Group items tagged

Science 8 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6039 pp. 173-175 Galaxy Zoo Volunteers Share Pain and Glory of Research 1. Daniel Clery A project to "crowdsource" galactic classifications has paid off in ways the astronomers who started it never expected. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Space oddity. Greenish "voorwerp" spotted by a Dutch volunteer still intrigues scientists. "CREDIT: NASA, ESA, W. KEEL (UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA), AND THE GALAXY ZOO TEAM" The automated surveys that are becoming increasingly common in astronomy are producing an embarrassment of riches for researchers. Projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are generating so much data that, in some cases, astronomers don't know what to do with them all. SDSS has compiled a list of more than 1 million galaxies. To glean information about galaxy evolution, however, astronomers need to know what type of galaxy each one is: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, or something else. At present, the only reliable way to classify galaxies is to look at each one. But the SDSS list is so long that all the world's astronomers working together couldn't muster enough eyeballs for the task. Enter the "wisdom of crowds." An online effort called Galaxy Zoo, launched in 2007, set a standard for citizen-scientist participation projects. Zealous volunteers astonished the project's organizers by classifying the entire catalog years ahead of schedule. The results have brought real statistical rigor to a field used to samples too small to support firm conclusions. But that's not all. Buoyed by the curiosity and dedication of the volunteers, the Galaxy Zoo team went on to ask more-complicated classification questions that led to studies they hadn't thought possible. And in an online discussion forum on the Galaxy Zoo Web site, volunteers have pointed to anomalies that on closer inspection have turned out to be genuinely new astronomical objects. "I'm incredibly impres

NARRATOR: Even though the ocean covers seventy percent of the Earth's surface, people tend to know more information about land than the sea. As a result, our understanding of the ocean is often incomplete or full of misconceptions. How well do you know the ocean? You may think Earth has five separate oceans. They're clearly labeled on our maps. But, in actuality, these are all connected, and part of one global ocean system. Ever wonder why the ocean is blue? You may have heard its because the water reflects the color of the sky. Not quite. Sunlight contains all the colors of the rainbow. When it hits the ocean, it gets scattered by the water molecules. Blue light is scattered the most, which is why the ocean appears blue. Even more interesting is that floating plants and sediments in the water can cause light to bounce in such a way for the ocean to appear green, yellow, and even red! Another idea some people have is that the sea floor is flat. Actually, just like land, the sea floor has canyons, plains, and mountain ranges. And many of these features are even bigger than those found on land. You may also think that our ocean's saltwater is just a mix of water and table salt. Not so. Seawater's "salt" is actually made of dissolved minerals from surface runoff. That is, excess water from rain and melting snow flowing over land and into the sea. This is why the ocean doesn't have the same level of salinity everywhere. Salinity varies by location and season. Finally, you may have heard that melting sea ice will cause sea levels to rise. In reality, sea ice is just frozen seawater, and because it routinely freezes and melts, its volume is already accounted for in the ocean. Sea levels can rise, however, from ice that melts off land and into the ocean. Understanding basic facts about the ocean is important since it affects everything from our atmosphere to our ecosystems. By knowing your ocean, you are better prepared to help protect it.

December 18, 2012 The Ten Best Ocean Stories of 2012 | | | Share on redditReddit | Share on diggDigg | Share on stumbleuponStumble | Share on emailEmail | More Sharing ServicesMore Two market squids mating 2012 was a big year for squid science. Photo Credit: © Brian Skerry, www.brianskerry.com Despite covering 70 percent of the earth's surface, the ocean doesn't often make it into the news. But when it does, it makes quite a splash (so to speak). Here are the top ten ocean stories we couldn't stop talking about this year, in no particular order. Add your own in the comments! 2012: The Year of the Squid From the giant squid's giant eyes (the better to see predatory sperm whales, my dear), to the vampire squid's eerie diet of remains and feces, the strange adaptations and behavior of these cephalopods amazed us all year. Scientists found a deep-sea squid that dismembers its own glowing arm to distract predators and make a daring escape. But fascinating findings weren't relegated to the deep: at the surface, some squids will rocket themselves above the waves to fly long distances at top speeds. James Cameron Explores the Deep Sea Filmmaker James Cameron has never shied away from marine movie plots (See: Titanic, The Abyss), but this year he showed he was truly fearless, becoming the first person to hit the deepest point on the seafloor (35,804 feet) in a solo submarine. While he only managed to bring up a single mud sample from the deepest region, he found thriving biodiversity in the other deep-sea areas his expedition explored, including giant versions of organisms found in shallow water. Schooling sardines form a "bait ball." Small fish, such as these schooling sardines, received well-deserved attention for being an important part of the food chain in 2012. Photo Credit: © Erwin Poliakoff, Flickr Small Fish Make a Big Impact Forage fish-small, schooling fish that are gulped down by predators-should be left in the ocean for larger fish, marin

Science 3 February 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6068 pp. 520-521 DOI: 10.1126/science.335.6068.520 News Focus Ecology Rebuilding Wetlands by Managing the Muddy Mississippi Carolyn Gramling Coastal managers and scientists have struggled to find ways to restore water flow through the wetlands of the Mississippi delta and bring back the sediment, supply of which has been cut in half by humanmade river channels, levees, and dams intended to control the river and save coastal communities from flooding. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza spillway during the 2011 Mississippi River floods to divert floodwaters, which offered a rare opportunity to conduct a large-scale natural experiment in real time. The floodwaters did carry enough sediment to help rebuild the wetlands, but that material didn't always stay where it could do the most good. However, researchers gained valuable insights-including ideas about how spillway design can help produce more targeted sediment deposits, and what volume of flow through the spillways might be required for effective wetland rebuilding.

"Scientific Workforce NSF Touts Family-Friendly Policies as Boon to Women 1. Jeffrey Mervis Young women are forever asking Meg Urry, an astrophysicist at Yale University, if it's possible "to have a successful scientific career and a family." A tenured professor with both, Urry tells them "yes." Perhaps more telling, however, is that the issue doesn't seem to interest half of her students. "I've never been asked that question by a man," she says. This week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) rolled out a set of family-friendly policies that it hopes will reduce the number of young women who jettison scientific careers because of responsibilities outside the lab. "Too many women give up because of conflicts between their desire to start a family and their desire to ramp up their careers," says John Holdren, the president's science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It was a rare moment in the spotlight for the low-profile basic research agency: First Lady Michelle Obama announced the policies at a White House ceremony touting the importance of women to the nation's economic recovery and, in particular, the need to improve the proportion of women in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Lending a hand. First Lady Michelle Obama applauds the work of young women in science at a White House event. "CREDIT: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION" The new policies will allow both male and female grant recipients to defer an award for up to 1 year or receive a no-cost extension of an existing grant. NSF also hopes to increase its use of "virtual reviews" of grant proposals so that scientists don't need to travel as often to the agency's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. The only change with any price tag attached is a new program of supplemental awards to investigators going on family leave, allowing them to hi

LIFEONTERRA is a collaborative filmspace and laboratory exploring the questions and ideas on the cutting-edge of science and at the farthest horizons of the natural world. The "TERRA: The Nature of Our World" video podcast launched in October 2005. TERRA films have been downloaded over one million times. LIFEONTERRA is committed to keeping ALL content free & easily accessible in perpetuity. To this end, we host past & present content in a digital archive. All our shows are available as a Medium Quality Flash 8 or High Quality Quicktime (.m4v) . This is a permanent resource for everyone: fans, educators, students, and anyone who is simply curious about the natural world. We are a worldwide crossroads, a forum for compelling issues, and a stage for the awesome diversity of our planet.

So, might you ask, what is the Anthropocene? First, the etymology. The Ancient Greek [anthropos] means "human being" while [kainos] means "new, current." The Anthropocene would thus be best defined as the new human-dominated period of the Earth's history. The term was proposed in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen, Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on atmospheric chemistry and his research on stratospheric ozone depletion (the so-called "hole"), and by Eugene F. Stoermer in a publication (p. 17) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. But the concept itself, the idea that human activity affects the Earth to the point where it can cross a new age, is not new and dates back to the late nineteenth century. Different terms were proposed over the decades, such as Anthropozoic (Stoppani, 1873), Noosphere (de Chardin, 1922; Vernadsky, 1936), Eremozoic (Wilson, 1992), and Anthrocene (Revkin, 1992). It seems that the success of the term chosen by Crutzen and Stoermer is due to the luck of having been made at the appropriate time, when humankind became more than ever aware of the extent of its impact on global environment. It should be noted that Edward O. Wilson (who suggested Eremozoic, "the age of loneliness") popularized the terms "biodiversity" and "biophilia." Technically, the Anthropocene is the most recent period of the Quaternary, succeding to the Holocene. The Quaternary is a period of the Earth's history characterized by numerous and cyclical glaciations, starting 2,588,000 years ago (2.588 Ma). The Quaternary is divided into three epochs: the Pleistocene, the Holocene, and now the Anthropocene.

"The Orangeburg Scarp, a band of hard, crusty sediment teeming with tiny plankton fossils that runs from Florida to Virginia, marks an ancient shoreline where waves eroded bedrock 3 million years ago. That period, the middle Pliocene, saw carbon dioxide levels and temperatures that many scientists say could recur by 2100. The question is: Could those conditions also result in Pliocene-epoch sea levels within the next 10 to 20 centuries, sea levels that may have been as much as 35 meters higher than they are today? The answer, say climate scientists, may lie 17,000 kilometers away in East Antarctica. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world's largest, a formation up to 4 km thick and 11 million km2 in area that covers three-quarters of the southernmost continent. Its glaciers were thought to sit mostly above sea level, protecting them from the type of ocean-induced losses that are affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But studies of ancient sea levels that focus on the Orangeburg Scarp and other sites challenge that long-held assumption. Not everybody believes the records from Orangeburg. But combined with several other new lines of evidence, they support the idea that parts of East Antarctica could indeed be more prone to melting than expected. "

"To help cool a warming world, some scientists have suggested fertilizing the oceans with iron. The idea is to stimulate vast blooms of phytoplankton, which sequester carbon dioxide. But such an approach could have deadly consequences. Experiments in the northern Pacific Ocean show that phytoplankton in waters far from land produce a molecule called domoic acid, a neurotoxin that has killed wildlife and people in coastal areas. "