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Seed's Daily Zeitgeist

July 30, 2010

1. 1 Calling for an old-fashioned Green Revolution

   BBC

   Biodiverse farming and sound forestry, moreso than GM crops, will help deliver a sustainable green revolution in Africa, says Tensie Whelan. In this week's Green Room, she warns that failure to protect biodiversity, water supplies and forests could spell disaster for the continent.

2. 2 Wanted: An IPCC for Biodiversity

   Nature

   Moves are now afoot to establish a body to review the science and anticipated effects of changes in biodiversity, reminiscent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Next week in Busan, South Korea, representatives from governments around the world will decide whether to create such a panel, which currently goes by the unwieldy moniker of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

3. 3 "National parks" at sea

   The New York Times

   A group of scientists are calling for world leaders to create more marine reserves like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia — national parks at sea, as they put it. In a statement issued Tuesday and signed by nearly 250 scientists from 35 countries, they asked lawmakers around the globe to consider designating vast reserves of the ocean as protected areas.

4. 4 Crowd science reaches new heights

   The Chronicle of Higher Education

   Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud."Crowd Science," as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences.

5. 5 Opening up science

   Timbuktu Chronicles

   This video looks at scientific knowledge-building using wikis and other web 2.0 tools to pass along agriculture methods at the local level, but it also hints at how one could pass along science at the local level if there was the language to talk about it.