Uncommon Ground

The latest  meeting of the international commission created to manage harvests of tunas and other wide-ranging fish species in the Atlantic Ocean ended by setting 2010 quotas for bluefin tuna that  conservation groups and  United States fisheries officials said were -- while lowered -- still far too high to allow the imperiled fish to recover. (from DotEarth)

The government of Monaco proposed a ban on international trade of bluefin tuna, and was  initially supported by the European Union and the U.S. It won't be hard for people who know the fish to recognize bluefin if whole fish are being shipped, but what if they've already been processed into steaks or filets? What then?

A little over a year ago a couple of high school students from Manhattan pointed the way. They used DNA fingerprinting to identify samples of sushi at New York restaurants and found that 25% were misidentified.

Jacob Lowenstein and his colleagues develop a more sophisticated DNA barcode based on cytochrome C oxidase subunit I to distinguish among all tuna species in the genus Thunnus (the genus to which bluefin belongs). They sampled tuna sushi from 31 restaurants in Manhattan and Denver. Among the 68 samples they tested they found some that were from endangered tuna species, some that weren't what they said, and some that were a health hazard.

Five out of nine samples sold as a variant of "white tuna" were not albacore (T. alalunga), but escolar (Lepidocybium flavorunneum), a gempylid species banned for sale in Italy and Japan due to health concerns. Nineteen samples were northern bluefin tuna (T. thynnus) or the critically endangered southern bluefin tuna (T. maccoyii), though nine restaurants that sold these species did not state these species on their menus.

The take home message? I see two. First, Lowenstein and colleagues demonstrate yet again that DNA barcoding can be a useful tool in identifying commercially sold fish (and other products). Second, think twice next time you order a piece of maguro at your favorite sushi bar and ask yourself how confident you are that it's not bluefin (and that the folks who run your sushi bar would know the difference or care).

Purchasing offsets for carbon dioxide is an appealing idea. Sometimes we have to travel to meetings or we have to travel for research.¹ Often that travel involves plane flights, and planes emit a lot of carbon dioxide. By purchasing a carbon offset, I invest a small amount of money in a project that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere equivalent to what my flight added.² In other words, my flight didn't contribute to global warming.

Responsible Travel was one of the first companies to offer such offsets to travelers.

But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more. (source)

Andy Revkin doesn't buy carbon offsets when he travels. I plan to continue buying them, because I'm buying them for travel I would have taken anyway. I'm not traveling more because the offsets are available. And I'll try to travel less, do more with conference calls, and I'll use Skype and web conferencing more often. I'll encourage groups I'm part of to do the same.

Buying offsets in that context has to help at least a little, doesn't it?³

Armen Leonovich Takhtajan or Takhtajian (Russian: Армен Леонович Тахтаджян; surname also transliterated Takhtadjan or Takhtadzhian) (June 10, 1910 - November 13, 2009), was a Soviet-Armenian botanist, one of the most important figures in 20th century plant evolution and systematics and biogeography. His other interests included morphology of flowering plants, paleobotany, and the flora of the Caucasus. (Wikipedia entry)

I had the privilege of meeting Professor Takhtajan once. He was kind, generous, and extraordinarily knowledgeable. His phylogenetic system has been largely superseded by work of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, but his influence will never be forgotten. He died on 13 November, and he will be buried in the Armenian part of the Smolensk cemetery in St. Petersburg tomorrow after a civil funeral at the Komarov Botanical Institute.

Interstates aren't green, but Karrie Jacobs has an idea: use interstates as corridors for high-speed rail and transport of energy.

It's been a long time since we've been able to see beyond the traffic and the exhaust fumes. But if we expand the highway system's uses in anticipation of a time when we are no longer dependent on the internal combustion engine, we may also appreciate the beauty in its graceful overpasses, lofty bridges and complex cloverleaf interchanges.

I don't know about "appreciating the beauty of graceful overpasses", but multiple use of existing interstate corridors just makes sense. Gulliver argues that it won't be simple:

First, America's interstates don't always cut through empty prairie--in many places, there won't be enough clearance on either side to build the "adjacent rail lines" Ms Jacobs is so psyched about. And where the interstates do cut through virgin prairie, infrastructure advocates will have the opposite problem: convincing environmentalists and locals that a landscape already sliced in half by I-Whatever should be further defiled.

The clearance problem is real, though in many places there's a wide median that could be used instead of using corridors on one side or the other. And using the median, which in my experience is often very wide in areas where I-Whatever cuts through "virgin" landscapes, won't add to the damage that's already been done.

I'm not prepared to go as far as Gulliver and conclude

Ms Jacobs' broad point is generally correct--infrastructure advocates and environmentalists should see America's highways as an opportunity for better, greener development--not an obstacle.

We have interstates because we have cars. And the American response to traffic congestion is always to add lanes rather than beefing up mass transit. Roads are a problem, but that doesn't mean we can't use them more wisely.

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. (source)

Interesting, the study, which was published last August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that habitual media multitaskers "are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory." It's not clear whether habitual multitasking causes people to be more susceptible to irrelevant information or whether those who are more susceptible to irrelevant information are more prone to be media multitaskers, but it is clear that the minds of multitaskers work differently from the minds of those who aren't.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding of all is that multitaskers are worse at switching tasks than non-multitaskers.

The pens at the left are from the Aurora Afrika series. My Aurora Afrika fountain pen is one of my favorites. It's one of my evening pens. (You've met the Pelikans, the 400 and the Niagara Falls. This completes my set of evening pens.) The ballpoint has the same striking design, but when I use a ballpoint, I use a simple, inexpensive Bic or something like that. I don't see the point of investing as much as you have to invest in a pen like an Aurora Afrika simply to have a ballpoint. Having a fine fountain pen is the whole point, so far as I am concerned.¹

The beautiful colors in the resin body speak for themselves, but one of the things I most enjoy about my Afrika is its nib. It took me 6-9 months to get it broken in. It was scratchy until either it adjusted to me, I adjusted to it, or both, but now it leaves a beautiful, wide line. And what makes it even more interesting is that my Afrika has a medium italic nib. Even though my penmanship is far from beautiful, when I write with my Afrika, the line has delightful variations in width and tone. It gives a dull, pedestrian (though legible) line a little spark and verve.

Here's the Fahrney's blurb.

Aurora presents Afrika - the first in a limited, numbered series celebrating the continents of the world. Aurora has captured the life, color and emotion of this adventurous land in the Afrika design. The resin barrel and cap in warm earthtones are hand-turned by a master craftsman and adorned with a matte gold clip and trim. The barrel ring depicts six African tribal shields. The black crown has a semi-precious agate stone set on the top as a symbol of harmony and peace.

Fahrney's no longer mentions the availability of the medium italic nib. I wonder if that means it's no longer available.

On rare occasions you read a story that reminds you how reslient, how resourceful, and how amazing some people are. This morning was one of those occasions. I read Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times about Tererai Trent who recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Western Michigan University and will receive her degree next month.

What's so remarkable about her? I can't do her story justice. You'll have to read Kristof's column. I will give you a taste of what's in store for you when you do.

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you're discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.

I've mentioned Randy Olson's book, Don't be such a scientist, repeatedly over the last several months,¹ and yesterday I received an e-mail from Island Press, Randy's publisher, with the following news:

In a webinar on November 19 at 1PM EST, Olson will draw on his own hilarious-and at times humiliating-evolution from science professor to Hollywood filmmaker and offer his perspective on communicating science at a time when information and facts are more important to the discussion than ever.

Here's a link to the page where you can sign up. It's a GoToMeeting sign up page, and signing up is free and easy.

A radio broadcast on probability told through a tale about a drifting balloon, a newspaper series on the impact of a devastating genetic disease on a family in rural Montana, and a group of gracefully written stories about genetics and evolution are among the winners of the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards.

Read more at AAAS.org. I was especially pleased to see that Carl Zimmer was recognized "for a trio of articles he wrote for The New York Times on aspects of genetics and evolution."

AIBS Publishes Darwin Articles Open Access
 
To celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is publishing open access two peer-reviewed articles about Charles Darwin and his historic insights into evolution.

The two articles are by Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, and James T. Costa of Western Carolina University.  Padian's article, "Ten Myths About Charles Darwin," appeared in the October issue of the AIBS journal BioScience and can be read at http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/full/10.1525/bio.2009.59.9.10.  Costa's article, "The Darwinian Revelation: Tracing the Origin and Evolution of an Idea" is published in the November issue of BioScience and can be read at http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/full/10.1525/bio.2009.59.10.10.  Padian explores some common inaccuracies and untruths about Darwin and his life's work, painting in the process a clear portrait of the man and his struggles to develop a theory to explain the diversity of nature.  Costa draws on Darwin's letters and notebooks and other sources to trace the origins of Darwin's key insights, which came to him over many years. Costa suggests that biology teachers can use Darwin's reasoning as a superb example of creative scientific thinking.