DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 4, 2016

RIP Muhammad Ali

He was (and will always be) The Greatest.

In his physical prime, a decade earlier, Ali had such grace and foot speed that watching him perform almost became an extension of the balletic arts. He won Olympic light-heavyweight gold as an 18-year-old at the Rome Olympics and four years later, in 1964, he won the heavyweight title for the first time by stopping Liston in a major upset. Challengers were dispatched with a surgical beauty, although there was a vicious streak to him too: when Ernie Terrell called him by his birth name, Cassius Clay, Ali shouted at him “What’s my name?” as he inflicted a terrible beating.

Dogs are so cool.  

We'd have been screwed without them.  But, we shouldn't hold them accountable for all our issues.

A genetic scan of ancient dogs suggests that humans domesticated pooches separately — once in Europe, and once in East Asia, researchers said Thursday.

The DNA finding fits in with archaeological evidence that shows dogs on the far east and far west of the Eurasian continent, but not in the middle until thousands of years later, the international team of researchers said.

Laurent Frantz and Greger Larson of Oxford University in Britain and colleagues used DNA taken from the bones of a 4,800-year old dog in a tomb in Ireland and from 59 ancient dogs that lived between 14,000 and 3,000 years ago. They compared that DNA to more than 2,500 modern dogs.

"These results suggest that dogs may have been domesticated independently in Eastern and Western Eurasia from distinct wolf populations," the team wrote.

Coastal City Alert - Yawn

If a bunch of planes filled with terrorists were heading toward New York City we would try to stop them wouldn't we?  Swamping the city over a generation and displacing millions.  A majority of Congress won't accept that it's happening, so I guess it isn't.

The red shading on maps show which areas of New York City would be underwater if sea levels rise between 1 and 5 feet.

As the visualization shows, the results could be dramatic. If sea levels rise 1 foot, a little under 170,000 New Yorkers will be affected, as well as 93 schools, waste treatment facilities and transportation facilities like subway yards and bus depots. But if ocean levels rise 5 feet, nearly 1,500,000 residents will find their homes — as well as about 800 education, waste and transportation sites — underwater.

Sea level rise is accelerating, the NCA says, and current projections suggest oceans could rise between 1 and 4 feet by 2100. Some experts predict a wider range, between 8 inches and 6 feet. According to The Washington Post, a recent study suggests melting ice in Antarctica will contribute more to sea level rise than was previously accounted for, shifting the high end of the estimate above 6 feet.

One Million Electric Vehicles.

One million and counting: electric cars crossed the milestone in 2015 on their way to finish the year with 1.26 million units deployed worldwide, a new IEA report documents, as sales and construction of necessary infrastructure both surged about 70% in a critical advance towards limiting carbon emissions from the transport sector.

Electric cars still have just a 0.1% market share worldwide. But they make up more than 1% of the fleet in seven countries, including China, where registrations tripled last year. Norway had the highest share of electric cars, at 23%, followed by the Netherlands, at 10%. The other countries are Sweden, Denmark, France, China and the United Kingdom, while a decline in US electric cars sales pulled the share there down to 0.7%.

North Cascades National Park

Washington State’s North Cascades mountains - North Cascades National Park.  Ecosystems need biodiversity, but humans have to help manage that diversity.

…by the 2000s , a complex combination of social and ecological factors had permitted individual animals from Canada to recolonize some of their former habitats. Today, at least 90 wolves and perhaps two-dozen or more wolverines once again wander Washington’s NCE, and both populations continue to expand their range. Even grizzly bears, which persist here in very small numbers, if at all, are now the focus of a long-awaited recovery effort. In 2014, North Cascades National Park and the US Fish and Wildlife Service initiated a three-year process to explore options for restoring grizzlies to the region. With any luck, grizzlies will reclaim their rightful home in the park – and beyond. 

Therein lies the challenge. Although America’s national parks include some of the wildest places on Earth, no park in the United States (with the possible exception of Alaska’s biggest parks) is large enough to support the full range of native biological diversity over the long-term. In order to accommodate wide-ranging animals like grizzly bears and wolves, our parks must be connected to other protected areas via wildlife corridors and their boundaries should be expanded wherever possible.

One billion dollar clean-up.

The oil companies devastate an entire ecosystem and way of life for the people whose lives are tied into the system.  Now maybe they will help clean it up.  Maybe is the big word here.

A $1bn clean-up of one of the world’s most oil-polluted regions will be officially launched on Thursday by the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari. But it will be at least 18 months before full remedial work starts in Ogoniland in the Niger delta, and possibly 25 years before all the swamps, creeks, fishing grounds and mangroves are restored after decades of spills by Shell, the national oil firm and other oil companies.

According to agreements signed last year in Abuja, $200m (£139m) will be spent annually for five years to clear up the devastated 1,000 sq mile (about 2,600km2) region in Rivers state near Port Harcourt. More money may be needed to restore the ecosystem fully.

Amnesty International campaigner Joe Westby said: “[The Ogoni] have a right to be sceptical, they have seen clean-ups promised and people paid to do the work in the past, only for little improvements to be delivered. This time the rhetoric must translate into action.”

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area.....

You can make a difference in the Bay Area.

San Francisco’s Bay is polluted, its wetlands are deteriorating and its wildlife is in dire need of help.

That’s the position of Save the Bay and a coalition of environmental organizations and business groups backing Measure AA, a nine-county initiative that will appear on the ballot in San Francisco’s June 7 election.

A majority vote in favor of the measure, which needs to cross a two-thirds threshold, would create a new $12 annual parcel tax across the Bay Area for 20 years to raise $500 million to restore tidal marshes across the Bay Area.

“We’ve lost a lot of our wetlands around the Bay,” Andrea Jones, director of bird conservation at Audubon California, said during the Facebook video event.

Jones argued that more than a million birds call the Bay’s wetlands home during their migration, and those wetlands are in need of restoration.  Wetlands naturally filter sediment and chemicals from water, allowing the detritus to drop to the wetland floor.  

The ocean is full of plastic litter.

Plastics makes fish slow and stupid.  Imaging what they do to us.

To look at the impact of micro-plastics on the early life stages of fish, Swedish researchers exposed perch larvae to different concentrations of polystyrene in water tanks.

In the absence of micro-plastics, about 96% of the eggs successfully hatched. This dropped to 81% for those exposed to large quantities.

"The fish that did hatch in these waters with high quantities of micro-plastics were "smaller, slower, and more stupid than those that hatched in clean waters, lead author Dr Oona Lonnstedt, from Uppsala University, said.