August 2009 Archives

Coturnix links to a video clip where Robert Scoble interviews Jennifer Ouellette about initiatives at the Science & Entertainment Exchange. Well worth a watch.

Click To Play

It's interesting that they mention that you in a realistic sci-fi flick you wouldn't hear or see an explosion if it happened in space. They laugh about how it's unavoidable. Really? Take a look at 2001: A Space Odyssey again some time. Even after 40 years the special effects are pretty amazing, and the silence just makes it eerier.

From Environment News Service:

A new coalition of organizations, the Amphibian Survival Alliance, is being established in an attempt to conserve the world's vanishing frogs, toads and salamanders. Threats to these species are numerous - a deadly fungus, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and climate change.

The alliance came together at the first Amphibian Mini Summit at the Zoological Society of London last week. The group includes amphibian specialists working in the wild as well as those in zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens.

"If we want to stop the amphibian extinction crisis, we have to protect the areas where amphibians are threatened by habitat destruction," says Claude Gascon, co-chair of the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group. "One of the reasons amphibians are in such dire straits is because many species are only found in single sites and are therefore much more susceptible to habitat loss."

I've argued (not very originally) that science education isn't enough. Not only do we need to do a good job of educating students, we also need to find ways to share the wonder and beauty of science. We need to let everyone in on our dirty little secret -- science is fun and exciting.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum argue in Unscientific America that one important way of communicating that message is through popular culture, e.g., movies and music. Don't worry, I'm not planning to release a music video, but I was delighted to read this morning in Nature that the next album from They Might Be Giants¹ is Here Comes Science. (That's a screenshot from the title video at the left.) Here are a couple of the questions and answers from the Q&A in Nature.

From the first song, 'Science is Real', this album seems to be making a statement. Why is that important?

It seems that science has suffered in this country recently, so it was political in a way. There has been some scepticism about science in the past 25 years that has been unfortunate. There's a decadent quality to that -- that the culture has lost its way.

Your lyrics talk about evolution being real and how stories about angels and unicorns are just that, stories. Did you worry that this might alienate some listeners?

John Flansburgh took the bull by the horns by writing that song and addressing that situation, which is that religion cannot take the place of science. It's not something you can tiptoe around. It's important that everybody gets what the discussion is about. If we're talking about the history of Earth, we can't rely on religious tradition to tell us all the information. He says it in the song: as beautiful as the stories are, they don't tell us everything we need to know. It's an old complaint on the part of scientists, but it bears repeating.

And I'm not talking Ringling Brothers. No. Richard Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, is being released on 22 September. But you don't have to wait until then to read it. The Times (that's the London Times, not the New York Times) is serializing it.

You read about it at Science Central about it, or you can head straight to the Times and start reading it right now. He starts by describing the plight that biology teachers all too frequently face:

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word "evolution" systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into "change over time".

Head over and take a look. Dawkins can be infuriating, but he is (almost) always worth reading.

The Pew Environment Group is inviting Ph.D. scientists to sign a letter to President Obama concerning oil and gas development in the Chuckchi and Beaufort Seas.

As scientists, we urge the President of the United States and his administration to take a science-based precautionary approach on decisions regarding the offshore oil and gas development of the U.S. Arctic Ocean. Prior to permitting any new oil and gas development, there must be thorough research, sustained monitoring, and comprehensive planning to better understand and avoid  impacts and determine the best way to proceed in the U.S. waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

More information about the letter is available at Time out in the Arctic.

From a recent e-mail:

The Chicago Botanic Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International's U.S. office are working with several partners, including the Botanical Society of America, to assess strengths and areas for improvement in plant science education, research and habitat management in the United States. We need your help. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey (links below), which includes questions about your academic background, management specialization, research interests, career goals, access to resources, and your opinion on several conservation issues. The survey is anonymous, and results will only be reported as a group or group subset.

We are asking individuals involved in plant science research, education and/or natural resource management in the United States to take this survey. The objective of this grant-funded project is to assess the collective ability of U.S. institutions and individuals to advance plant science research and application, while identifying gaps in capacity and highlighting opportunities to fill these gaps in the future. A summary report will be released in mid-2010 and freely available from www.bgci.org/usa/bcapinfo.

Thank you in advance for completing this survey. Your contribution is crucial to the study's success and is greatly appreciated. Please note that all surveys will close on Friday, September 19, 2009.


To TAKE THE SURVEY - please go to http://www.bgci.org/usa/bcap/

Please feel free to forward this message on to colleagues or students, and don't hesitate to contact us directly with any questions or concerns.

http://www.bgci.org/usa/BCAPInfo/

Sincerely,

Andrea T. Kramer, Ph.D.
Executive Director, U.S. Office
Botanic Gardens Conservation International
at Chicago Botanic Garden
1000 Lake Cook Road
Glencoe, IL 60022 USA
Phone: 847-835-6971
atietmey@chicagobotanic.org

Barbara Zorn-Arnold, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Chicago Botanic Garden
1000 Lake Cook Road
Glencoe, IL 60022 USA
Phone: 847-835-6858
bzornarnold@chicagobotanic.org

The Sierra Club just released its 3rd annual Cool Schools list. It ranks colleges and universities on a range of "green" criteria including efficiency, energy, academics, purchasing, and waste. The University of Colorado comes out on top with an A+. The University of Washington, Middlebury College, the University of Vermont, the College of the Atlantic, and Evergreen State College aren't far behind. All of them got an A+ too.

Sorry to say, the University of Connecticut did not do so well. We're #93 out of 135 schools ranked, but at least we passed -- with a C-. Yale did much better. It's #14 and got an A. Harvard's #11, and Brown's #64, Amherst's #71, and Williams is #52. Neither Princeton nor Cornell seems to be ranked.

You may also want to take a look at the College Sustainability Report Card. Colorado still beats us by a healthy margin, but at least we don't look quite as bad.

I don't think of the typeface as dull or boring, I think of it as neutral, but not in a colorless, noncommittal way, but in a way that's helpful and intentional. It's almost like there is a sort of Zen in the way Helvetica is perfectly, beautifully bland (and yet, not bland).

I like to think of myself as "helpful and intentional", but I'd never go so far as to claim that there's any sort of Zen about me.

If you'd like to know what typeface you are, head on over to [i]ndependent lens and take the quiz.

Proponents of intelligent design creationism are always talking about the "miraculous" ways in which the world fits together -- the vertebrate eye, the blood clotting cascade and so on. They claim that if even one piece is missing, the whole shebang will stop working. They've been repeatedly shown to be wrong. The whole idea of irreducible complexity is going nowhere.

There's another problem with intelligent design. A lot of things in the world don't look so intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer have us ingest food and water and transport it to the stomach through a tube that's shared with the tube taking oxygen to our lungs? A designer who would build us so that the Heimlich maneuver had to be invented seems pretty stupid to me.

Here's another example from today's issue of Science.

It's long been known that many animals acquire protective chemicals from symbionts that live with or within them. The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum, for example, gains protection against a parasitoid wasp when it's "infected" by a bacterium, Hamiltonella defensa. Now it may seem a little odd that an intelligent designer would leave A. pisum unprotected without the bacterium, but maybe the bacterium is really common and it was "easier" that way.¹

But it doesn't stop there.


Kerry Oliver and colleagues show that being infected by Hamiltonella alone isn't enough for A. pisum to be protected. The Hamiltonella has to be infected by a virus in order to confer protection on A. pisum.

The light gray bar on the left side of the figure shows the fraction of A. pisum individuals parasitized when they are uninfected. The dark gray bar on the right side of the figure shows the fraction of individuals parasitized when they are infected with Hamiltonella, but the Hamiltonella aren't infected with the virus. No difference. It's only when individuals are infected with Hamiltonella that is itself infected with the virus that they are protected against parasitism (black bar in the middle).²

That strikes me as a system that might have been designed by Rube Goldberg, not an intelligent designer.³

In today's Nature, Jeff Tollefson describes an ambitious plan in Brazil to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). Farmers in Pará who agree to put rainforest land into conservation rather than clearing it will receive monthly payments from the Brazilian government -- and the funds to support those payments come from international donors. Brazil will receive about $114 million this year to support the project in Pará and others like it through its Amazon Fund. Norway pledged up to $1 billion until 2015.

Getting REDD right in Brazil and beyond is "totally possible and essential", says Lars Løvold, director of the Rainforest Foundation Norway in Oslo, which, along with Friends of the Earth Norway, proposed to the Norwegian government that it invest in a big forest conservation initiative. "But you need some projects to show that it works."

Sounds pretty promising, if it works. Last December, WWF was skeptical:

WWF criticized Brazil's plan to reduce Amazon deforestation to 5,740 square kilometers per year as being "short on ambition and detail".

In a statement issued Wednesday, WWF said that Brazil's proposed fund for conserving the Amazon would still result in the annual loss of an area forest the size of Rhode Island.

I pointed out a couple of weeks ago that if Jon Stewart thinks climate change is boring, we have a problem. Well, I have some (sort of) good news for you. Stephen Colbert isn't convinced we need to do anything about it, but he had Bill McKibben on Monday night, and he sounds at least a little interested.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill McKibben
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Meryl Streep

Federal authorities removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list in May. Yesterday, Idaho's Fish & Game Commission voted 4-3 to allow up to 220 wolves to be killed by hunters this fall (stories from the Missoulian, Boise Weekly, and the Spokesman Review). The three dissenting votes were from commissioners who wanted to allow more wolves to be taken.

Chairman Wayne Wright, one of the dissenters, declared, "Now's the time to do the right thing. ... Neither our state's economy, our ranchers, our sportsmen or our elk herds can wait any longer." (from the Spokesman Review article)

Idaho Fish & Game currently estimates that there are about 1020 in the state. The original recovery goal set by the Fish & Wildlife Service for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming was only 300 wolves. Supporters of the hunt contend that the wolf population is now secure and can be hunted without endangering it. Opponents threaten legal action.

The season will start on the 1st of September in some parts of the state and run through December 31st.

In 2007, more than 1,500 research scientists from more than 50 countries, including 71 from Quebec, signed a letter to Canadian government leaders seeking the conservation of the Boreal forest protection through land-use planning prior to industrial development, and in accordance with the principles of sustainable development.

This letter also asked governments to support the implementation of the Boreal Forest Conservation Framework drafted and signed by the Canadian Boreal Initiative, Canadian conservation organizations, First Nations and industry partners.

Since then, two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have announced plans for the Boreal forest that include the essential notion of the agreement - stated simply, 50-50 zoning of the region (protection of at least 50% of the region, with sustainable industrial activity in the other half).

We believe that these commitments merit a letter to the government supporting these announcements, while also reiterating our vision that any development must be truly sustainable, based on scientific conservation principles and a sound data acquisition system.

To this end, we have drafted the attached letter. Please read it carefully and add your signature if you agree with its contents. We invite you to circulate this letter to your colleagues, who may sign here: http://interboreal.org/scientifiquesQC/index.php?lng=eng

Sincerely yours,

Marcel Darveau, Ph.D., Ducks Unlimited Canada and Laval University

Nigel Roulet, Ph.D., McGill University

Jeff Wells, Ph.D., International Boreal Conservation Campaign

When I checked the list yesterday about 1:00pm, there were 420 signatures on the letter. If you haven't already done so, please add yours.

Well, that will teach me not to check my backups carefully! I upgraded the operating system on the server¹ that hosts this blog yesterday afternoon. The upgrade didn't go so well. I had to wipe out the old partition and start from scratch. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until after I had wiped the hard drive that my backup of the MySQL database that runs this blog (and several other things on this site) was corrupt. So I lost the database that held all previous entries on this blog.

i still have static copies of all of them, and I'll move them over into the same directory where they used to be so that people finding this site through searches may still be able to see them, but the results aren't going to be pretty.