Nigerian Farming Failures, Canada’s Oil Sands, Venomous Dinos

This week: You’ll hear a story on the controversy over U.S. imports of oil extracted from the Canadian oil sand reserves. We have a story about agricultural failures in Nigeria, told by a reporter who first visited the country twenty-five years ago. Then some good news about  U.S fisheries, the first venomous dinosaur find and an inter-continental concert with the synthesized sounds of an ancient Greek instrument. And we launch our new Music in Science segment. (Credit for photo on left: Mike Blyth)

Canadian Oil Sands: Three weeks ago, we brought you new findings about the environmental impacts of extracting and refining the bitumen that lies deep underground in northern Alberta. Canada is under fire for the ongoing extraction of oil from those reserves. But it’s the United States that buys much of that oil. New pipelines are under construction to bring even more of it south.
Report by: The World’s Jeb Sharp.
Environmental hazards of oil sand extraction on Podcast44.
Canada’s ‘dirty oil challenge’ on the BBC .

Farming Failures in Nigeria: A few decades ago, Nigeria launched a plan to embrace modern farming. But today the country is more dependent than ever on imported food. To find out what went wrong with these agricultural efforts, a reporter travels to a Nigerian village he first visited in the 1980s.
Report by: David Hecht
Africa’s Food Challenge, a paper by the U.N Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Saving Fisheries from Decline: Rampant overfishing has caused some fisheries to collapse. Individual fishing quotas called catch shares could help conserve fish stocks. A new analysis of catch share fisheries in the U.S. shows that the mechanism yields more stable fish stocks.
  The study.
  FAO report on climate’s impact on global fisheries.
  The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on catch-shares.
• Fanged Dinosaurs:  Scientists have found the first evidence of venom glands in dinosaurs. Sinornithosaurus, a feathered dinosaur that lived some 128 million years ago, had grooved teeth and facial features much like today’s rear-fanged snakes. The researchers think these raptors used venom to stun and kill their prey.
  The study.
  More on the BBC.
• Finding Lost Sounds: European researchers are reconstructing the sounds of ancient musical instruments. They’re using equations that describe sounds based on the shape and material of an instrument. They recently reconstructed the sounds of the barbiton, an ancient Greek stringed instrument. The sounds of the barbiton were recently used in a concert in Stockholm.  See video below.
  More about the ancient instruments project.
  More about the powerful grid-computingnetowrks used by the researchers.
  Video credit: Ancient Instrument Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application.

Music in Science: This is a new segment on the podcast.  This week, we spoke to evolutionary biologist Tim White, one of the researchers who discovered and studied the remains of our oldest known ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi. White works in a remote desert region in Ethiopia with an international team of researchers. Listen to the podcast to find out what he and his team listened to as they dug out the remains of Ardi.
Tim White.
Ardi on The World Science Podcast 34.

Tags: ancient Greek instrument, Ardi, Canada, dinosaur, farming, fisheries, Nigeria, tar sands, Tim White, venomous