iPhones, for all their glorious, touch-screeny goodness, are fragile little things — it hangs up on your mom if you hold it in your left hand, data speeds are spotty with some carriers, and the screen cracks easier than a jailhouse snitch with an upcoming parole hearing. But for all…
Last week, Sea World took in an approximately 1,700-pound manatee that had been bashed up by a speeding boat. It’s the seventh sea cow taken in by the facility this year alone, and regulations to stop boats from hitting the sweet morons have been debated, sort of.A new study suggests,…
Earlier this year, Spanish oil giant Repsol YPF announced that a massive drilling rig had started operating in “ultra-deep water” in the Straits of Florida, somewhere between Cuba and the Keys. One of the more problematic aspects of the operation is the dearth of information about where the rig is…
Coral reefs have taken a beating in recent decades. Ask someone who dove off the Florida coast in the ’70s and he’ll tell you the reefs today are a shadow of what they once were.Overfishing, reckless coastal development, pollution, careless boaters, and human plundering have all had a perilous effect on the increasingly…
Bear with me — this is cool.Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas make things look cool for a living. They lead Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization group. They’re of a special breed of nerd — how many people do you know with a résumé that includes a doctorate in mathematics and…
Everybody’s trying to ride the Trayvon Martin case’s publicity coattails — politicians are making statements about it left and right, a column in the Huffington Post tried to connect an FAU student’s freakout to racial anger, and now, the University of Missouri is trying to tie a psychology study to…
Despite the string of national headlines, television specials, a federal ban, and grotesque photographs, it’s becoming increasingly unclear whether Burmese pythons are permanently wrecking the Everglades or if they’re just an overhyped nuisance. Earlier this year, scientists released a major study suggesting that huge drops of mammal sightings in the Everglades were likely because…
The Everglades has a marketing problem. Earlier this week, officials from the Everglades National Park and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization got together for a chat about how to better market the park to lure in tourists. As the Miami Herald reports, during the meeting, park Superintendent Dan…
Last week, we looked out how a sheet of ice covering most of Greenland could threaten Broward and Miami in the distant future if it melts. The gist is that a jump in sea levels would flood massive swaths of South Florida and that there isn’t necessarily the infrastructure in…
A giant sheet of ice that covers most of Greenland might be a serious problem for South Florida in a few hundred or few thousand years, give or take. A new study in Nature Climate Change warns that a 1.6 degree Celsius jump in global temperatures could completely melt Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s terrible because we’re talking about…
At the end of January, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study suggesting that Burmese pythons were decimating mammal populations in the Everglades. The numbers were shocking: a 99 percent decline in raccoon sightings, a 98 percent drop in opossum sightings, and so on. Reuters reported on Friday, however, that some…
Today, in turtle-wonkery:We told you last week about the big fight to keep Hillsboro Lighthouse from being turned out by sea-turtle activists, even though the sea-turtle activists say they love the lighthouse and don’t want it turned out at all.The advocates even sent the Coast Guard a list of things…
Could a whole coalition of highly accomplished, super educated doctors and researchers — the ones who work at and advise the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Harvard School of Public Health — all be wrong? Or are their critics hindering them from…
We told you yesterday about the Broward Water Partnership’s latest push to encourage water conservation with its new spokesman, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. Jingleheimer Schmidt is helping pass on information about conservation, rebates for high-efficiency toilets, and free stuff by using stories about his anti-drought efforts in Nursery RhymeLand. There’s also a…
It’s the dry season, and Broward County is looking to encourage water conservation efforts by offering rebates to residents who buy high-efficiency toilets and other incentives, depending on your city. The goal is to cut water use by 30 million gallons per day — and officials decided the best way to…
When it comes to shark attacks, Florida is tops. In 2011, there were 11 unprovoked attacks in the state’s waters, including one in Palm Beach. The next closest state was North Carolina, which had only four. Losers.But the 11 attacks in Florida marks a huge drop over past years, according to…
It’s no secret that Burmese pythons have been wreaking havoc in the Everglades, but the extent of their destruction has been hard to grasp. A new study provides some of the first hard statistics on how these invasive reptiles are altering the food chain, and the numbers are downright scary.Between…
Copper in Coral Springs. Lead in Deerfield. Styrene in Dania Beach. These are just a few of the cases that turn up with a quick search of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Toxic Release Inventory database.The database, consisting of toxic disposals from 2010, allows users to search by zip code…
The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact released a lengthy draft plan intended to make sure South Florida doesn’t become some real-life mashup of Mad Max and WaterWorld when sea levels start to rise courtesy of climate change. The Compact — a gang of county representatives from Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade,…
As if snakes large enough to swallow — or at least try to swallow — alligators in the Everglades aren’t frightening enough, U.S. Geological Survey researchers delivered a bit of unsettling news this week about Burmese pythons. These massive beasts can’t be held back by saltwater. The researchers hoped that reptiles’…
Palm Beach County’s health department is reporting that a woman has acquired the West Nile virus — the first case in the county in five years.The county issued a “mosquito borne disease advisory” yesterday when the case was confirmed, after the woman was diagnosed with the disease by her doctor.Since…
They didn’t have much reason to do it before, but the Bahamas and Cuba have defined an international boundary in the waters off the coast of Florida. Now, the reason is clear: Both countries are poised to start drilling for oil from floating rigs.Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham cochaired a…
