US plays down incident at sea with Chinese vessels

The Pentagon Tuesday played down a confrontation between Chinese vessels and one of its Navy surveillance ships, taking a decidedly more low-key tone than during similar incidents two months ago.

In what has become almost a routine cat-and-mouse game on the seas, there have been four incidents in the past month in which Chinese-flagged fishing vessels maneuvered too close to two unarmed ships crewed by civilians and used by the Pentagon to do underwater surveillance and submarine hunting missions, two defense officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss some of the incidents and details that the Pentagon has not yet released, adding that they fear such maneuvers are not just dangerous in themselves but could lead to escalated incidents.

The Pentagon did release a brief statement on the latest confrontation in which two Chinese fishing vessels came dangerously close — to within 30 yards — of the USNS Victorious Friday as it was operating in the Yellow Sea.

The Victorious crew sounded its alarm and shot water from its fire hoses to try to deter the vessels in an hour-long incident, one official said. The vessels didn’t leave until the Victorious radioed a nearby Chinese military vessel for help, said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman.

After incidents in March that included similar though apparently more aggressive Chinese maneuvers, the Pentagon protested to Beijing officials and issued a strong public statement calling the Chinese actions harassment.

But on Tuesday, Whitman declined to characterize what the Chinese vessels were trying to do, saying only that their actions were “unsafe and dangerous.”

Asked why the tone of the U.S. statement was muted this time, he said: “We will be developing a way forward to deal with this diplomatically.”

“USNS Victorious was conducting routine operations on Friday, May 1, in international waters in the Yellow Sea in accordance with customary international law, when two Chinese fishing vessels closed in on and maneuvered in close proximity to the Victorious,” the Pentagon said in its statement. “The intentions of the Chinese fishing vessels were not known.”

via US plays down incident at sea with Chinese vessels.

Population and Climate Change Solutions

Positive initiatives to slow global population growth — such as empowering women and girls — can play a significant role in addressing rising pollution levels worldwide, says population and climate change expert Kathleen Mogelgaard.

“Slower population growth would have significant benefits in addressing climate change,” writes Mogelgaard, senior program manager for population and climate change at the research institute Population Action International. These include a reduction in fossil fuel-related emissions and reduced stress on forests and other natural resources that absorb carbon dioxide. And we already know of positive interventions to bring down birth rates around the world, continues Mogelgaard: “expanding education, especially for the world’s girls; enhancing economic opportunities for women; and providing access to voluntary reproductive health and family planning services, so that women and men can freely decide the number and timing of their children.”

In addition to alleviating pressures on the environment, slowing population growth is key to mitigating poverty, writes environmental expert Lester Brown. In an article entitled, “Moving to a Stable World Population,” the founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute cites the Iranian government’s national family planning efforts, which effectively slowed a population growth rate burdening both the economy and environment. “Enabling people to have fewer children contributes to upward mobility and helps to stimulate development,” states the United Nations Population Fund, adding that “the countries where poverty levels are the highest are generally those that have the most rapid increases in population and the highest fertility levels.” Nonetheless, global population is expected to climb to 9.1 billion by 2050. The majority of these new births will occur in developing countries.

via Population and Climate Change Solutions.

Scientists unveil chocolate-fueled race car

Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world’s fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers.

Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car’s size, weight, and performance.

Their claims cannot be independently verified.

They hope it can reach speeds of over 145 mph when it is tested on a racetrack in a few weeks time. They have driven it at around 60 mph and are now making final adjustments to the engine before driving it at top speed.

via Scientists unveil chocolate-fueled race car.

Sleeping and eating – the French do it best

True to their reputation as leisure-loving gourmets, the French spend more time sleeping and eating than anyone else among the world’s wealthy nations, according to a study published on Monday.

The average French person sleeps almost nine hours every night, more than an hour longer than the average Japanese and Korean, who sleep the least in a survey of 18 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Despite their siesta habit, Spaniards rank only third in the poll after Americans, who sleep more than 8.5 hours.

And while more and more French people grab a bite at fast-food chains these days or wolf down a sandwich at their desk, they still spend more than two hours a day eating.

That means their meals are twice as long as those of the average Mexican, who dedicates just over an hour a day to food, the OECD’s “Society at a Glance” report on work, health and leisure in Asia, Europe and North and South America found.

The Japanese, scrimping on sleep and burdened with long commutes and working hours, still manage to spend close to two hours a day eating and drinking, placing them third behind New Zealanders.

The Japanese like to spend what remains of their scarce free time watching television or listening to the radio. This takes up 47 percent of leisure time in Japan.

Turks, on the other hand, spend more than a third of their leisure time entertaining friends.

The survey showed that the split between work and leisure time within certain countries is striking.

“Italian men have nearly 80 minutes a day of leisure more than women. Much of the additional work of Italian women is apparently spent cleaning the house,” the OECD said in a statement.

via Sleeping and eating – the French do it best.

The Biology of Skin Color: What Makes Us Black and White?

Jablonski, now chairman of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, begins by assuming that our earliest ancestors had fair skin just like chimpanzees, our closest biological relatives. Between 4.5 million and 2 million years ago, early humans moved from the rain forest and onto the East African savanna. Once on the savanna, they not only had to cope with more exposure to the sun, but they also had to work harder to gather food.

Mammalian brains are particularly vulnerable to overheating: A change of only five or six degrees can cause a heatstroke. So our ancestors had to develop a better cooling system. The answer was sweat, which dissipates heat through evaporation. Early humans probably had few sweat glands, like chimpanzees, and those were mainly located on the palms of their hands and the bottoms of their feet. Occasionally, however, individuals were born with more glands than usual.

The more they could sweat, the longer they could forage before the heat forced them back into the shade. The more they could forage, the better their chances of having healthy offspring and of passing on their sweat glands to future generations. A million years of natural selection later, each human has about 2 million sweat glands spread across his or her body.

Human skin, being less hairy than chimpanzee skin, “dries much quicker,” says Adrienne Zihlman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Just think how after a bath it takes much longer for wet hair to dry.” Hairless skin, however, is particularly vulnerable to damage from sunlight. Scientists long assumed that humans evolved melanin, the main determinant of skin color, to absorb or disperse ultraviolet light. But what is it about ultraviolet light that melanin protects against? Some researchers pointed to the threat of skin cancer.

But cancer usually develops late in life, after a person has already reproduced. Others suggested that sunburned nipples would have hampered breast-feeding. But a slight tan is enough to protect mothers against that problem. During her preparation for the lecture in Australia, Jablonski found a 1978 study that examined the effects of ultraviolet light on folate, a member of the vitamin B complex. An hour of intense sunlight, the study showed, is enough to cut folate levels in half if your skin is light. Jablonski made the next, crucial connection only a few weeks later.

At a seminar on embryonic development, she heard that low folate levels are correlated with neural-tube defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly, in which infants are born without a full brain or spinal cord. Jablonski later came across three documented cases in which children’s neural-tube defects were linked to their mothers’ visits to tanning studios during early pregnancy. Moreover, she found that folate is crucial to sperm development — so much so that a folate inhibitor was developed as a male contraceptive. (“It never got anywhere,” Jablonski says. “It was so effective that it knocked out all folate in the body.”) She now had some intriguing evidence that folate might be the driving force behind the evolution of darker skin.

But why do some people have light skin? As far back as the 1960s, the biochemist W. Farnsworth Loomis had suggested that skin color is determined by the body’s need for vitamin D. The vitamin helps the body absorb calcium and deposit it in bones, an essential function, particularly in fast-growing embryos. (The need for vitamin D during pregnancy may explain why women around the globe tend to have lighter skin than men.)

Unlike folate, vitamin D depends on ultraviolet light for its production in the body. Loomis believed that people who live in the north, where daylight is weakest, evolved fair skin to help absorb more ultraviolet light and that people in the tropics evolved dark skin to block the light, keeping the body from overdosing on vitamin D, which can be toxic at high concentrations. By the time Jablonski did her research, Loomis’s hypothesis had been partially disproved. “You can never overdose on natural amounts of vitamin D,” Jablonski says. “There are only rare cases where people take too many cod-liver supplements.”

But Loomis’s insight about fair skin held up, and it made a perfect complement for Jablonski’s insight about folate and dark skin. …People in the tropics have developed dark skin to block out the sun and protect their body’s folate reserves. People far from the equator have developed fair skin to drink in the sun and produce adequate amounts of vitamin D during the long winter months.

- PBS