UFOs, Heat from Dead Bodies, Veggies on Drugs, and Bush’s Trail of Devastation

: Image by Gidzy via Flickr

Weird:

Could ‘Tentacle’ UFO Have Destroyed UK Wind Turbine? Several residents of a remote English village have reported sightings of a bizarre tentacle-shaped UFO above a local wind farm, on the night before a wind turbine was mysteriously destroyed. “It was huge. At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles – it looked just like an octopus.” [Read more at CleanTechnica]

Dead People Will Provide Heat to Crematorium Facilities: If you’re dead and worried about the carbon emissions created from your cremation, relax. The Swedish town of Halmstad has a solution. After an environmental review showed that Halmstad’s crematorium was pumping too much smoke into the air, the facility’s director decided to re-use heat from the cremations to warm up the crematorium’s buildings. [Read more at CleanTechnica]

Good:

Bush to declare Pacific areas protected monuments: President George W. Bush will designate nearly 200,000 square miles (518,000 sq km) of the Pacific ocean on Tuesday as a protected region, White House officials said, making the areas hands-off for oil drilling or other extraction procedures. [Read more at Reuters]

Malaysia Using Satellites to Protect Forests: Malaysia’s forests have been dwindling at a rapid rate. During the 1990s, 13 percent of its forests disappeared, with illegal logging as a major culprit. Now, the country’s government is fighting back – with satellites. [Read more at EcoGeek]

The greenest car? Could the 100 year-old Zuest be one of the greenest cars on the planet? Its carbon footprint should be almost invisible by now, since the energy used to build it was expended 100 years ago. [Read more at Reuters]

Bad:

Worried About Antibiotics In Your Beef? Vegetables May Be No Better: For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places: Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota. [Read more at Scientific American]

Bush Delivers Five Final Blows to the Environment: Though President Bush remains in office for only two more weeks, he has left a final trail of devastation to cement his legacy in place. From gutting the endangered species act to allowing toxic waste to flow freely, Bush is pushing 11^th hour executive orders at a potentially record setting pace. [Read more at PlanetSave]

International experts weigh-in on harmful algal blooms: An international group of scientists is linking nutrient pollution in the world’s coastal seas to an increase in the number of harmful algal blooms reported in recent years. When harmful algal blooms (HAB’s) occur, they taint seafood with toxins, cause human respiratory and skin irritations and cause fish or mammal kills in coastal waters. [Read more at PhysOrg]

Meh:

New study shows governments need more honest environmental accounting: In work published in Science today, researchers from UQ’s Ecology Centre and collaborators have found that only with the ‘honest’ reporting of both the positive and negative outcomes of conservation policy can we hope to properly manage our dwindling environmental resources. [Read more at PhysOrg]