Last month, Rex Dalton told us about a major earthquake in Baja Mexico that in addition to killing two people had the unfortunate local consequence of sealing off a traditional fishing spot that sustains the Cucapá Indian community. In “Quake Rescues Reserve, Shakes Baja Fishing Town,” he noted that aftereffects of the 7.2-magnitude Easter 2010 earthquake pleased conservationists as much as it annoyed the subsistence fishermen, and for exactly the same reasons. In the pleased column now add seismologists. The U.S. Geological Survey just announced that the El Mayor-Cucapah quake ... Read More
About Michael Todd
Most of online editor Michael Todd's career has been spent in newspaper journalism, ranging from papers in the Marshall Islands to tiny California farming communities. Before joining Miller-McCune, he was managing editor of the national magazine Hispanic Business.
How Marine Spatial Planning Calms Choppy Waters
March 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Imagine starting to build a house by first deciding where to put the kitchen sink, suggests scientist Benjamin Halpern. The placement is first class — for a sink — and helps the next project on your list, determining a good place for the downstairs bathroom. Over time, each addition of a room or a feature slowly completes the structure. In the end, this sink-centric home might turn out to be a perfect house, but that seems a stretch and, as Halpern insists, no one would approach the project that way. Instead of a house, let’s say you wanted to place some windmills offshore to generate ... Read More
New Statin Warnings Include Brain-Related Effects
February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Since 2009, Miller-McCune has taken a couple bites of the apple surrounding statins – a class of drugs used to lower cholesterol in the bloodstream – and whether there might be some unacknowledged health concerns for some users. Just about anything a human might ingest, from aspirin to water, might prove harmful in some cases, but we looked at statins because they were so popular (in 2009, we estimated 13 million in the U.S. alone were prescribed statins, and that figure is now believed to be north of 20 million) and yet there was little discussion of the drugs’ risks. And there are ... Read More
‘Orcas as Slaves’ Argument Sinks
February 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Approaching Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, we now know that the Great Emancipator did not free the orcas. So ruled U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller on Wednesday, as he rejected an attempt to use the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment to free five performing animals at SeaWorld. The advocacy group PETA had sued SeaWorld, claiming that the five orcas — always referred to by the names Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka, and Ulises so as to emphasize their putative personhood — were being held in involuntary servitude, which violates the amendment enacted just after the Civil War to outlaw ... Read More