When sonar picked up a large mass at the bottom of the Columbia River earlier this year, scientists feared that part of the nearby Bonneville Dam had started eroding away. However, when the dive team they sent in got down to the riverbed, what they found surprised everyone: a massive ball of 60,000 or more white sturgeon, some more than 14-feet long.

The mountain of white sturgeon contained around 60,000 fish, according to a rough estimate by Michael Parsley, a research fisheries biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Columbia River Research Laboratory in Cook, Skamania County. He described that estimate as “probably conservative.”

It was an aquatic phenomenon nobody had ever seen at such a monstrous scale, offering a startling glimpse into the life of the Columbia’s largest and most ancient fish. If the estimates are anywhere near correct, the congregation of sturgeon may represent 5 to 10 percent of all the white sturgeon in the lower Columbia River, Parsley said. The conclave apparently broke up in March as the corps increased water releases through the dam to help salmon.

Sturgeon are no punks, man. They can live to be OVER A HUNDERD!

This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story on the potential for Lab-Grown meat. Much like how scientists grow sheets of skin for medical use from cells, animal muscle can also be grown..and hey! animal muscle is meat. Mmmm….delicious, test tube meat.

Almost any meat eater who went to college or has a hippie friend (or reads the Synthesis Blog) has seen at least one video of animals at the slaughter and the absolutely horrendous conditions there, so it’s apparent that meat eaters don’t care where their food comes from as long as it tastes delectable. So why not meat from the lab? No animals harmed, no animal waste; it will still take energy to create the “shmeat,” but not as much as traditional meat-producing facilities. Oh, you wonderful futuristic world, you! Now WHERE’S MY FUCKING HOVER BOARD?

From NPR:

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay “Fifty Years Hence”: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill’s comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years.

Even PETA and other animal rights activists are into the idea.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA recently announced a $1 million contest to create commercially viable chicken meat, sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean and the prize money paltry. But the thinking is pragmatic: If people must have meat, and factory farming is an animal nightmare, why not find a high-tech alternative?

Peter Singer, author of the 1975 treatise Animal Liberation, is all for it.

“I always thought it would be a good thing,” he says. “The same way that I think it’s good that the abuse of horses for pulling loads has ended. … I think it would be good if the abuse of animals for raising them for meat were to end, because we had a technological solution to that. We had an alternative.”

So here we are at the doorstep of the animal-less meat culture future. Next stop, Soylent Green.

Scientists in the UK can now legally combine human and animal embryos. Manimals. Why? For the sake of finding cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

From Times Online:

The Minister admitted that the Bill was not a promise that cures for diseases could be found. “It is an aspiration that it may.”

The main kinds of admixed embryo permitted by the Bill are “cytoplasmic hybrids” or “cybrids”, which are made by moving a human nucleus into an empty animal egg. These are genetically 99.9 per cent human. As well as true hybrids, it also allows chimeras that combine human and animal cells, and transgenic human embryos that include a little animal DNA.

Of course, they can’t really (legally) grow a mermaid or centaur or whatever weird manimal (yet). Scientists can only cultivate the embryos for 14 days, and it is illegal to transfer them into a human or animal womb. BUT, rules were made to be broken and chances are if they make it illegal, someone will do it. Mother nature, prepare to be f*cked with.

The Tasmanian Devil, an Australian carnivorous marsupial, has unfortunately been announced as a member of the endangered species list. Due to a cancer that has furiously attacked the animals face, the Devil has seen it’s numbers drop by near 60 percent in recent years. Wildlife experts estimate that the population could possibly be as low as 20,000 at this point. A sad thought for fans of the animal, and the cartoon.

[The following, written by Synthesis weekly columnist Julia Murphy, appeared in the Synthesis Weekly on Monday, May 19th, 2008. Julia can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com]

Peak Oil Losing That Ugly 3,000 Pounds

The brilliant and sexy Robert Murphy was the one who originally pointed out to me the correlation between summer vacation season and spikes in gas prices. Now, for true we’ve been tracking some crazy gas price increases ever since…well, about the same time the phrase “peak oil” entered the popular lexicon. Some of us have been hearing that phrase for a little longer, but it’s probably safe to say that at least five out of every 10 people have heard of it; the concept that consumption has outstripped supply and it’s just a matter of time before that fact becomes unavoidably apparent.

For the other five, from Wikipedia:

“Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.”

Yes, my friends, the age of finity will make many scenarios possible, even likely. Civilian air travel? Not sure how that’ll pan out. To postpone the inevitable, here is an online remedy titled “Six Stupidly Simple Steps to Save Billions of Gallons of Gas”

1. Lose weight. (900 million gallons).

2. Synchronized (intelligent) traffic lights (1,000 million gallons)

3. More expensive gas (450 million gallons)

4. Drive slower (600 million gallons just for semis)

5. More people per car (1,500 million gallons)

6. Increase fuel efficiency to 35 MPG (55,000 million gallons by 2015)

So freakin’ simple! I’m going to save the losing weight one for last, though, cause bikes get (doing the math from the caloric — which is heat — value of a gallon of gas) an astounding 1,035 miles to the gallon. Or, what, about 57 miles for 2,000 calories.
So it occurred to me that as we head into the summer vacation season that the thing to do would be to lose that ugly 3000-plus pounds (i.e., your car) and trip the light fantastic, vacaying on yer bike.

More after the jump: (more…)

Apparently, the coyotes of Southern California have decided that children would make delicious dinners:

Wardens have spotted the coyote that tried to drag a 2-year-old girl from her front yard Tuesday in Lake Arrowhead, about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, but did not have a clear shot to fire. They have since set up traps for it. Authorities were also investigating reports of two possible attacks earlier this year in the same resort town in which a coyote may have bitten two young children in the buttocks as their father barbecued on the deck.

In the latest case, police said her mother was photographing the toddler and her siblings in front of the house when she ran inside to put the camera down. That’s when a coyote tried to make off with the toddler. The girl was treated for wounds to the head and neck, but was expected to survive. Dotti Edwards, a neighbor, came home after the attack and spotted a scrawny coyote in the street. Her neighbors have complained of coyotes in recent weeks with reports of the wild animals sleeping in yards and pestering residents.

“They’re so brazen right now,” she said. “They just stand there and look at you.”

Earlier, a coyote attacked a 2-year-old girl playing in a city park in Chino Hills, a suburb 30 miles east of Los Angeles that is connected to a state park.

The next day, a coyote in the same place made a beeline for another child, but the father scared it away. Since last year, there have been seven coyote attacks in the Chino Hills area, including four in which children were bitten. State wildlife officials have killed 23 coyotes to protect the public

“If they see a young child and they have a chance, yeah they’ll take it,” said Kevin Brennan, a state wildlife biologist.

The problem will be easy enough to solve however. We’ll just keep building building McMansions and suburbs over the land where coyotes have lived for a bajillion years, keep shooting them whenever they act like coyotes, then wait until there’s like three left before deciding that we might actually like to keep them around, for posterity. The American way!