superman said in a press conference. Using scientific data to underline his safety analysis, Superman explained why he did not destroy the Russian meteorite, reported Kyle Hill for Scientific American.

Superman remains a reclusive hero. He agreed to attending the press conference only after residents from Chelyabinsk, Russia tracked him down after the meteor exploded over their homes on February 15.

Superman reassured reporters that he is as committed as ever to saving the Earth and he would definitely handle the big stuff.

But behind the hype, do we know enough about Superman to believe he will keep saving the Earth? Only a few months ago, famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson pinned down the exact location of Krypton, Superman’s home planet.

Headlines: from Fishy Flakes to Horse Hysteria

A flurry of Flourishing Fish Fraud headlines alerted American consumers that 87% of snapper was not snapper and 59% of white tuna was not tuna. Fishy fakes common in restaurants, wrote USA Today.

While no reports of illness surfaced, eating escolar sold as tuna in sushi bars might cause rather distressing side effects. But even when health risks are minimal, consumers have to get what they pay for. “If you’re ordering steak, you would never be served horse meat but you can easily be ordering snapper and get tilapia or Vietnamese catfish,” Oceana’s Dr. Michael Hirshfield told The New York Times in 2011. But in 2013, if you ordered a beef burger in Ireland, you may have been served a mix of horse and beef.

The Horse meat in hamburgers headlines were upsetting pretty much everyone in Europe, even the French. Horse meat, presumed from Poland or Romania showed up in Swedish meatballs sold in Britain. “At the last count, something like 19 countries were involved either in the supply chain or in uncovering tainted products,” Chris Elliott, the director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, told the New York Times.

The Guardian posts an interactive map. A sample here:

Who buys horse meat? European imports, one of the facets of The Guardian’s interactive map.

To find out how Romanian workhorses reach the dinner plate, Reuters reporters ventured to CarmOlimp slaughterhouse in Ucea de Jos. The plant mostly processes pork, but poor peasants sell their old horses for $0.50/lb. Build with EU loans, this plant was cleared of any mislabeling charges. But horse meat from elsewhere in Romania found roundabout ways to British and French dinner tables.

Shady trading along the way involved the Meat Mafia from Cyprus; a Dutch company called Draap, which spelled backwards is paard or Dutch for horse; a horse lover and polo player, former Goldman Sachs guy now a financier, straight out of central casting; a convicted Russian arms smuggler of Ukrainian origins, and a French company that supplied meat to a Luxembourg factory.

‘Mystery meat’ takes on a whole new meaning, writes science blogger Christie Wilcox.

How the horse became “beef” remains shrouded. Suffering and disease lurk behind European horse meat trade, writes the UK-based World Horse Welfare on their blog. Even though horse slaughterhouses do not operate in USA today, Forbes’ Vickery Eckhoff found Five Reasons Why Burger King’s Horse Meat Scandal Could Happen Here.

Since no one got sick except perhaps of headline alliterations, the publicity led to curiosity: Britons give horse a try as scandal piques interest. “While people are putting horse into their shopping cart on the website they are also putting in things like zebra, llama and alpaca,” Paul Webb, director Britain’s Exotic Meats, tells Reuters. Horsemeat scandal triggers 15% rise in sales for France’s equine butchers, reports The Guardian.

When consumers make informed choices, substitutions may lead to culinary explorations. Seafood substitutions snuck in our foodie vocabulary to improve our health and save endangered species. Substituting foods to help feed humanity and save the earth may become a trendy green consumer choice–why not try insect burgers? Why not choose pasture-raised beef over feedlot-confined cows?

Or, just say no to meat: “No more excuses, go vegetarian,” writes John Harris for The Guardian.

So, how do they find horse meat in hamburgers? Like crime scene investigations on TV, high-tech DNA-testing traces the origins of what we eat. The method that uncovered the horse meat contamination, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) analysis, is credited to Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, reports treehugger.

DNA testing also finds The Real maccoyii amongst the fake tuna, and helps keep the critically endangered southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii ) off on the menu. While complex, testing has become easier and cheaper. Two New York teenagers who loved sushi may have been the first ones to check for mislabeling using barcode DNA testing in 2008. Relatively affordable high-tech will help the F.D.A. police food on a larger scale than previously possible. The agency purchased gene sequencing equipment, reports The New York Times. FDA inspectors can test fish fillets and identify the species by comparing results with 8,000 varieties of fish gene sequences available at The International Barcode of Life Project.

Eventually the horsemeat hysteria headlines reflected the bigger picture. Who is responsible for shaping our food systems? Horse meat – the hardest thing to digest is that it’s your fault, writes The Making Progress Blues blog.

While no one disputes the need to curb fraud, the larger picture ranges from British politics to speculations over the recipe for a divided Europe: add horse and stir; to the need for government oversight, the history of broken taboos and ethics of eating all kinds of animals including dogs, as practiced in some cultures.

Jezebel’s Lindy West writes, “A cute baby animal is a cute baby animal, and in the grand scheme of things—our vast, lonely universe that I happen to believe is meaningless anyway—this sacred difference between a horse and a cow is just a combo of semantics and cultural elitism.”

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Notes
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Oceana.org, recent research revealed seafood fraud

Monterey Bay Aquarium has been my go-to place of a list of fish that we can eat while trying to preserve a healthy ocean: Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch

The European trade in horse meat: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/datablog/interactive/2013/feb/15/europe-trade-horsemeat-map-interactive