Free Republic

Week of March 4, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 9 , p. 133 Smoldered-Earth Policy: Created by ancient Amazonian natives, fertile, dark soils retain abundant carbon Ben Harder Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, a research expedition encountered a group of Confederate expatriates living in Brazil. The refugees had quickly taken to growing sugarcane on plots of earth that were darker and more fertile than the surrounding soil, Cornell University's Charles Hartt noted in the 1870s. The same dark earth, terra preta in Portuguese, is now attracting renewed scientific attention for its high productivity, mysterious past, and capacity to store carbon....

A MAN tried to sue the council after he soiled his own trousers, it emerged today. He blamed the embarrassing accident on the council's decision to close a public lavatory at a bus station, and claimed he was owed the cost of a new pair of trousers. The bizarre claim was among thousands of public liability claims which cost local government and insurance firms an estimated £250 million per year. Public sector insurer Zurich Municipal said many claimants are genuine but exaggerated and spurious claims are an increasing problem. The firm compiled a list of other ludicrous and dubious claims....

The engineering mistakes that led to the canal levee failures that flooded most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were found and then dismissed in the Army Corps of Engineers' design review process in 1990, an investigative team reviewing the failures says. Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a critical mistake in assessing soil strengths on the 17th Avenue Canal project, said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who is a member of the National Science Foundation team.

Contact: Mark Shwartz mshwartz@stanford.edu 650-723-9296 Stanford University Volcanic soils yield new clues about the emergence of powerful chiefdoms in Hawaii When the first Europeans arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, they found a thriving, complex society organized into chiefdoms whose economies were based primarily on farming. On the islands of Kauai, O'ahu and Molokai, the principal crop was taro – a starchy plant grown in irrigated wetlands where the supply of water was usually abundant. But on Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii, the main staple was the sweet potato – a more labor-intensive crop planted in relatively...