Weekly Linkfest – Edition 12

Welcome to round twelve of our (sometimes!) Weekly Linkfest, where we share the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain interesting from what we’ve seen this week.

I would greatly appreciate readers getting involved in this weekly linkfest. Please email editor (at) permaculturenews.org with links (and ideally a summary sentence outlining the key point of each link) to noteworthy articles and news reports on the internet.

Off we go:

Good News (coz we all need it):

• Pregnant Mom’s Diet Influences Infant’s Favorite Foods. Simple, if all pregnant women eat permie-food, we get a permie-world!
• Wool & Seaweed Makes Sustainable Brick Stronger. Surely this brick can give excellent moisture regulating properties too.
• Survival wins Hollywood award for tribal rights film.
• Brazil: Amazon deforestation falls to new low.
• The World Land Trust (WLT) announces a new partnership with Armenian conservation group. The Caucasus region is one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots.
• Sri Lanka war zone becomes wildlife sanctuary.
• Solar Powered "Swater" Concept Collects and Purifies Water In the Desert.
• Electric Pinwheels Wind Turbine Can Be Installed In 8 Seconds. Note! Remember that many small windmills are more resource hungry than one bigger one. But if you have no neighbours to share it with, ok.
• Deep Cure for Asthma. This is quite old, but I like to share it as I think it works. Some time ago I was swimming in the salt lake of Mar Menor in Spain three hours a day for 10 days, and it helped. Or you can do like the old Egyptians did — eat garlic.
• Plants Clean Up More Air Pollution Than Previously Thought.
• Artificial Cornea made of human collagen. A ground-breaking procedure is being developed to correct a type of blindness which strikes 10 million people each year.
• Monsanto GMO sugarbeets to be destroyed: court.
• EU consumers are still overwhelmingly opposed to GM food, new research published by the European Commissions shows. For once I’m proud to be a European.

Bad News (coz we need to understand the challenges if we’re to design our way out of them):

• Gigantic mercury catastrophe threatens the Philippines, tells Peter Appel of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Each year 200 – 500 tons of mercury ends up in the Philippine ecosystems. Consider that one teaspoon of mercury is enough to poison an average Swedish lake (which is not small). Peter says to Forskning.no that if this practice is not stopped and the nature cleansed, several hundred thousand people will die and many others will give birth to deformed children. An alternative to mercury is to use borax.
• Big agriculture is at war against the Brazilian Cerrado, the most bio diverse savanna in the world.
• Energy from fossil fuel gets 12 times more in subsidies worldwide than sustainable energy, says a new report from the USC Marshall School of Business. See also.
• Use of mild painkillers in pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of male reproductive problems.
• Maternal folate levels in pregnancy and asthma in children at age 3 years. Balance is the keyword.
• Additives in paints and cleaning agents might cause asthma and allergies for children in much smaller concentrations than formerly presumed, a new study shows.
• Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick, Study Says. Be careful when you take your laptop into your food forest!
• Top 10 Food Additives to Avoid.
• USDA Asked To Approve GMO Apple That Won’t Brown. What is next, a GMO apple that won’t rot?
• Vatican scientists urge support for engineered crops. For the first time Europe’s people are more conservative than the Pope. Thank God for that! I think we better listen to Vandana Shiva this time.

Just plain interesting or odd (coz we’re curious creatures):

• Plants ‘can think and remember’.
• Mutant Leads to Jumbo-Sized Apple.
• Do Attractive People Have More Daughters? Well, I’m soon going to have a daughter, but surely this is all thanks to my beautiful wife.
• Norfolk earliest known settlement in northern Europe.
• Dolly, the first cloned sheep, is ‘reborn’.
• Eau de Pumpkin: For Men Pumpkin Is a Real Turn-On — A Study Found the Aroma of Pumpkin Gets a Man’s Blood Rushing More than Any Other. All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden, even for single women.
• Mercury ‘turns’ wetland birds such as ibises homosexual.
• Yellow Submarine Finds River at the Bottom of the Sea.
• Arsenic-loving bacteria — The first organism able to substitute one of the six chemical elements crucial to life has been found. See also.
• Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights. Is this really a bright future?

Don’t forget to send your links for next week’s linkfest!! – editor (at) permaculturenews.org