Browsing: Lifestyle

A Brief History On September 7, 1936, Benjamin died.  Ben was the last Thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, a carnivorous marsupial of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea.  The introduction of Dingoes and climate change cut into their population, and hunting pressure did the rest. Digging Deeper Now that we have no living Thylacines, should scientists use cloning to resurrect the species?  Are there any moral or practical reasons not to?  What about other extinct species? Some of the critters we would like to see brought back through cloning include the Wooly Mammoth and the Wooly…

A Brief History On September 6, 2013, ivory poachers in Africa poisoned and killed 41 elephants at the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.  The WWF reports about 20,000 elephants are killed illegally each year in Africa by poachers, out of a world wide total of only 415,000 African elephants.  Incredibly, in 1930 there were about 10 million wild elephants in Africa! Digging Deeper Despite strict anti-poaching laws, poaching takes a terrible toll on many types of animals.  There may be about 30,000 Rhinos left in Africa, of which only 6000 are Black Rhinos, which numbered over 100,000 as recently as…

A Brief History On September 5, 1980, the Gotthard Road Tunnel from Uri Canton to Airolo in Switzerland opened for travel, at the time the longest highway tunnel in the world at 10.5 miles long.  Today, we look at some other real and fictional tunnels: Digging Deeper The Channel Tunnel, or, “Chunnel,” connecting France and England with an under the sea section of 23.5 of its 31 mile length. The Time Tunnel, a TV show from 1966 to 1967, featuring two lost time travelers going from one historical adventure to another. The Delaware Aqueduct, the longest tunnel in the world,…

A Brief History On September 1, 2004, terrorists seeking the independence of Chechnya from Russia invaded School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia, taking 1,100 hostages, of which well over 700 were school children.  The incident lasted three days and cost 333 innocent lives and the lives of 31 of the 32 terrorists. Digging Deeper The Riyad-us Saliheen attackers had pre-staged weapons and explosives in the school weeks before the attack.  A standoff followed demands that Chechnya be given independence, and after three days, Russian forces began an assault that triggered explosions and shooting by the terrorists and a…

A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania.  The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations.  Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host.  Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …