please post worries about extinction in lolcat terms.
like
OH noes, I pwnd all yer pollinators!

Colony Collapse Disorder scares me. They talk about bees just up and disappearing. Makes me think there's an alien conspiracy going on...

Seriously though, I wish we did understand more about CCD, it's gotten pretty serious in the past few years, and if all the bees die off... we're screwed as far as food goes.

That is, unless we could utilise some super weed pollinates/spreads easily and can be turned into food.

So yeah, we're screwed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder

From their website:
Every year, hundreds of professional beekeepers forklift their wooden hives onto 18-wheel semis, strap down the loads, and head out on the highway.

Across the country - from the Imperial Valley in California to the Florida panhandle and the hills of Maine – farmers rely on honeybees to pollinate crops worth $15 billion every year.

But parasites, pesticides, and modern agricultural practices are making it harder and harder for beekeepers to keep their bees alive, and the crisis could affect what shows up on all of our dinner tables.

oh, and for those fans of the 1% number, if you really must look at polls, try these:
http://ronpaul2008.typepad.com/ron_paul_2008/2007/11/ron-paul-pollin.html

blah blah spin whatever, if you believe in what ron paul stands for you should vote for him anyway and tell people wherever you go why.
same is true for any candidate.

There's actually a few small intermediary steps, to my understanding, in Rychan's otherwise neat explanation:
- Plants with more color and/or small pockets of mass that will catch rain water and accumulate sugary liquid from the plants glands or pollent are selected because they attract more insects for pollination. (Significant because it describes the creation of what will become a trapping ground later.
- Plants are selected for larger and larger liquid-holding pockets, which eventually evolve into phytotelmata.
- Insects fall into the phytotelmata, and local bacteria and parasites digest the insects, leaving basic nutrients that the plant can then absorb. (This bridges the evolutionary gap of the plant evolving the ability to trap insects at the same time as evolving the ability to digest the insect, a la blind watchmaker.)
- The plant develops small mutations (downwards-growing hairs, slippery sides) that lead to insects becoming trapped at a greater percentage. Some pitcher plants' evolutionary journeys end here.
- The intercellular methods of absorption of the digested insect nutrients are developed and eventually the plant evolves the ability to break the dead insect down into its basic amino acids through the production of proteases and phosphotases. (I haven't come across one definite mechanism for the evolution of the ability to create these enzymes, although viral transduction/transmission seems to me to be a pretty good possibility.)
- The modern day pitcher plant is born.

Carnivorous plants are a fascinating topic of biomechanics and evolutionary mechanisms. Some neat papers and links to check out:
http://www.botany.org/Carnivorous_Plants/
http://www.skepticfiles.org/evolut/meatplnt.htm
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/p/pitche42.html

Cameron, K.M., Wurdack, K.J., and Jobson, R.W. 2002. Molecular evidence for the common origin of snap-traps among carnivorous plants. American Journal of Botany 89:1503--1509.
Evolution of the Genetic Architecture Underlying Fitness in the Pitcher- Plant Mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii
Peter Armbruster, William E. Bradshaw, Christina M. Holzapfel
Evolution, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 451-458
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-3820(197506)29%3A2%3C296%3AEAEOTP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Not to fear.

This appears to be a domain testing thing. [redacted].com is registered to Lucky, and I imagine some of his testing for v3.0 has cross pollinated into some scripts, and instead of picking up the main domain (videosift.com) it picked up his domain by accident.

Not really a spammer, the message is what you would normally get with those emails enabled in your profile (except s/{{REDACTED}}/videosift/)
YOU MISSED THIS REDACTED... U ARE WELCOME

So... that is unless Lucky is planning a coup and corrupted siftbot to do his bidding.

I read up about it after they talked about it on NPR. They said environmental related stresses , pesticides or genetically modified foods were the main suspects at this point but from what I have found about the cellphone signal research it seems that could be a problem too, it certainly fits the time frame.
It strikes me as a serious problem. There likely wont be any food shortages because as far as I know bees are only used to pollinate certain crops; but it should definitely have some economic impact, hopefully enough for people to put politics aside and take it seriously.

Poo! Space Angel, Clutch Cargo, nasty locker smell from sack-lunch under math book, sensation of fresh doggie doins' during pre-dawn newspaper retrival, between the toes, Bad!!!

Ladybug! Let you out to pollinate and eat aphids!!! Get motivated!!!

Interesting cultural cross-pollination. Many of the themes in Fiddler on the Roof fit in very well with Japanese culture, and the challenges of modernization.

This is a rehearsal for a production this past February.
http://jewschool.com/?p=10079