COSEE-West

Teaching & Learning with the New York Times

There is something you need to know about Jaws. He was a fabrication. Photographer and explorer Amos Nachoum dispels the misconception of killer species in a photographic exploration presented at TEDxConejo2011.

During this week of action, OCEAN2012 member groups are inviting EU citizens to witness the impact overfishing has had on the marine environment and learn how the EU's CFP reform is an opportunity to go back to the future.

"Using data for 25,780 species categorized on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, we present an assessment of the status of the world's vertebrates. One-fifth of species are classified as Threatened, and we show that this figure is increasing: On average, 52 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians move one category closer to extinction each year. However, this overall pattern conceals the impact of conservation successes, and we show that the rate of deterioration would have been at least one-fifth again as much in the absence of these. Nonetheless, current conservation efforts remain insufficient to offset the main drivers of biodiversity loss in these groups: agricultural expansion, logging, overexploitation, and invasive alien species. "

"Estimates of Earth's climate sensitivity are uncertain, largely because of uncertainty in the long-term cloud feedback. I estimated the magnitude of the cloud feedback in response to short-term climate variations by analyzing the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget from March 2000 to February 2010. Over this period, the short-term cloud feedback had a magnitude of 0.54 ± 0.74 (2σ) watts per square meter per kelvin, meaning that it is likely positive. A small negative feedback is possible, but one large enough to cancel the climate's positive feedbacks is not supported by these observations. Both long- and short-wave components of short-term cloud feedback are also likely positive. Calculations of short-term cloud feedback in climate models yield a similar feedback. I find no correlation in the models between the short- and long-term cloud feedbacks. "

The Zuni Indians thought a red moon brought water. Seventeenth-century English farmers believed in a "dripping moon," which supplied rain depending on whether its crescent was tilted up or down. Now scientists have found evidence for another adage: Rain follows the full and new phases of the moon. Most studies on the weather and moon phases appeared in the 1960s and seemed to lend credence to lunar folklore. Researchers detected more peaks in rainfall in the days after the full and new moons, for example. Recently, three researchers decided to revive the issue when they stumbled across a link between moon phases and stream runoff while working on another project. They will soon publish in Geophysical Research Letters one of the most comprehensive studies yet, with more than a century of data from across the continental United States.

"Multilingualism-the ability to understand and speak several languages-is exceptional in the United States but common elsewhere, especially in small-scale traditional societies. For instance, once while I was camped with some New Guinea Highlanders conversing simultaneously in several local languages, I asked each man to name each language in which he could converse. It turned out that everyone present spoke at least 5 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15. What are the cognitive effects of such multilingualism? Recent studies (1-5) show that children raised bilingually develop a specific type of cognitive benefit during infancy, and that bilingualism offers some protection against symptoms of Alzheimer's dementia in old people. "

"Penguin feathers are highly modified in form and function, but there have been no fossils to inform their evolution. A giant penguin with feathers was recovered from the late Eocene (~36 million years ago) of Peru. The fossil reveals that key feathering features, including undifferentiated primary wing feathers and broad body contour feather shafts, evolved early in the penguin lineage. Analyses of fossilized color-imparting melanosomes reveal that their dimensions were similar to those of non-penguin avian taxa and that the feathering may have been predominantly gray and reddish-brown. In contrast, the dark black-brown color of extant penguin feathers is generated by large, ellipsoidal melanosomes previously unknown for birds. The nanostructure of penguin feathers was thus modified after earlier macrostructural modifications of feather shape linked to aquatic flight. "

The shallow water reefs of the Coral Triangle, which stretches across Indonesia and north through the Philippines, host the world's greatest diversity of corals, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and marine plant species. Now preliminary results from a joint Indonesian-U.S. marine survey indicate that the biodiversity runs deep. A remotely operated vehicle has captured stunning images of massive corals, as well as unusual crustaceans and fish living at depths never before surveyed, thousands of meters below the surface. And mapping of that sea floor has turned up a huge, previously unknown volcano.

"Slowing climate change requires overcoming inertia in political, technological, and geophysical systems. Of these, only geophysical warming commitment has been quantified. We estimated the commitment to future emissions and warming represented by existing carbon dioxide-emitting devices. We calculated cumulative future emissions of 496 (282 to 701 in lower- and upper-bounding scenarios) gigatonnes of CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels by existing infrastructure between 2010 and 2060, forcing mean warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less than 430 parts per million. Because these conditions would likely avoid many key impacts of climate change, we conclude that sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built. However, CO2-emitting infrastructure will expand unless extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives. "

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.

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.

It's almost like Excel, but online.

A book by Nathan Yau who writes for FlowingData, Visualize This is a practical guide on visualization and how to approach real-world data. The book is published by Wiley and is available for pre-order on Amazon and other major online booksellers. Available July 2011.

"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. "

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.

"Spatial diversity gradients are a pervasive feature of life on Earth. We examined a global ocean circulation, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem model that indicated a decrease in phytoplankton diversity with increasing latitude, consistent with observations of many marine and terrestrial taxa. In the modeled subpolar oceans, seasonal variability of the environment led to competitive exclusion of phytoplankton with slower growth rates and lower diversity. The relatively weak seasonality of the stable subtropical and tropical oceans in the global model enabled long exclusion time scales and prolonged coexistence of multiple phytoplankton with comparable fitness. Superimposed on the decline in diversity seen from equator to pole were "hot spots" of enhanced diversity in some regions of energetic ocean circulation, which reflected lateral dispersal. "

"Nitrogen (N2)-fixing microorganisms (diazotrophs) are an important source of biologically available fixed N in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and control the productivity of oligotrophic ocean ecosystems. We found that two major groups of unicellular N2-fixing cyanobacteria (UCYN) have distinct spatial distributions that differ from those of Trichodesmium, the N2-fixing cyanobacterium previously considered to be the most important contributor to open-ocean N2 fixation. The distributions and activity of the two UCYN groups were separated as a function of depth, temperature, and water column density structure along an 8000-kilometer transect in the South Pacific Ocean. UCYN group A can be found at high abundances at substantially higher latitudes and deeper in subsurface ocean waters than Trichodesmium. These findings have implications for the geographic extent and magnitude of basin-scale oceanic N2 fixation rates. "