With a lot of great health and fitness benefits, honey should be a common staple in people’s daily diets. Other than its great taste, it has numerous benefits for our bodies, immune systems, weight, and energy which you may not be aware of.

Honey is a source of a variety of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. The main vitamins it provides are niacin, riboflavin and pantothetic acid, and the main minerals are calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium and zinc. Importantly, the amount of these substances in honey varies depending on its floral source, just as its color and taste vary.

On top of this, what are the main health benefits of honey?

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Perhaps fewer than 5,000 Komodo dragons remain in the wild - victims of poaching, human encroachment, and loss of prey due to human hunting.

Wild Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) inhabit Komodo National Park in the center of Indonesia’s archipelago. The park is comprised of the islands of Komodo, Pada, and Rinca. The limited range of the Komodo dragon makes this species vulnerable to extinction.

To help raise awareness for these large and lovely lizards, here are 11 things you didn’t know about Komodo dragons — and a compilation of adorable photos! Enjoy!

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Because of CO2 build up in the atmosphere, its level of concentration in the oceans also increases. There, some of the CO2 converts to a simple acid called carbonic acid. (H2CO3).

What is becoming a much-studied phenomenon in recent years, these dead zones of depleted oxygen (02) - typically found at depths between 300 and 600 meters–are the result of several factors working separately and in combination: lower sea surface 02 levels, less heat exchanging (”ventilation”) with mid-level ocean depths due to over-all warming, and “euthrophication events” (an over-growth of a species due to excess nutrients).

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Mascoma Corp. says it has found a way to remove several steps from the process of making cellulosic ethanol, cutting the cost and time it takes to make the fuel, while increasing yields.

The Lebanon, N.H.-based company says it has made advances in consolidated bioprocessing, a process that uses engineered microorganism to make ethanol from cellulosic biomass, such as grasses, stalks and wood waste. Mascoma’s CBP process eliminates the need to produce costly cellulase enzymes, by producing the cellulase and ethanol in a single step.

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Data used in this study comes from one of 15 (so far) research cruises that are part of a much larger, international project called CLIVAR; the Climate Variability (CLIVAR) Repeat Hydrography/CO2 research   program.

Data analysis of the water samples indicated that total mercury levels in the North Pacific Ocean water have risen about 30 percent over the last 20 years.

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Researchers in have discovered ancient, extremophile life forms that survive with neither light nor oxygen underground in Antarctica.

From the surface, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Eastern Antarctica appears to be one of the most desolate places on Earth. And indeed it is. Apart from a few glaciers, the land is ice-free. No animals live here, and what few plants are able to are simple planktonic forms. But recently, a team of researchers have discovered evidence of a thriving community of extremophile microbes thriving several hundred feet below the barren surface.

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Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have discovered a solution to the problem of reliable storage for alternative energy: a bacteria that can convert electricity to methane when combined with CO2.

Any surplus power from wind, solar, or tidal sources is fed into the bacteria and combined with CO2 from the atmosphere to create methane for storage. Methane is a clean-burning gas and 80% of energy fed into the process was retained at the end.

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Dairy products are part of most American diets on a daily basis, but what is the health and environmental impact of this high demand for milk?

The production of much of the milk in this country is done in large scale-operations, some having thousands of cows.

That’s a lot of manure to be dealt with, this reduces the air quality (especially for people living near the dairy operation), and consistently finds its way into our rivers, streams, and groundwater.

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E. coli is normally found in the guts of most warm-blooded animals (yes, even yours) and if you’ve had an encounter with it that you remember, chances are you spent the weekend on the toilet wishing you were dead. Yet, while it’s true that some strains of e. coli can cause food poisoning in humans, most are actually quite harmless.

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From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.

Links for this week’s edition:

sustainablog - Killing for Crops
Gas 2.0 - Ecodriving with the AAM
EcoScraps - McDonalds Green Billboard
Shell and the Alberta Oil Sands
Sad Hippies
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF

Scientists have uncovered life in a South African gold mine, 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) beneath the surface of the earth. In this dark but hot ecosystem, a single biological species derives power not from the sun but from elements produced by uranium’s radioactive decay.

Remarkably, it is the first ecosystem ever found having only one biological species. In utter darkness, total isolation, with no oxygen, and in 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit), the cave-dwelling, rod-shaped bacterium, Desulforudis audaxviator survives.

Trajectories of evolution have fitted the bacterium with the genes necessary to exist under a variety of different conditions. One such adaptation is the ability to survive by fixing nitrogen and carbon directly from the environment.

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During a recent sea expedition the team successfully used the bacteria, which contains a protein that glows blue when viewed though a simple light-detecting device, to detect oil.

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San Diego-based scientists at Genomatica have developed the ability to manipulate bacteria into being useful to feed our societal lust for plastics, by producing “butanediol (BDO), a chemical compound used to make everything from spandex to car bumpers, thereby providing a more energy-efficient way of making it without oil or natural gas,” the article says.

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This week from our friends at ZapRoot: The FDA needs to have their heads examined. We respond to the numerous Chinese comments. Explore the world through Google Earth’s Environment section.

This week’s show links:

Eco Child’s Play - CA Fails to Pass Chemical Ban in Baby Products
Eat Drink Better - FDA Allows Producers to Irradiate Spinach & Lettuce
BPA Opinions
Corn Syrup All Natural
Google Earth Environment
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

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