Burgeoning demand for food to feed the world's swelling population, coupled with increased use of biomass as fuel is putting a serious strain on global water reserves, experts said

"If we look at how much more water we will need for food and how much more for biomass for energy going forward ... it is quite worrying," said Jan Lundqvist, who heads the scientific programme at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

Global food needs are expected to roughly double by 2050, at the same time as climate change and dwindling oil reserves are pressuring countries to set aside ever more land for producing biomass to replace greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.

These parallel global trends risk colliding with "the water-constrained biophysical reality of the planet," according to SIWI, which hosted the the World Water Week in the Swedish capital last week.

Umbra Fisk's no-nonsense, no-embarrassment voice resonates with the left-leaning people in their 30s who were the first generation to take environmental studies for granted as a part of a college curriculum. Judging from the questions, the readers, like Umbra's creators, are forming families (or choosing not to), buying cars (or choosing not to) and having babies (or choosing not to). Her view on the old argument about cloth versus disposable diapers? A tossup, environmentally speaking.

The readers also appreciate frankness about everything from phosphates to condoms, and a knowledgeable voice on questions about atmospheric science and shower urination (is it more environmentally correct than using a toilet?) .

Here, for example, is Umbra's take on yoga mats: "They seem so soft and friendly, but they are another product for our list of Things That Contain Vinyl. Vinyl and phthalates. How I wish to never need spell phthalates again." She suggested a jute and rubber alternative.

She also assures the party set that yes, you can recycle a beer bottle with a lime in it.

Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

Wild deer also display this behaviour - a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

In the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say the Earth's magnetic fields may influence the behaviour of these animals.

Now it so happens that some cultural narratives are myths in both senses of the word: they are crucial elements of a society's view of the world, and they also make statements about the world that can be shown to be untrue. The myth of the market falls into this interesting category. Just now, in America and some other industrial nations, it plays a central role in defining how people think about the economic dimension of their lives. At the same time, some of its core assumptions, and many of the statements about the world that derive from it, are hard to support on any basis but blind faith.

This is where the intemperate passions I mentioned earlier enter the picture, of course, because the myth of the market is not simply a cultural narrative; it's also an ideology supported by a great many people just now. There's a complicated history behind its current ideological role. The grand geopolitical struggle between the American and Russian empires that occupied most of the twentieth century, and still makes headlines today, followed the usual custom and borrowed ideological garments to provide a scrap of decency to the clash of naked ambitions.

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A secular ideology had to be coined, and free market capitalism filled that need. It's not accidental that many of its active proponents in recent years were Marxists during their years of adolescent rebellion in the 1960s; much of what now passes for economic thought in America simply takes Marxist assumptions and stands them on their head, in the same way that Satanists borrow most of Christian theology but root for the other side.