BBC Nutritional Science — Sticking to a diet which includes fruit, vegetables, fibre and healthier fats could protect against type two diabetes, a study suggests.

More than 14,000 Spanish volunteers were quizzed about eating habits, then checked over four years to see who developed the condition. The results pointed to an 83% lower risk for those who followed the diet, the British Medical Journal reported. …

People living in Crete, southern Italy and Greece provided the inspiration for the so-called Mediterranean diet. Their traditional lifestyle involved not only regular exercise, but also plenty of fish, fruit and vegetables, usually cooked in olive oil, and washed down with the occasional glass of red wine.

Studies have suggested that modern diets based on this ideal could improve heart health. The idea that it could also reduce the risk of diabetes is a logical step - olive oil is already known to improve blood sugar control and lower blood pressure.

The 14,000 men and women, of varying ages, were all scored on their own recollection of which elements of the Mediterranean diet they followed in day-to-day life, and split into three groups, depending on the level of their adherence to the diet. As well as gaining a point for eating key ingredients fish, fruit and olive oil, they got one for cutting back on animal fats and keeping to a moderate alcohol intake. The highest group had managed seven or more points, while the bottom group had less than three points.

The researchers then waited to see who developed diabetes over the next four years, and found that the average risk for those in the highest group was 83% lower than for those in the lowest group. Those in the middle had a 59% fall in the risk of diabetes. (05/30/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for “solutions.” This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our “Happy Motoring” utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements. …

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country’s oil consumption. The fact that we’re not talking about it — especially in the presidential campaign — shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don’t get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

We don’t have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about “hope” has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it — by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don’t figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works. (05/30/08)
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Christian Science Monitor — Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there’s a Ä9,000 ($13,000) fine if you’re caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water – and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.

Barcelona is not alone. Cyprus will ferry water from Greece this summer. Australian cities are buying water from that nation’s farmers and building desalination plants. Thirsty China plans to divert Himalayan water. And 18 million southern Californians are bracing for their first water-rationing in years.

Water, Dow Chemical Chairman Andrew Liveris told the World Economic Forum in February, “is the oil of this century.” Developed nations have taken cheap, abundant fresh water largely for granted. Now global population growth, pollution, and climate change are shaping a new view of water as “blue gold.”

Water’s hot-commodity status has snared the attention of big equipment suppliers like General Electric as well as big private water companies that buy or manage municipal supplies – notably France-based Suez and Aqua America, the largest US-based private water company.

Global water markets, including drinking water distribution, management, waste treatment, and agriculture are a nearly $500 billion market and growing fast, says a 2007 global investment report.

But governments pushing to privatize costly to maintain public water systems are colliding with a global “water is a human right” movement. Because water is essential for human life, its distribution is best left to more publicly accountable government authorities to distribute at prices the poorest can afford, those water warriors say.

“We’re at a transition point where fundamental decisions need to be made by societies about how this basic human need – water – is going to be provided,” says Christopher Kilian, clean-water program director for the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation. “The profit motive and basic human need [for water] are just inherently in conflict.”

Will “peak water” displace “peak oil” as the central resource question? Some see such a scenario rising. (05/30/08)
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BBC Nature – Damage to forests, rivers, marine life and other aspects of nature could halve living standards for the world’s poor, a major report has concluded.

Current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by about 7% by 2050.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) review is modeled on the Stern Review of climate change.

It will be released at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Bonn, where 60 leaders have pledged to halt deforestation by 2020.

“You come up with answers like 6% or 8% of global GDP when you think about the benefits of intact ecosystems, for example in controlling water, controlling floods and droughts, the flow of nutrients from forest to field,” said the project’s leader Pavan Sukhdev.

“But then you realise that the major beneficiaries [of nature] are the billion and a half of the world’s poor; these natural systems account for as much as 40%-50% of what we define as the ‘GDP of the poor’,” he told BBC News. …

At the CBD on Wednesday, 60 countries signed pledges to halt net deforestation by 2020.

But the main CBD target agreed by all signatories at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 - to “halt and begin to reverse” biodiversity loss by 2010 - is very unlikely to be met.

An early draft of the TEEB review, seen by BBC News, concluded: “Lessons from the last 100 years demonstrate that mankind has usually acted too little and too late in the face of similar threats - asbestos, CFCs, acid rain, declining fisheries, BSE and - most recently - climate change”. (05/30/08)
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Science Digest: Microspheres carrying targeted nucleic acid molecules fabricated in the laboratory have been shown to prevent and even reverse new-onset cases of type 1 diabetes in animal models. The results of these studies were reported by diabetes researchers at the John G. Rangos Sr. Research Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and Baxter Healthcare Corporation.

In a research study at Children’s Hospital, the scientists injected the microspheres under the skin near the pancreas of mice with autoimmune diabetes. The microspheres were then captured by white blood cells known as dendritic cells which released the nucleic acid molecules within the dendritic cells. The released molecules reprogrammed these cells, and then migrated to the pancreas. There, they turned off the immune system attack on insulin-producing beta cells. Within weeks, the diabetic mice were producing insulin again with reduced blood glucose levels.

Results of the microsphere study are published in the June issue of Diabetes, the journal of the American Diabetes Association.

In type 1 diabetes, T cells from the immune system travel to the pancreas and destroy beta cells, which produce insulin. The scientists — led by Massimo Trucco, MD, and Nick Giannoukakis, PhD — found that the microspheres reprogram dendritic cells to block the signaling mechanism that sends T cells to destroy beta cells. The microsphere research builds on previous research by Drs. Giannoukakis and Trucco in which they used dendritic cells delivered to the pancreas in another method to turn off the immune system’s attack on insulin-producing beta cells, thereby allowing the cells of the pancreas to recover and begin producing insulin again. (05/29/08)
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George Monbiot writes: An open letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

Your Majesty,

In
common with the leaders of most western nations, our prime minister is
urging you to increase your production of oil. I am writing to ask you
to ignore him. Like the other leaders he is delusional, and is no
longer competent to make his own decisions.

You and I know that
there are several reasons for the high price of oil. Low prices at the
beginning of this decade discouraged oil companies from investing in
future capacity. There is a global shortage of skilled labour, steel
and equipment. The weak dollar means that the price of oil is higher
than it would have been if denominated in another currency. While your
government says that financial speculation is an important factor, the
Bank of England says it is not, so I don’t know what to believe. The
major oil producers have also become major consumers; in some cases
their exports are falling even as their production has risen, because
they are consuming more of their own output.

But what you
know and I do not is the extent to which the price of oil might reflect
an absolute shortage of global reserves. You and your advisers are
perhaps the only people who know the answer to this question. Your
published reserves are, of course, a political artefact unconnected to
geological reality. The production quotas assigned to its members by
Opec, the oil exporters’ cartel, reflect the size of their stated
reserves, which means that you have an incentive to exaggerate them.
How else could we explain the fact that, despite two decades of furious
pumping, your kingdom posts the same reserves as it did in 1988?

You
say that you are saving your oil for the benefit of future
generations. If this is true, it is a rational economic decision:
oil in the ground looks like a better investment than money in the
bank. But, reluctant as I am to question your majesty’s word, I must
remind you that some oil analysts are now wondering whether this
prudence is a convenient fiction(6). Are you restricting supply because
you want to conserve stocks and keep the price high, or are you unable
to raise production because your fabled spare capacity does not in fact
exist? (05/29/08)
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The Oil Drum: The world’s top oil producers are proving unable to put
more barrels on thirsty world markets despite sky-high prices, a shift
that defies traditional market logic and looks set to continue.

Fresh data from the U.S. Department of Energy show the amount of
petroleum products shipped by the world’s top oil exporters fell 2.5%
last year, despite a 57% increase in prices, a trend that appears to be
holding true this year as well.

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