Tag Archives: overpopulation

The seven billionth baby

Commentable: October 31, 2011
At a relatively arbitrary date, October 31, 2011 at a relatively arbitrary time of 11:58 PM in Manila in the Phillipines (near the International Dateline), a relatively arbitrary baby (Danica May Camacho) was born – the seven billionth person alive on Earth. That is according to the United Nations Population Fund. The U.S. Census Bureau [...]
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World population estimate for 2100 revised – up

News: Overpopulation    May 5, 2011
Ask around about the ‘overpopulation issue.’ The reply is likely to be: What overpopulation issue? For anyone cognitively aware before 1990, that was one of the biggest issues of the era, right up there with the means of reducing the surplus population, which was called global thermonuclear war. For recent generations, it is hardly a [...]
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Can the Earth feed 9 billion people?

News: Overpopulation    February 25, 2011
Less than twenty years ago if you asked almost anybody – “Is there enough food for everybody on Earth?” – answering would not even elicit a scratch of the head. Obviously, it can and does. This was the era of the green revolution, when a combination of new crop varieties, pesticides, fertilizers and agricultural management [...]
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NEWS: Short List

News:     February 21, 2011
Tunable antilaser good for a switch – Photonics | In science (as in life) it’s sometimes useful to go against the flow, to experiment with the reverse. Take lasers, for example. Excite some atoms into making a beam of photons and you’ve got a laser. Now go the other way: Start with a laser beam; [...]
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A framework for thinking about a healthy planet

Impact: Climate Change    March 21, 2010
We should be angry when information that must be widely available – something with real public impact – is sequestered behind a paywall. This is by way of putting some emotional steam into an important article in the eminent Scientific American, April 2010, titled Boundaries for a Healthy Planet. Why is this article important? The [...]
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Radical thinking in agriculture needed

News: Genetic Modification    February 12, 2010
A new report, published online in the journal Science, titled “Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century” was prepared by sixteen top specialists in population, climate, agriculture, and food genetics. They represented a mixture of academics, corporations (Monsanto, DuPont), and government scientists. The report was first presented to the U.S. State Department in 2009. Three [...]
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