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"In some cases, cheaper types of fish were substituted for expensive species. In others, fish that consumers have been urged to avoid because stocks are depleted, putting the species or a fishery at risk, was identified as a type of fish that is not threatened. Although such mislabeling violates laws protecting consumers, it is hard to detect. Some of the findings present public health concerns. Thirteen types of fish, including tilapia and tilefish, were falsely identified as red snapper. Tilefish contains such high mercury levels that the federal Food and Drug Administration advises women who are pregnant or nursing and young children not to eat it."

Science 25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 p. 1039 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6059.1039-b * News of the Week Random Sample Mongolia's 'Ice Shield' Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Hot zone. Flanked by desert, Ulan Bator will be cooled in summer by an "ice shield." "CREDIT: BRÜCKE-OSTEUROPA/WIKIPEDIA" As the coldest capital on Earth, you might think the last thing Ulan Bator needs is more ice. But that is just what it's about to get under a geoengineering trial aimed at "storing" freezing winter temperatures to cool and water the city during the summer. At the end of this month, engineers will drill a series of bores through the ice on the Tuul River, pump up water from below, and spray it on the surface where it will freeze. This process will be repeated throughout the winter, adding layer after layer to create a chunk of ice that will be 7 or 8 meters thick by the spring. It's an attempt to artificially create the ultra-thick slabs-known as naleds in Russian-that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through surface cracks. Nomads have long made their summer camps near such phenomena, which melt much later than normal ice. Flanked by desert and plagued by summer temperatures that can rise close to 40°C, Ulan Bator's municipal government hopes the $724,000 experiment will create a cool microclimate and provide fresh water as the naled melts. ECOS & EMI, the Anglo-Mongolian company behind the plan, has still greater ambitions. "Everyone is panicking about melting glaciers and icecaps, but nobody has yet found a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative," says Robin Grayson, a geologist in Ulan Bator for ECOS & EMI. "If you know how to manipulate them, naled ice shields can repair permafrost and build cool parks in cities." The process, Grayson says, can be replicated anywhere where winter temperatures fall below −5°C for at least a couple of months.

Pass the bass, please. Omega-3 fatty acids, a main component of fish oil, have a reputation as potent anti-inflammatory agents. Now researchers think they know how the acids block this immune response. They've also found that omega-3s can help fight diabetes in obese mice, pointing the way to potential therapies in humans. To understand how omega-3s curb inflammation, Jerrold Olefsky, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues trawled through the data on a family of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, which can bind to a number of different fatty acids. One of these receptors-GPR120-"jumped right out," Olefsky says. Olefsky's group found it on immune cells involved in inflammation, as well as in mature fat cells, and they noted that it seemed to bind to omega-3s.

About 2 years into my Ph.D., I began to realize that I couldn't imagine my life as a researcher in 5 years' time and to wonder why that might be. Why wasn't I enthusiastic about where my first, second, or even third postdoc would be and into which new and fascinating areas of oceanography they would lead me? It wasn't that I didn't enjoy my particular area of research. I did. I still do. But I had begun to realize that my heart (and perhaps my skills) lay outside academic research. I felt like I wanted to be a communicator of leading-edge science but not necessarily a doer of it myself. Could I admit that and still say I had a passion for science?

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers approving a genetically modified (GM) Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), it faces fundamental questions of risk analysis and impact assessment. The GM salmon-whose genome contains an inserted growth gene from Pacific chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and a switch-on gene from ocean pout (Zoarces americanus)-would be the first transgenic animal approved for human consumption in the United States (1, 2). But the mechanism for its approval, FDA's new animal drug application (NADA) process (2), narrowly examines only the risks of each GM salmon compared with a non-GM salmon (2, 3). This approach fails to acknowledge that the new product's attributes may affect total production and consumption of salmon. This potentially excludes major human health and environmental impacts, both benefits and risks. Regulators need to consider the full scope of such impacts in risk analyses to avoid unintended consequences (4), yet FDA does not consider ancillary benefits and risks from salmon market expansion (2, 3), a result of what may be an overly narrow interpretation of statutes.

Science On a Sphere Well-crafted visualizations provide unique and powerful teaching tools Science On a Sphere® is a large visualization system that uses computers and video projectors to display animated data onto the outside of a sphere. Researchers at NOAA developed Science On a Sphere® as an educational tool to help illustrate Earth System science to people of all ages. Animated images of complex processes such as ocean currents, sea level rise, and ocean acidification are used to to enhance the public's understanding of our dynamic environment. Ocean Acidification on Science On a Sphere® The movies below were developed for use on Science On a Sphere® and show computer model simulations of surface ocean pH and carbonate mineral saturation state for the years 1895 to 2094. The first movie shows a computer recreation of surface ocean pH from 1895 to the present, and it forecasts how ocean pH will drop even more between now and 2094. Dark gray dots show cold-water coral reefs. Medium gray dots show warm-water coral reefs. You can see that ocean acidification was slow at the beginning of the movie, but it speeds up as time goes on. This is because humans are releasing carbon dioxide faster than the atmosphere-ocean system can handle.

COSEE Network: The overall mission is "to spark and nurture collaborations among research scientists and educators to advance ocean discovery and make known the vital role of the ocean in our lives." Although each Center is funded individually, the Network of Centers has established its own set of goals: 1) Fostering the integration of ocean research into high-quality educational materials 2) Enabling ocean researchers to gain a better understanding of educational organizations and pedagogy 3) Enhancing educators' capacity to deliver high-quality educational programs in the ocean sciences 4) Promoting a deeper understanding of the ocean and its influence on each person's quality of life and our national prosperity

Not really back from the dead: A single-celled alga that went extinct in the North Atlantic Ocean about 800,000 years ago has returned after drifting from the Pacific through the Arctic thanks to melting polar ice. And while its appearance marks the first trans-Arctic migration in modern times, scientists say it signals something potentially bigger.

A blackspot tuskfish off Australia has its mouth full as it carries a cockle to a nearby rock, against which the fish was seen repeatedly bashing the shellfish to get at the fleshy bits inside.

The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results.

Isles of Abundance Britain has taken another step toward designating the world's largest marine reserve around the Chagos Islands, a group of 55 coral protrusions in the Indian Ocean. The government announced the end of a 4-month public comment period on 5 March and is expected to reach a final decision by May. The Chagos contain half of the Indian Ocean's remaining healthy reefs. The waters are said to be among the cleanest on Earth, allowing corals to grow in deep water less vulnerable to global warming. The islands are located in the equatorial "tuna belt," which hosts what a Royal Zoological Society of London report called one of the "most exploited, badly enforced fisheries in the world." A total ban on fishing in the 544,000-square-kilometer zone, an area the size of France, would make it an even larger protected area than the current record-holder, the 360,000-km2 Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The Pew Environment Group has spearheaded a 3-year campaign for creation of a Chagos reserve. It would be "literally an island of abundance in a sea of depletion," says Pew's Jay Nelson. The islands are uninhabited except for the U.S. Navy base on Diego Garcia. Some 1500 Chagossians were deported to Mauritius in the 1970s for military security.

"A horrendous slaughter is going on out here," said Peter D. Ward, a biologist from the University of Washington, during a recent census of the marine creature in the Philippines. "They're nearly wiped out." The culprit? Growing sales of jewelry and ornaments derived from the lustrous shell. To satisfy the worldwide demand, fishermen have been killing the nautilus by the millions, scientists fear. Now marine biologists have begun to assess the status of its populations and to consider whether it should be listed as an endangered species to curb the shell trade.

What if your home were in the middle of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? How far would you have to go to get out of it? Are you friends' houses also in the spill region?

Experts Agree Global Warming Is Melting the World Rapidly Richard A. Kerr Forty-seven glaciologists have arrived at a community consensus over all the data on what the past century's warming has done to the great ice sheets: a current annual loss of 344 billion tons of glacial ice, accounting for 20% of current sea level rise. Greenland's share-about 263 billion tons-is roughly what most researchers expected, but Antarctica's represents the first agreement on a rate that had ranged from a far larger loss to an actual gain. The new analysis, published on page 1183 of this week's issue of Science, also makes it clear that losses from Greenland and West Antarctica have been accelerating, showing that some ice sheets are disconcertingly sensitive to warming.

Warming and Melting Mass loss from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica account for a large fraction of global sea-level rise. Part of this loss is because of the effects of warmer air temperatures, and another because of the rising ocean temperatures to which they are being exposed. Joughin et al. (p. 1172) review how ocean-ice interactions are impacting ice sheets and discuss the possible ways that exposure of floating ice shelves and grounded ice margins are subject to the influences of warming ocean currents. Estimates of the mass balance of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have differed greatly-in some cases, not even agreeing about whether there is a net loss or a net gain-making it more difficult to project accurately future sea-level change. Shepherd et al. (p. 1183) combined data sets produced by satellite altimetry, interferometry, and gravimetry to construct a more robust ice-sheet mass balance for the period between 1992 and 2011. All major regions of the two ice sheets appear to be losing mass, except for East Antarctica. All told, mass loss from the polar ice sheets is contributing about 0.6 millimeters per year (roughly 20% of the total) to the current rate of global sea-level rise.

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.