Number Please Let Your Fingers Do the Blocking


With the advent of online access at home and ubiquitous use of smartphones, the traditional printed telephone book is going the way of the dodo. Yet competing companies across the country are still churning out the archaic directories and delivering them unbidden to mil- lions of people annually. Many receive multiple publica- tions that, although they can be recycled, still add up to a tremendous waste of resources and an unnecessary burden on landfills. Now an industry-sponsored online opt-out registry, YellowPagesOptOut.


Jurassic Ark Extinction is Not Forever


Tiny organisms that vanished from the Earth’s biosphere eons ago are still around—they’re just buried under miles of polar ice sheets in Antarc- tica and Greenland. As the forces of climate change cause the ice to melt faster every year, John Priscu, a professor of ecology at Montana State University and pioneer in the study of Antarctic microbiology, predicts that bacteria and other microbes could awaken from their hibernation and threaten contemporary species. Priscu notes, “It’s a way of recy- cling genomes. You put something on the surface of the ice and a million years later, it comes back out.” He has spent the past 28 summers near the South Pole, finding living bacteria in cores of 420,000-year-old ice and multiplying them in his laboratory. Other researchers report bringing far older bacteria back to life. Thawing glaciers could also churn out enormous compost piles of decaying biomass. It’s estimated that all the carbon from organic matter in and under the ice sheets, if converted to carbon dioxide, would equal a decade’s worth of emissions from today’s vehicles worldwide. Not all of the carbon would convert directly to greenhouse gases, but any release would add to the huge amount al- ready expected from thawing perma- frost. “This is a big pool of carbon to be considered,” Priscu warns. “We really should look at this.”


Source: TheDailyClimate.org (Tinyurl. com/AntarcticBacteria)


natural awakenings October 2012 23


com, has been established to provide a convenient way for residents to choose which directories they want to receive or to stop delivery. At least 12 weeks are required to process an opt-out request.


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