Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

Since Darwin’s seminal works, the universality of facial expressions of emotion has remained one of the longest standing debates in the biological and social sciences. Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements by virtue of [...]

Older fathers often get blamed for passing on genetic mutations to their children, causing some types of autism, schizophrenia, and other disorders. But new data presented at the meeting suggest that children of older fathers and grandfathers may inherit at least one advantage from aging patriarchs: longer telomeres, structures at the tips of chromosomes that [...]

There is increasing interest in the use of biodegradable materials because they are believed to be “greener”. In a landfill, these materials degrade anaerobically to form methane and carbon dioxide. The fraction of the methane that is collected can be utilized as an energy source and the fraction of the biogenic carbon that does not [...]

Here is how Biofuels Digest reported this story: “Over the past several months, the Digest and other media noted that California was importing ethanol from Brazil, a 6000 mile, diesel-churning tanker haul.Now, before the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard was put into place, California would have sourced its ethanol needs from, say, Nebraska, some 1200 [...]

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the United States have systematically compared the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km [...]

Does drinking lots of milk keep you healthy? Yes, according to a 2010 press release by Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) in the Netherlands about a study of the relationship between milk consumption and cardiovascular disease. But on Tuesday, the university appeared to withdraw the claim after one of the study’s authors, renowned Harvard [...]

Contemporary impacts of anthropogenic climate change on ecosystems are increasingly being recognized. Documenting the extent of these impacts requires quantitative tools for analyses of ecological observations to distinguish climate impacts in noisy data and to understand interactions between climate variability and other drivers of change. To assist the development of reliable statistical approaches, we review [...]