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Santa Cruz city council and the county's board of supervisors unanimously voted to write an opposition letter to a Los Angeles-based environmental lobbying group's proposal to protect the kelp forests. They cited a lack of scientific evidence, public outreach and its impact on local fishing. In a petition to the California Fish and Game Commission, Environment California, a Los Angeles-based, lobbying group, requested the expansion of six marine protected areas, or MPAs, which includes Natural Bridges State Marine Reserve, and the creation of one new one at Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz. "I guess my question is, environmentalist, is what's wrong...

With war expanding in the Middle East, Russia's invasion of Ukraine still raging and China threatening to invade Taiwan, the world has arguably not been closer to the brink of nuclear war in generations. Researchers have begun sounding the alarm once again about the risks of a nuclear winter: picture an Earth hidden from the sun by as much as 165 million tons of soot and freezing 16 degrees Fahrenheit down from global mean temperatures. All-out nuclear war could shrivel up harvests worldwide, reducing global calorie production by 90 percent according to agricultural and atmospheric scientists. But an international team...

Images: Pamela Patrick MAMMOTH HUNTER OR FISH CATCHER? Archaeologists had concluded that the first inhabitants of the New World were fur-clad big-game hunters who swept across the Bering land bridge in pursuit of their prey. But recent evidence suggests that the first settlers may have been just as likely to hunt small game, catch fish or gather plants as they moved through more temperate environments. The leaf-shaped spearpoint I'm holding is surprisingly dainty--for a deadly weapon. I let my mind wander, trying to imagine life some 14,700 years ago in the marshes of southern Chile, where this relic was ...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

Mapmakers once thought the earth was flat. Astronomers used to believe the sun circled the earth. As late as the 1990s, archaeologists were convinced that the original American settlers crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska, found daylight between the glaciers, and gradually followed it south. According to what had been orthodox thinking, that happened about 12,000 years ago. “Suppose it were true,” says Jack Rossen, associate professor and chair of the Department of anthropology. “Suppose you could find a corridor through a mile-high wall of ice and follow it for a thousand miles. What would you eat? Popsicles?”...

First Americans thrived on seaweed 19:00 08 May 2008 NewScientist.com news service Jeff Hecht How times have changed. Instead of large amounts of meat and spuds, some of the first Americans enjoyed healthy doses of seaweed. The evidence comes from 27 litres of material collected from the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, widely accepted as the oldest settlement in the Americas. Nine species of seaweed, carbon dated at 13,980 to 14,220 years old, played a major role in a diet that included land plants and animals. Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, argues that the seaweeds were...

A Canadian high school student named Bronwyn Delacruz never imagined that her school science project would make headlines all over the world. But that is precisely what has happened. Using a $600 Geiger counter purchased by her father, Delacruz measured seafood bought at local grocery stores for radioactive contamination. What she discovered was absolutely stunning. Much of the seafood, particularly the products that were made in China, tested very high for radiation. So is this being caused by nuclear radiation from Fukushima? Is the seafood that we are eating going to give us cancer and other diseases? The American people...

In California, kelp is at once admired for its underwater beauty, grumbled over as a beach obstacle and served up on dinner plates. Now it is being used in the name of science. Local kelp, like the organism pictured above in the Malibu Colony, is going to be tested later this year for possible radiation contamination related to the March 2011 Japanese tsunami and resulting Fukushima radiation leaks. (Photo by Dave Lichten/The Malibu Times) Local kelp, like the organism pictured above in the Malibu Colony, is going to be tested later this year for possible radiation contamination related to the...

A highly invasive form of brown kelp native to Japan has spread throughout the San Francisco waterfront since it was discovered three years ago and could threaten native species and ecosystems if money and resources aren't put into stopping its spread, researchers say.

All along the California coast, stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, a species of rapidly-growing sea kelp from Japan has begun taking over the coastline and spreading quicker than authorities can contain it. The aggressive seaweed, known to scientists as Undaria pinnatifida, was first detected in the area in May when a local biologist noticed the marine plant clinging to piers and boats in a San Francisco Bay yacht harbor. “I was walking in San Francisco Marina, and that's when I saw the kelp attached to a boat,” recalled Chela Zabin, a biologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center...

Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson says The Pacific Coast of the Americas was settled starting about 15,000 years ago during the last glacial retreat by seafaring peoples following a "kelp highway" rich in marine resources, a noted professor of anthropology theorized Wednesday. Jon Erlandson, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, suggested that especially productive "sweet spots," such as the estuaries of B.C.'s Fraser and Stikine rivers, served as corridors by which people settled the Interior of the province. Erlandson said in an interview these migrating peoples were already...

Source: University of California, Davis - Health System Date: April 7, 2007 High Arsenic Levels Found In Herbal Kelp Supplements Science Daily — A study of herbal kelp supplements led by UC Davis public health expert Marc Schenker concludes that its medicinal use may cause inadvertent arsenic poisoning and health dangers for consumers, especially when overused. Schenker and two researchers evaluated nine over-the-counter herbal kelp products and found higher than acceptable arsenic levels in eight of them. The new study, published in the April issue of Environmental Health Perspectives was prompted by the case of a 54-year-old woman who was...

Ancient People Followed 'Kelp Highway' to America, Researcher Says Bjorn Carey LiveScience Staff Writer Sun Feb 19, 9:00 PM ET ST. LOUIS—Ancient humans from Asia may have entered the Americas following an ocean highway made of dense kelp. The new finding lends strength to the "coastal migration theory," whereby early maritime populations boated from one island to another, hunting the bountiful amounts of sea creatures that live in kelp forests. This research was presented here Sunday at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science by anthropologist Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon. Today, a nearly continuous "kelp...

Heck, if the government really is going to spend $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans, they might as well rebuild it as the city of tomorrrow complete with kelp farms, electricity generated by tides, public transportation light as a cloud and efficient and almost noiseless, parks that are nice and safe and clean. It could be a proof-of-concept city for all those innovations you see in the middle of "Popular Science" that are always "just around the corner." I draw the line at dog-walking robots and the bubble dome (for now), but you get my drift, I suppose. Well, I...