Apparently they didn’t talk to any divorce lawyers. We hear that they’re mostly in it for the green.
A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2007) — The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment. A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.
The findings of Jianguo "Jack" Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households," Liu said. "The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere."
Liu and his research assistant Yu started with the obvious -- that divorce rates across the globe are on the rise. Housing units, even if they now have few people in them, require resources to construct them and take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. A refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two.
When they calculated the cost in terms of increased utilities and unused housing space per capita, they discovered that divorce tosses out economy of scale. Among the findings:
* In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
* In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
* The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.
* The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.
To track what happens when divorced people returned to married life, the study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results: The environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households.
Liu, a University Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife and Rachel Carson Chair in Ecological Sustainability at MSU's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, has spent more than two decades integrating ecology with social sciences to understand the complex interrelationships between nature and humans and how those interactions affect the environment and biodiversity. Liu and Yu began to discuss this research project when Yu was a high school student.
A study on divorce done by a “Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife.” Oh yeah, break us off some of that, particularly the wild life part.
Headline of the day
Man talking on cell phone killed by train in San Leandro (SF Gate)
OK, we’ll say it. “Can you hear me now…?”
Let’s see them blame this on pop culture
Neanderthal Children Grew Up Fast
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2007) — An international European research collaboration led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports evidence for a rapid developmental pattern in a 100,000 year old Belgian Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis).
A new report details how the team used growth lines both inside and on the surfaces of the child’s teeth to reconstruct tooth formation time and its’ age at death.
Scientists found differences in the duration of tooth growth in the Neanderthal when compared to modern humans, with the former showing shorter times in most cases. This faster growth resulted in a more advanced pattern of dental development than in fossil and living members of our own species (Homo sapiens).
The Scladina juvenile, which appears to be developmentally similar to a 10-12 year old human, was estimated to be in fact about 8 years old at death. This pattern of development appears to be intermediate between early members of our genus (e.g., Homo erectus) and living people, suggesting that the characteristically slow development and long childhood is a recent condition unique to our own species.
Neanderthal life history, or the timing of developmental and reproductive events, has been under great debate during the past few decades. Across primates, tooth development, specifically the age of molar eruption, is related to other developmental landmarks such as weaning and first reproduction.
Scientists have previously found evidence to both support and refute the idea that Neanderthals grew up differently than our own species. In this new study, researchers used information from the inside of a molar tooth, coupled with data from micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), as well as evidence of developmental stress on the outsides of tooth crowns and roots.
That’s when they had real rock music. Nothing but rocks.
What, no GPS?
Singing might help whales find themselves
By Charles Q. Choi
updated 1 hour, 56 minutes ago
Humpback whales may sing not to court mates but to help explore the seas around them.
When a male humpback moves someplace new, he changes his song to match those coming from other nearby whales.
"The traditional explanation for why whales do this is that male whales are singing to seduce female whales, and that females get really turned on by songs that are currently in style," said cognitive neuroscientist Eduardo Mercado III of the State University of New York in Buffalo. "A song that does not follow the most recent trends might be viewed as passé by females, so singers would need to keep current to compete."
But instead of learning songs to better attract females, Mercado suggests humpbacks do so to help navigate new locales.
Complex habitat
In the complex underwater habitats where humpbacks live, figuring out where other whales are, just by listening, can prove quite challenging. Mercado suggests that singers can improve their ability to pinpoint other whales by learning their songs. By comparing incoming sounds that were likely degraded by journeying through the ocean with memories of pristine versions of those sounds, the whales can use any distortion they hear to judge the distance the sound has traveled.
"By analogy, a baseball player's knowledge about the size of a baseball can help him to judge when and where a fly ball will land," Mercado said. "This is the same basic process that bats, dolphins, and sonar operators use when they compare echoes to the signals that generated those echoes to locate and track targets."
Only male humpbacks learn songs, a fact that long suggested they do it to court females. "But I think they're the ones who learn songs because they're the ones who go and search for mates, while females are the ones who wait to get found," Mercado told LiveScience.
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology bioacoustician Whitlow Au, who did not participate in this study, agreed the reason why humpbacks sing remains unclear, and "any idea that might make sense is welcome." He said Mercardo's idea was interesting and reasonable, "but whether or not it is right is still to be determined."
Lack of evidence
While Mercado acknowledges there is no direct evidence yet supporting his idea, he adds there is similarly no direct proof that humpback songs are used for courtship.
Indeed, Mercado said there was evidence against the notion of humpback songs as serenades — for instance, most of the whales that join singers are other males, rather than females. Moreover, "whales are more likely to swim away when they hear a recording of a song than to approach the speaker," he explained.
Find themselves? Well, we guess a year abroad before college probably isn’t practical.
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