DAPRA-funded Berkeley researchers have tricked out a beetle with tiny electrodes that allow them to control its flight, reports California. Next step: Outfitting the insect with onboard sensors that relay information back to mission control. Hello, coleopteran espionage!

This certainly isn’t the first time animals have been “pressed into military service,” the University of Berkeley alumni magazine reports. The cyborg beetle is merely the latest in a line of distinguished (also often disastrous and no doubt PETA-enraging) military critters. California did us the courtesy of a recap. Here are a couple of my tragicomic favorites:

The common gerbil. “With their unique ability to smell increased adrenaline in sweat, gerbils had been slated to detect spies and terrorists since WWII. The Israeli internal security force put gerbils to work at the Tel Aviv airport, but cancelled the project when the furry creatures implicated innocent passengers who were just anxious about flying.”

The domestic cat. “The CIA inserted a transmitter and battery pack in a cat and put a microphone in its ear and an antenna on its tail, to eavesdrop on the Soviets during the Cold War. On its first test run, the cat was run over by a taxi before reaching the intended target.”

Source: California

Image by wildxplorer, licensed under Creative Commons.

For thousands of years, humans have been trading biodiversity for homogeny: Diverse forests for monoculture tree farms, grasslands for agriculture, and oceans for fish farms. This process is simply unsustainable, ecology professor Shahid Naeem writes for Miller-McCune. The drive to domesticate the earth creates an existential crisis for humans, according to Naeem, because “All aspects of human well-being and prosperity trace back to biodiversity for their foundation.”

The natural functions of the earth are based on biodiversity. Naeem writes about a study he was involved in proving that “More diversity led to greater absorption of carbon dioxide.” Even knowing this, biodiversity loss continues to be “the single most prevalent feature of our changing world.”

Species extinction is just one part of the problem, though a significant one. Rounding up wildlife into reserves and domesticating plants and animals also diminishes the earth’s diversity. “Even without the loss of a single species, with increasing homogenization biodiversity declines.”

In order to create a more sustainable ecosystem, humans need to take responsibility for creating a more equitable one, according to Naeem. Rather than the more Judeo-Christian system of human dominion over the animals, people need to think of themselves as a necessary part of the earth’s biodiversity, and they need work to keep it that way.

Image by  Cindy Sims Parr , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source:  Miller-McCune  

Most people would just write a press release, but Ted Ciamillo devised a flashier way to draw attention to the pedal-powered submarine he invented: Later this year, he’s taking it on a solo mission across the Atlantic and giving himself just 50 days to complete the journey. According to the New Scientist, the undertaking may prove more than a publicity stunt. Some scientists are convinced the trip will be a milestone in research on marine life.

Ciamillo will spend his days pedaling at a relatively shallow depth, about 2 meters below the sea surface. Surprisingly, scientists know very little about this region of the ocean, in part because current research methods are noisy, disruptive, and piecemeal. Because the sub is small and has no motor—and because it will be spending such a sustained amount of time in the water—some think it could provide valuable insight about ocean life at this depth. As a result, Ciamillo is working with researchers to prep the sub for data-gathering, fitting it out with high-resolution video cameras and making plans to meet up with support boats along his journey, which will provide him with fresh batteries and video tapes.

We'll learn more about what Ciamillo finds when the trip gets under way next November. Until then, you can read more about his plans on his project website.

Image courtesy of Christopher Thomas, licensed under Creative Commons.

(Thanks, Seed.)

The Encyclopedia of Life, a website that came out earlier this year and crashed almost immediately from a flood of visitors, is a “project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on earth.” With approximately 1.8 million known species on earth, this is a great tool for scientists and students, and it grants open access to anyone who wants to brush up on their knowledge of earth’s creatures, from seals to viruses and everything else in between. 

Sounds great, right? Well, Randy Malamud, writing in The Chronicle Review (subscription or pass required), sees more going on here than an eight-eyed jumping spider, and asks if the digital nature of EOL will “encourage us to appreciate plants and animals more, or spend more time surfing online?” He suggests that the more we cite and arrange plants and animals the less we care about them in their environment—that taxonomy parallels destruction.

He also thinks the animals are out of their element, if you will, as a pin-up for each individual entry. All animals in life are affected by and play a role in their ecosystems. We should consider the role in history they play with human interaction, and their importance of place. An example he gives is Australian Aborigines' use of the imperial blue butterfly. Their host plant, the acacia, provides seeds to the natives as food and its gum as an adhesive for tool building. The butterfly then, is an integral part of the Aborigines' culture, but it's not referenced on the EOL website.

Who is classifying the animals, Malamud argues, tells you more about the human environment than the exotic outside world. "Structuring the natural world meshes with the structure of imperial power," he writes, and he quotes MIT historian Harriet Ritvo: "The classification of animals, is apt to tell us as much about the classifiers as the classified."

Any ecologist will tell you that life on earth is about ecosystems. Malamud thinks one step in the right direction for the website's success may be that “the EOL might take a cue from Facebook or Myspace for an enhanced sense of connectivity.”

Adding to the trend of green and alternative burials, one British woman is developing a new, elegantly morbid way to honor the dead: by pressing loved ones’ cremains into fully functional pencils. 

The project “Carbon Copies” is the brainchild of Nadine Jarvis, a product designer who is currently exploring ways “to challenge our archaic post mortem traditions and to offer proposals for alternate treatment for our deceased.”

Image courtesy of Srthnow, licensed under Creative Commons.

Conservationist Calvin DeWitt sees the Bible as our earliest environmentalist treatise: “an ecological handbook on how to live rightly on earth.”

The newly published Green Bible drives that message home by highlighting all verses with ecological and conservationist themes in green ink. It’s a variation on the red-letter editions of the Bible that highlight the words of Jesus. The green edition includes an index of environmental topics, a foreword by Desmond Tutu, a “trail guide for further study,” and “inspirational essays by scholars and leaders,” among them DeWitt.

Perusing the text and zeroing in on the green passages makes for an illuminating kind of exegesis. Most of Genesis is printed in green, concerning as it does the natural world and humankind’s relationship to it. When God says, “‘And have dominion over the fish of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (1:28), the Green Bible and its contributors interpret “dominion” not as free reign, but as responsibility.

The Book of Jeremiah is more to the point, recasting the Old Testament God as an angry environmental activist: “But my people have forgotten me … making their land a horror.” (18:15-16).

The Green Bible hopes to remind the faithful that adherence to their faith includes a responsibility toward God’s creations—an increasingly common theology reflected in the emergence of Christian environmental initiatives. Environmental awareness in this edition also encompasses a mindfulness of the earth’s other human inhabitants, and every exhortation to love thy neighbor, every reminder of our interconnectivity, is printed green. An example comes from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians: “There may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for each other. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:25).

Back in November, Google.org (Google's philanthropic branch) announced it was launching a massive effort to support renewable energy. On Tuesday the company reached a milestone in their endeavor by earmarking $10 million for the research and development of geothermal energy, specifically that of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). The official Google.org blog post explains EGS as expanding “the potential of traditional geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.”

The money will go to AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling, two startup EGS companies, and will fund a research grant for Southern Methodist University to study and map US geothermal distribution. The effort is a part of the company’s RE<C initiative, a project geared towards reducing the cost of renewable energy to less than that of coal.

(Thanks, CNET News.)