Category Archives: Eureka

Believe it or not, some corals are doing just fine right now

by OlenMayorga Posted on May 27, 2016

Believe it or not, some corals are doing just fine right now

By on May 27, 2016Share

Coral reefs aren’t exactly in a happy place right now — more like a terrifying brink, actually. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is now 93 percent bleached, and Florida’s reefs are straight-up crumbling.

But if you dive a little deeper, a couple hundred feet beneath the surface, some corals seem to be doing OK. And according to a new report commissioned by the United Nations, those reefs might be a lifeline for their counterparts in shallower waters.

Mesophotic coral ecosystems — mesophotic means “middle light” — exist in the so-called “twilight zone” between the ocean’s brightly lit, shallow waters and its sunless, inky depths. Frankly, we don’t know a lot about ocean life this far down, since it’s deeper than we can comfortably get to by scuba-diving.

But we do have a few important pieces of knowledge about mesophotic life: 1) Its corals are generally sheltered from stressors like bleaching, overfishing, pollution, storms, and disease; 2) Some of its coral and fish species are genetically similar to their surface-level counterparts; and 3) Mesophotic corals look like a rainbow glow stick party.

To connect the dots: This means that if our shallow reef systems are decimated, they have a kind of insurance policy (in fluorescent colors!) in these mesophotic corals, which could help replenish surface reefs and supply much-needed genetic diversity.

But don’t grab your techno-scuba gear just yet. It’s possible that some mesophotic coral ecosystems may be just as vulnerable to threats as shallower systems. And if we did try to introduce mesophotic species in surface reefs, we’d have to do so carefully — after all, human intervention is why we have so many coral skeletons on our hands in the first place.

Repopulating shallow reefs with deeper sea corals is a back-up plan, but it’s a reminder that there’s still hope. Corals survived five big extinction events in the 250-some million years before we came along. Now we’re counting on our most resilient corals to adapt and lead the way again.

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Believe it or not, some corals are doing just fine right now

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Believe it or not, some corals are doing just fine right now

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

by MaribelGregson Posted on May 2, 2016

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

By on May 2, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change reached an interesting, if not totally surprising, conclusion: The Earth has become significantly greener over the past 33 years.

The main reason? All the extra carbon dioxide we humans dump into the air.

Let me be clear right away: This is a kinda sorta good thing, but don’t celebrate the positive aspect of climate change just yet. The effect almost certainly won’t last, and this small positive is completely buried under a long, long list of negatives.

The research used satellites to examine vegetation growth over time, assuming that the extra green is coming from leaves on plants and trees. Using a computer model to estimate leaf growth, they find the extra greening is equivalent to adding about 18 million square kilometers of vegetated land to the globe, more than twice the area of the mainland U.S. That’s pretty astonishing.

Map showing vegetation across the globe.

Myneni et al.

The growth is due to added CO2 in the air. Plants use sunlight for energy and convert CO2 (plus water) into sugar, which is stored for food. In a naive sense, more CO2 means more food for plants (this is called carbon dioxide fertilization), so there’s more growth.

The good news, such as it is, is that this means plants are able to soak up more carbon from the atmosphere. The bad news is, it’s not nearly enough. This is made clear by a graph showing atmospheric carbon dioxide content, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii:

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

As you can see, the amount of CO2 in the air is still increasing, even with this extra vegetation. Worse, look at the increase from 1980 (roughly the start of the new study’s time range) to 1995. If you extend that slope, you’ll see that the increase has increased since 1995; in other words, we’re putting out even more CO2 per year than we did 35 years ago.

All that extra plant growth can’t keep up with the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide humans dump into the atmosphere every year.

Incidentally, some of that greening is in the Arctic. That place is usually covered with snow and ice, except warmer temperatures have been causing it to melt away. That’s not a place we want to see green. White would be way better.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the deniers, who tend to ignore inconvenient facts like that, and instead just tout how the Earth getting greener must be a good thing. World News Daily and the Cato Institute were two sources I found pretty easily making this fallacious claim. It’s cherry-picking in the worst sort of way, but then deniers have been making this ridiculous claim for a long time now.

What I find funny is that in the press release, one of the authors of the research preemptively smacks down the deniers [emphasis mine]:

The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians, notably Lord Ridley (hereditary peer in the U.K. House of Lords) and Mr. Rupert Murdoch (owner of several news outlets), to argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change, similar to those agreed at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) meeting in Paris last year under the U.N. Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change, namely global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, more severe tropical storms, etc. are not acknowledged. Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time,” says coauthor Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suvYvette, France, and contributing lead author of the Carbon Chapter for the recent IPCC Assessment Report 5.

Of course, deniers gonna deny. Using this study to say that climate change is good is like getting in a massive car accident and being happy you don’t have to vacuum out the car anymore.

But hey, if you’re willing to ignore rising sea levels, more extreme weather, melting polar ice, deoxygenation of the oceans, droughts, floods, acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching, more heatwaves, and the displacement of potentially hundreds of millions of people, then y’know, a little more green in your life is just great!

Enjoy it while it lasts.

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Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Climate Change is Putting Your Favorite Foods at Risk

by MaiDuggan290 Posted on January 5, 2016

The climate is changing the global temperature is rising, weather patterns are changing, sea levels are rising. Its effects are serious and widespread, but have you ever considered its effects on your favorite foods? Here are 6 foods that will likely be affected if climate change progresses.

Avocados. Scientists expect to see a 40 percent decrease in avocado production over the next 30 years unless farmers uproot and seek more suitable climates. Why? Blame the warming global temperatures. That means a drastic increase in avocado prices, which probably means your guacamole consumption will be cut down in its prime.

Chocolate. Chocolate brings happiness its just scientific fact. But cocoa crops may be on the decline. While cocoas ideal altitude is 100 to 250 meters above sea level, that’s expected to rise to 450 to 500 meters above sea level by 2050. With most cocoa coming from Ghana and the Ivory Coast, this could have a dramatic impact on cocoa costs as yield begins to decrease and arable land diminishes.

Coffee. Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. However, it’s an environmentally sensitive plant. Coffee-growing regions around the world are experiencing the initial complications of climate change. A serious fungus called coffee rust has been sweeping across Central America, spurred by warming temperatures. A pest in Hawaii known as the coffee berry borer is expected to become an even greater threat to crops in upcoming years if it is allowed to spread. And with the temperature rise, coffee-growing regions in Africa the birthplace of coffee are expected to decrease from 65 to 100 percent. Thats right, 100 percent. No more African coffees if the surface temperature continues to spike.

Almonds. Over the next 30 years, almond production is expected to decrease by 20 percent. Interestingly, the model scientists used did not account for decreased rainfall due to changing weather patterns, so this decrease in yield could indeed be greater. If the drought in California is any indication, we may not be enjoying almond milk as regularly in the future.

Grapes. Grapes are very sensitive to temperature and weather changes. In fact, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 19 to 73 percent of the land suitable for grape-growing in wine regions will be lost to climate change by 2050. France is already feeling the effects, with some winemakers being forced to harvest earlier due to an increase in mild nights and extreme weather. If this trend continues, grapes may thrive less in these regions, while places like China or Montana may become surprisingly more accommodating.

Potatoes. With rising surface temperatures, potato farmers in the Andes have been forced to move to higher and higher altitudes to grow their crops. Eventually, if temperatures continue to rise, farmers will simply run out of arable land. (Unless were looking to start farming on Mars.) Think of all the traditional foods around the world that are potato-centric! Its the third most consumed crop worldwide after wheat and rice, with over a billion people regularly consuming potatoes.

Climate change is real, and our agriculture is extremely sensitive. If you needed a reason to get serious about climate change, what’s more powerful than the threat of losing your favorite foods?

Related
Should You Work Out When You’re Sick?
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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Continued – 

Climate Change is Putting Your Favorite Foods at Risk

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Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

by KarolynKZFX Posted on November 23, 2015

Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

By on 23 Nov 2015commentsShare

Bioart is weird, pure and simple. It’s DNA engineered to encode messages like “I am the Riddle of Life. Know me and you will know yourself,” paintings made of bacteria, rabbits genetically modified to glow (then don’t actually glow because fluorescent proteins don’t work in fur), living tissue grown to resemble Guatemalan worry dolls or mini leather jackets, and a “biocompatible” ear replica implanted in a human arm.

In short, bioart is what you’ll find at the bottom of the lab-grown, biofluorescent rabbit hole that emerges when scientists and artists get together and turn the building blocks of life into a new kind of creative medium. And according to a group of researchers at MIT and Harvard, it’s also a funky new way to engage the public in the controversial and often frightening world of biotech. Here’s how they put it in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Biotechnology:

Regardless of their potential for health benefits and quality of life, genetic technologies have consequences that are not absolutely foreseeable and this has led to public uncertainty about implications for personal privacy and human rights, eugenics, food and drug safety, replacement of natural systems with bioengineered counterparts, involvement of multinational corporations with genetic propriety, worldwide agricultural monopolies, and prospects for the weaponization of biotechnological accessories for the military and law enforcement. Bioartists find these issues to be compelling subjects for their art.

“Historical and Contemporary Bioart. (A) Germ paintings on paper by Alexander Fleming. Bar, 1 cm. Courtesy of Kevin Brown of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. (B) Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog gathered from Aptos, CA, USA by Brandon Ballengée (2012) in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. DFA 186: Hades, unique digital c-print on watercolor paper. Bar, 9 cm. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York and reproduced with permission. (C) Conceptual drawing of Microvenus. Courtesy of Joe Davis, 1988. (D) Victimless Leather project showing a miniaturized leather jacket using skin cells by SymbioticA. Bar, 2 cm. Courtesy of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr and reproduced with permission. (E) Ear on Arm project. Bar, 3 cm. Courtesy of Nina Sellars and reproduced with permission.”

Yetisen, et al. Trends in Biotechnology

George Church, a Harvard geneticist and synthetic biologist famous for trying to bring back the woolly mammoth by splicing mammoth DNA into an elephant, was one of the co-authors on the paper. His lab at Harvard is currently hosting the artist Joe Davis, another co-author, who in the ’80s worked with a geneticist to encode a message into the DNA of E. coli. The project, called Microvenus, was meant to explore the possibility of one day sending such messenger organisms into space as a way to communicate with extraterrestrials. In a press release about the new paper, Davis and Church spoke with Cell Press about their collaboration:

“It’s Oz, pure and simple,” Davis says. “The total amount of resources in this environment and the minds that are accessible, it’s like I come to the city of Oz every day.”

But it’s not a one-way street. “My particular lab depends on thinking outside the box and not dismissing things because they sound like science fiction,” says Church, who is also part of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Joe is terrific at keeping us flexible and nimble in that regard.”

For example, Davis is working with several members of the Church lab to perform metagenomics analyses of the dust that accumulates at the bottom of money-counting machines. Another project involves genetically engineering silk worms to spin metallic gold — an homage to the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin.

Bioart isn’t entirely new. It goes all the way back to the 1920s, when one Alexander Fleming was making stick figure paintings with bacteria and discovered that a fungus called penicillin was killing some of his work. It also hasn’t always been successful. There was one time, for example, in 1970, when German artist Hans Haacke tried to draw attention to the destructiveness of the pet trade by buying and releasing ten endangered Hermann’s tortoises in a part of France where the tortoises roam free. Turned out, a few of Haacke’s purchases belonged to the wrong subspecies of tortoise and ended up messing with the local gene pool, ultimately compromising the distinct genetic lineages of both subspecies.

And then there was the controversial environmental art of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — hillsides paved with asphalt, islands covered in plastic, craters carved with tunnels and chambers. Davis, Church, and their co-authors note that environmental art eventually became more about restoring nature, and together with advances in biological sciences, paved the way for today’s bioart.

With the rise of Romanticism several centuries ago, artists seemed to shed longstanding commitments to scientific and technical literacy while, at the same time, science started its long march toward secularization [68]. In this century, art and science are in the process of disengaging from this legacy of separation. The interdisciplinary landscape of life sciences has come to include chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. Partnerships with bioartists can contribute cultural and aesthetic contexts essential to translating basic research into useful applications. While the role of bioart in both the criticism and application of science will undoubtedly continue, perhaps a more profoundly important and yet less recognized contribution may be the ability of bioart to help science understand itself.

That’s deep, man. Call it Oz, call it Wonderland, call it whatever you want — all I know is, this is one glowing white rabbit that I intend to follow.

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Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

Posted in Anchor, Eureka, FF, GE, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Smith's, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

Are We About to Say Goodbye to Fish Sticks?

by ElbaAudetqiabp Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Many people think of climate change as something happening in the atmosphere, but in fact a lot of the most important changes are taking place under the ocean.

In fact, up to one-third of the greenhouse gases humans release, and up to 90 percent of the global warming caused by those gases, ends up sunk in the sea. That has a lot of scary impacts: Rising sea level threatens coastal communities; rising seawater acidity kills off coral and shellfish; changing conditions are forcing dozens of species from whales to puffins into unfamiliar regions of the globe. We’ve even got cannibal lobsters, for crying out loud.

Those impacts can also devastate vital US industries, as a peer-reviewed study published today in Nature illustrates. The research found that warming waters are to blame for a recent collapse of the cod fishery in New England. Although a smaller industry than major commercial fish like salmon and mackerel, cod, commonly used for fish sticks and other processed foods, is a multimillion dollar business in New England.

But the fish have become increasingly rare. Last year, federal regulators slapped tight limits on cod fishing after they discovered that the population was at only 4 percent of the level needed to be sustainable. That was the lowest point in a nosedive that has played out over the last decade. In 2014, the commercial catch of cod in New England—about 5 million pounds—was 67 percent less than it was in 2004; the net value of the fishery was correspondingly cut by more than half, to about $9.3 million.

Researchers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute wanted to know whether climate change played in role in that collapse. Indeed, they found that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen 99 percent faster than those in the rest of the ocean, rising especially quickly over the same decade-long decline of the cod fishery. The correlation is clear when you look at the two trend lines side-by-side, as in this chart from the study:

Pershing, et al

Higher temperatures make it harder for the fish to metabolize food, leaving them with less energy, especially at their prime reproductive age of about four years. That leads to fewer fish being born. Those that are born may have a harder time finding food, as the plankton they survive on move into deeper water in search of cooler temperatures. Deep water is home to more cod predators.

These problems have all been compounded by a lack of climate-savvy policy by fishing officials, the study found. Because the officials have largely overlooked the impact of ocean warming, they’ve consistently set quotas for commercial fishers far too high, giving the cod population no opportunity to rebound even in cooler years. In other words, overfishing has been rampant even when the overall catch comes in below the legally prescribed limit.

For that reason, the key solution that the researchers advocate is better integration of climate modeling in decision about where, when, and how cod fishing should be allowed. In Canada, extreme limitations on cod fishing seen to have been remarkably successful in revitalizing the population. Still, those management choices aren’t getting any easier to make, as warming continues to rise; the only true fix for New England’s fishing industry is to slow the warming. Bear that in mind the next time you hear a politician complain about job-killing climate action policies.

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Are We About to Say Goodbye to Fish Sticks?

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

by LurleneHollins Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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We often point to testosterone to explain the traits that make men “manly”: competitiveness, horniness, impulsiveness. People have even blamed the testosterone levels of the architects of the Great Recession for the devastatingly awful decisions that led to the financial crash.

But new research shows that the reason men have more testosterone than women may have as much to do with gender socialization as inherent biology. Scientists from the University of Michigan published a study today that found that the act of wielding power increases testosterone levels regardless of gender. The study’s authors went on to hypothesize that the reason women generally have less of the hormone than men may be, at least in part, because of gender norms that prevent women from accessing positions of power and discourage them from being competitive.

To come to this conclusion, researchers hired more than 100 actors to perform an activity during which they held power over someone else: firing a subordinate employee. The actors performed the firing both acting with stereotypically “masculine” traits (using dominant poses, taking up space, not smiling), and with stereotypically “feminine” traits (lifting their voice at the end of sentences, being hesitant, not making eye contact). Researchers also measured the levels of a control group watching a travel documentary.

What they found was fascinating.

Not only did the female subjects acting in a stereotypically masculine way see an increase in testosterone (compared with the control), but those performing in a “feminine” way saw a significant boost, as well. In other words, just the act of wielding power, regardless of whether the wielder is performing maleness, increases testosterone levels. The study found that men did not have much of a testosterone boost during the activity, which, the study’s authors guessed, could be because men’s more frequent engagement in competitions and power-wielding activities “might paradoxically lead to dampened testosterone responses.”

“Our results would support a pathway from gender to testosterone that is mediated by men engaging more frequently than women in behaviors such as wielding power that increase testosterone,” the study says.

What’s that in layman’s terms? Gender inequality, at least in part, may be part of what’s making men manly.

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

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Kids Who Breathe More Pollution Have Lower Grades

by ShawnaWeston Posted on September 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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A growing body of evidence suggests pollution can do a number on the brain. The July/August Mother Jones cover story chronicled the research connecting neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to the dirty air we breathe; studies have found that pollution may also age the brain prematurely. And according to new research from the University of Texas-El Paso, pollution’s damage to the brain may start even sooner than was previously thought: Fourth and fifth graders exposed to exhaust emissions, researchers found, don’t do as well in school as their peers who breathe cleaner air.

Using the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Air Toxics Assessment, researchers estimated how often children were exposed to air pollution in their homes. They then compared that data with the academic performance of close to 1,900 kids enrolled in the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD)—an area prone to high levels of pollution.

Adjusting for other factors that can influence school performance, like socioeconomic status and parents’ education levels, the researchers found that students exposed to more emissions had lower grade-point averages. Areas included in the study were ranked by the amount of air pollution, and students living in areas with the highest levels (in the top 75 percent) had GPAs that were 0.031 points below those who lived where the air was cleaner.

The researchers also found that pollution from “non-road mobile sources”—such as airports, construction vehicles, and trains—had the greatest impact on GPA, even though factories and vehicle emissions often receive the most attention from policymakers.

The American Lung Association reports that some 139 million people—close to half of the nation’s population—live in areas with air that the group deems “too dangerous to breathe,” and the UTEP researchers highlighted that low-income families are more likely to live in the most polluted areas. Poverty alone has been connected to adverse affects on childhood brain development, but the new findings suggest poor students might be at an even greater disadvantage because of pollution levels near their homes.

“This study and this body of literature about air pollution is demonstrating one more negative effect of air pollution in our environment,” says researcher Sara Grineski. “There are many studies that show that higher levels of air pollution are associated with so many negative effects, from asthma, respiratory infections, cardiovascular disease, and autism, to reduced school performance.”

Grineski and her coauthor believe their findings indicate an even greater urgency to implement policies that will curb emissions. “The finding that there is a significant association between residential exposure to air toxins and GPA at the individual level is both novel and disturbing,” they write. “These findings provide another piece of evidence that should inform advocacy for pollution reduction in the USA and beyond.”

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Kids Who Breathe More Pollution Have Lower Grades

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Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

by ReganV32die Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the summer closing out its final weeks, kids around the US are packing up their book-bags, collecting their colored pencils and heading back to school. But, amidst the excitement, parents have a new worry: super lice.

Lice infestations typically affect up to 12 million kids ages 3 to 11 each year. But, in 25 states, the blood-eating parasites that make their homes in hair and are commonly spread in classrooms have become resistant to most over-the-counter treatment methods, according to a new study.

Lice populations in the states in pink have developed a high level of resistance to some of the most common treatments. Kyong Yoon, Ph.D.

“We are the first group to collect lice samples from a large number of populations across the U.S.,” researcher Kyong Yoon said in a statement published with the study, which was presented at the American Chemical Society. “What we found was that 104 out of the 109 lice populations we tested had high levels of gene mutations, which have been linked to resistance to pyrethroids.”

Pyrethroids, insecticides that can be bought in FDA-approved shampoo-form from a pharmacy, have long been go-to treatments for lice infestations.

Overuse, Yoon found, could be to blame for the loss in the insecticides’ effectiveness — and the problem has been growing for years. While the latest study used the largest survey of the data on lice in the United States, the super lice problem was identified back in the 1990’s.

Still, Yoon’s study—and the alarm that resulted from it—has been scrutinized by other scientists who say it’s not time to panic yet. While Yoon concluded many of the lice had genetic mutations that made them less sensitive to the insecticides, traditional treatment methods may still be enough to kill them. As Medpage Today reports:

“The relationship between clinical and genetic resistance is still debated,” said Rémy Durand, PharmD, PhD, HDR, a researcher in the Department of Parasitology and Mycology at Hôpital Avicenne in Paris, France. While kdr mutations are well known for their effects on insecticide resistance in many insect species, Durand pointed out that some limited studies have actually reported that the presence of these “mutant alleles” in lice did not correlate with clinical failure.

Should we fear the rise of mutant lice? The good news, health officials report, is that the critters aren’t dangerous and they don’t spread disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the over-the-counter treatments, followed by prescription-strength remedies if that doesn’t knock them out.

Still, Yoon’s findings serve as an important warning that extends beyond louse-removal:

“If you use a chemical over and over, these little creatures will eventually develop resistance,” Yoon says. “So we have to think before we use a treatment.”

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Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

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Happy Accidents – Morton A. Meyers

by Myrna Posted on August 23, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Happy Accidents

Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century

Morton A. Meyers

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Arcade Publishing

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the twentieth century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In the 1990s, Pfizer had high hopes for a new drug that would boost blood flow to the heart. As they conducted trials on angina sufferers, researchers noted a startling effect: while the drug did not affect blood flow to the heart, it did affect blood flow elsewhere! Now over six million American men have taken Viagra in their lifetime. Winston Churchill once said, “Men occasionally stumble across the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.” Within the scientific community, a certain stigma is attached to chance discovery because it is wrongly seen as pure luck. Happy accidents certainly happen every day, but it takes intelligence, insight, and creativity to recognize a “Eureka, I found what I wasn&apos;t looking for!” moment and know what to do next. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!

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Happy Accidents – Morton A. Meyers

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How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

by sseerss4tr Posted on August 10, 2015

How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

By on 10 Aug 2015commentsShare

What do glaciers have in common with my bank account?

They’re both slowly melting away — sometimes in big chunks, other times at a slow trickle — and both represent existential crises that end in either the demise of humanity or me moving back in with my parents. Which is why I’d like to ignore both of them — you know, ignorance is bliss, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, etc.

Except bliss doesn’t last, and what you don’t know can hurt you — and hurt you and hurt you. So as a grownup, I do, in fact, check my bank account — through scrunched eyes and gritted teeth, but still! — and I would like to know what’s going on with those glaciers, even if I’m making this face the entire time.

The problem is, there’s no online banking equivalent for monitoring melting glaciers. Even scientists don’t always know what’s going on with those giant hunks of world-altering ice. But according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers have figured out a new way to use seismic vibrations to monitor the melting of tidewater glaciers — those that end in the ocean, rather than on land. Here’s more from a press release:

Meltwater moving through a glacier into the ocean is critically important because it can increase melting and destabilize the glacier in a number of ways: The water can speed the glacier’s flow downhill toward the sea; it can move rocks, boulders and other sediments toward the terminus of the glacier along its base; and it can churn and stir warm ocean water, bringing it in contact with the glacier.

“It’s like when you drop an ice cube into a pot of warm water. It will eventually melt, but it will melt a lot faster if you stir that water,” said Timothy Bartholomaus, a postdoctoral fellow at [The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics] and the study’s lead author. “Subglacial discharge provides that stirring.”

Bartholomaus and his colleagues realized that they could use seismic equipment to monitor such subglacial discharge when they were trying to study earthquakes — or “icequakes” — caused by glacier calving and kept detecting mysterious background vibrations. Those vibrations, it turned out, came from meltwater running through the ice.

Landlocked glaciers are easier to monitor because scientists can just measure the amount of runoff in glacial rivers. But if we only monitored landlocked glaciers, it would be like me only monitoring my grocery bill and ignoring rent, student loan payments, and health insurance.

“All of the biggest glaciers in Greenland, all of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica, they end in the ocean,” Bartholomaus said. “We need to understand how these glaciers are moving and how they are melting at their front. If we want to answer those questions, we need to know what’s occurring with the meltwater being discharged from the glacier.”

So while I go check my bank account, you grit your teeth and stare at this picture of the Yahtse Glacier in Alaska. All that brown water at the top is meltwater runoff.

Tony OneySource:
Scientists pioneer method to track water flowing through glaciers

, Eurekalert.

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How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle