Tracking Drugs Online, Readying REDD, Deep Drilling Concerns
This week: You’ll hear about Spice – a new and worrisome recreational drug that European researchers are tracking by prowling around chat rooms, blogs, and online forums. British people feeding birds in the winter may help split a bird species in two. We have news about the harmful effects of extracting Canada’s oil sands. We’ll hear about underground energy development in Germany and the concerns of those who live nearby. And we’ll talk to a scientist about a proposed program to pay developing countries to protect forests and reduce carbon emissions.
Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:
- Tracking Party Drugs Online: Scientists have been snooping around the Internet to find out what recreational drugs people are using. They’ve turned up hundreds of compounds that were circulating under the radar. The latest expose concerns Spice, a drug that’s sold as an herbal incense or smoking blend, but has marijuana-like effects on the brain.
The study will be published later this month in the International Journal of Culture and Mental Health.
Read a story about how researchers figured out the chemistry of Spice.
The Psychonaut Web Mapping Project. - Feeding Evolution: European blackcap warblers breed in northern and central Europe, and they usually migrate to Spain for the winter. A few oddball blackcaps have always migrated to the U.K., but they generally couldn’t survive the harsh English winters. That changed in the 1960′s, when bird feeders became common. Now, some 30 generations later, researchers say that the blackcaps wintering in England have become genetically different from their cousins that winter in Spain.
The study. - Canadian Oil Sands: Canada has the world’s second largest oil reserves. Most of the oil is in the form of oil sands, and extracting it requires injecting steam into the sand or excavating it and treating it with hot water. The process releases toxic metals and organic chemicals into the environment. A new study says that the levels of toxic chemicals released are much higher than previously reported by industry studies.
The study.
Alberta Department of Energy.
Find out how oil extraction in Canada threatens migratory bird species from this video.
Underground Energy Concerns: To produce cleaner energy, companies and governments are looking underground. But people who live above such projects are worried about what it means for them.
Report: By The World’s Gerry Hadden, in Germany.
More photos for this story.
More on earthquakes and geothermal energy from the New York Times.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation: A quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from tropical deforestation. Saving forests would therefore help prevent climate change. That’s the idea behind REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), a proposed program that would pay developing countries to protect their forests. Several REDD pilot projects are already underway. (This interview is a podcast exclusive!!)
Guest: Sanjayan Muttulingam, Lead Scientist, The Nature Conservancy.
The U.N REDD program.
Recent technological advances have enabled scientists to measure deforestation. Read more here.
“Guyana Offers a Model to Save Forests” in the New York Times.
The BBC on REDD in the Amazon.
On reading the article, I’d thought “what a clever chemist” that the scientific police could not detect wrong-doing, but the spice chemists were only acting very simply.
Awarter is probably a well paid participant in this “rat race”. Surely policing these clever substances will never have an end, unless we relax completely, save oodles of national tax dollars, and allow people to make mistakes – the finest known way to learn a lesson we are currently forcing citizens to learn by criminal prosecution.
Let’s begin to let those lessons spread like wildfire across the Internet.
I read in another article that this ‘spice’ drug has some really dangerous effects. It has double the effect of marijuana and it can make a person black out for 2-3 days. Its relatively new so it faces no legal restrictions yet, therefore making it technically “legal”. But I’m sure measures are already being done about this. Every citizen should keep watch.
Good and evil are the part of the same thing. I feel proud to read and hear our scientific developments like using gps to track anybody across the globe, use latest mobile phone for every possible office or personal use. Human being also made an unprecedented improvement in medical science which increases our lifespan. On the other side the same gifted scientists are developing latest drugs like ‘spice’ which are dangerous.I think extraction of minerals across the globe is more dangerous effect on humanity than nuclear bomb because it is slow and irreversible as happening in oil extraction in Canada.
That is really great achievement in the field of medicine.These development in fact are source of improvement in living standards.We never forget to appreciate our scientists as well.