Ragbag Headliners

Scientist Finds Gulf Bottom Still Oily, Dead

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there." -Read more at Yahoo News 

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Planet Could Be 'Unrecognizable' By 2050, Experts Say

A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies. –Read more at Yahoo News 

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Horse Semen On The Menu At N.Z. Food Festival

Long renowned for pioneering extreme sports such as bungee-jumping and heli-skiing, New Zealanders are now pushing culinary boundaries by serving up shots of horse semen to iron-stomached food lovers.

The equine delicacy will be on the menu at the annual Wildfoods Festival in the South Island town of Hokitika next month, along with other gastronomic delights such as raw scorpions, chocolate-covered beetles and deep-fried grubs.

"The idea is you'll have as much zizz as a stallion for a week afterwards," Christchurch racehorse breeder Lindsay Kerslake, who came up with the semen surprise, told Fairfax Media.

He said the shots being sold at this year's festival on March 12 would taste like a milkshake and be washed down with an energy drink chaser.

Organiser Mike Keenan said he expected many festival patrons would sample the shots as a dare, and he was prepared to put his own stomach on the line. –Read more at Yahoo News