Everyday Thinking

College students exhibiting more severe mental illness

Severe mental illness is more common among college students than it was a decade ago, with more young people arriving on campus with pre-existing conditions and a willingness to seek help for emotional distress, according to a study presented at the 118th annual convention of the American Psychological Association. The data support what college mental health professionals have noted for some time.

"In the last 10 years, a shift in the needs of students seeking counseling services is becoming apparent," said John Guthman, PhD, author of the study and director of student counseling services at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. "University and college counseling services around the country are reporting that the needs of students seeking services are escalating toward more severe psychological problems. While the condition of students seeking counseling doesn't necessarily reflect the experience of the average college student, our findings may suggest that students with severe emotional stress are getting better education, outreach and support during childhood that makes them more likely to attend college than in the past."

Guthman and his co-authors looked at the records of 3,256 college students who accessed college counseling support between September 1997 and August 2009 at a mid-sized private university. Students, both undergraduate and graduate, were screened for mental disorders, suicidal thoughts and self-injurious behavior. Several tools were employed to make a diagnosis, including clinical evaluations, structured interviews, and two widely used tests of mood -- the Beck Depression Inventory and the Beck Anxiety Inventory.

In 1998, 93 percent of the students coming into the clinic were diagnosed with one mental disorder, said Guthman. That number rose to 96 percent in 2009. In 2009, 96 percent of students seeking treatment met criteria for diagnosis with at least one mental disorder. Most students were diagnosed with mood and anxiety disorders as well as adjustment disorders or problems associated with significant impairment in functioning. There were no significant class or age differences.

"Overall, the average quality of depression and anxiety experienced by students in counseling has remained constant and relatively mild during the last decade," Guthman said. "However, the percentage of students with moderate to severe depression has gone up from 34 to 41 percent. "These outliers often require significantly more resources and may contribute greatly to the misperception that the average student is in distress."

The rise in the more severe cases of depression and anxiety in college students may be because more students are coming to college with pre-existing mental health difficulties, said Guthman. "There are also more students who are not socially connected. The average college student is not having this problem, but the students who are seeking help are frequently socially isolated, depressed and may be on medication."

The study also found that the number of students on psychiatric medicines increased more than 10 percentage points. In 1998, 11 percent of the clinical sample reported using psychiatric medications, mostly for depression, anxiety and ADHD. In 2009, 24 percent of those attending counseling reported using psychiatric medications.

On a more positive note, Guthman found that the number of students who acknowledged that they had thought about suicide within two weeks of counseling intake declined from 26 percent in 1998 to 11 percent in 2009. This decrease may reflect general improvements in suicide prevention education and outreach and greater awareness of available assistance, he said.

"It used to be that students would come to university counseling centers because they broke up with their partner or failed a test," Guthman said. "Now, they are coming with emotional distress and requesting mental health treatment for the same reasons that other adult populations seeks out treatment."

Astronomers Identify Two New Solar Systems

In the field of astronomy these days, it's raining planets.  Two leading teams of planet hunters announced this week that they'd found entire solar systems — one with two or three planets, the other with as many as seven.

These are not planets where life could actually survive, but many scientists say that detecting planets that can is looking very likely.

Matthew Holman, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was one of the scientists playing top-this at a conference hosted by the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in southeastern France.

"There's always, I admit, an element of competition," Holman says of the conference.  "People come and want to show their best work and surprise their colleagues."

Holman had to keep his own surprise under wraps for a few days because it hadn't yet been published.

So he just listened as his European competitors claimed the spotlight.  Christophe Lovis, from the University of Geneva, announced on Tuesday that his group had discovered a whole collection of planets orbiting a star 127 light-years away.

"At least five planets, and probably seven," Lovis said.  "Two of them are a little bit uncertain."

That makes it the largest solar system ever seen outside our own.  But Lovis didn't actually see any of those planets — that's impossible right now.

The Planet Hunter's Toolbox

But Lovis did watch stars — very carefully — as they move through space.  If they speed up and slow down a little in a regular pattern, it indicates that there's something tugging on them: the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

This has been the most successful planet-hunting technique, but it works best for giant planets close to small stars.  Of the 500 planets discovered so far, most have been like this.

One of the new planets that Lovis announced, however, appears to be much smaller — its mass is just 40 percent greater than that of Earth.

"We've really moved from giant planets only to any kind of planetary system, with more and more planets, small-mass planets and so forth — it's really exciting," Lovis says.

The Kepler Planets

Thursday, Holman finally got to add his bit of excitement when his discovery was published by the journal Science.

"We're announcing the discovery of two Saturn-size planets, which we're calling Kepler 9B and Kepler 9C," Holman said.  And there's evidence of a third planet, he said — a much smaller one.  Its diameter appears to be just 50 percent larger than Earth's.  "If it is confirmed, it would have a radius of about 1.5 times the radius of Earth."

Holman's discovery, in fact, is an early scientific harvest from NASA's new planet-finding machine — a telescope called Kepler.

This instrument is following Earth in its orbit around the sun, staring constantly at a group of 100,000 stars in another corner of our galaxy.  When the light from any of those stars dims slightly, it's evidence that a planet just crossed in front of it.

Read the rest of the story at NPR.

Biochar could reduce CO2 emissions, Cornell research shows

If every bit of biomass that could be collected sustainably were converted to biochar and the gas produced in the conversion process used for energy, human-caused (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by 12 percent annually, according to new research.

That reduction could help slow the increase in total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and boost the chances of stabilizing global temperatures.

The findings appear in the Aug. 10 issue of Nature Communications.

Johannes Lehmann, Cornell associate professor of soil science and a leading authority on biochar, was a consultant on the paper, which outlines three scenarios using biochar to sequester carbon and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

The paper's lead authors are Dominic Woolf of Swansea (UK) University and James E. Amonette of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

Biochar is produced when grasses, crop residues, timber and forestry residues, manures and other organic waste are burned at low temperatures without using oxygen -- a process known as pyrolysis.

The process doubles carbon concentration in the residue (biochar), which can then be returned to the soil as a stable, long-term carbon repository -- slowing the rate at which carbon that has been absorbed by plants for photosynthesis is returned to the atmosphere.

Biochar improves the structure and fertility of soils, while exhaust gasses from the process can be converted into energy. Research has shown that in almost every case, use of biochar has the potential to mitigate climate change on a much larger scale than combustion of the same sustainably procured biomass for energy.

In the paper, the researchers demonstrate three models of varying intensity in which biochar use is incorporated into the global energy picture.

In the most optimistic scenario, called the maximum sustainable technical potential, the researchers assess the upper limit of biochar's potential -- the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that can be eliminated globally by biochar without harming the food supply or causing other environmental damage. That model, which assumes that all sustainably obtained biomass is converted to biochar, shows a maximum emissions reduction of 12 percent.

"The number is much better founded as a technical potential than what we had before, and it is vetted against what is sustainable," said Lehmann. "The maximum values are well in the area that justifies further efforts to explore the doability of biochar systems."

But before biochar systems can be deployed on a larger scale, some critical knowledge gaps have to be addressed in research as well as application, he added.

"This paper should answer the question: If you were implementing biochar systems to mitigate climate change, would it be worth discussing it as a global strategy? Would it potentially scale to an important approach? The answer is yes."

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Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved!

Bermuda Triangle courtesy steelkaledoscope

According to theSalem-News, two research scientists researching the mystery of vanished ships and airplanes in the region dubbed "The Bermuda Triangle" has been solved.

Step aside outer space aliens, time anomalies, submerged giant Atlantean pyramids and bizarre meteorological phenomena ... the "Triangle" simply suffers from an acute case of gas.

Natural gas—the kind that heats ovens and boils water—specifically methane, is the culprit behind the mysterious disappearances and loss of water and air craft.

The evidence for this astounding new insight into a mystery that's bedeviled the world is laid out in a research paper published in the American Journal of Physics.

Professor Joseph Monaghan researched the hypothesis with honor student David May at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

The two hypothesized that large methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor might account for many, if not all, of the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft at specific locales around the world.

Researcher Ivan T. Sanderson identified these mystery areas during the 1960s. Sanderson described the actual shape of these regions as more like a lozenge rather than a triangle. Some of the more famous spots include an area in the Sea of Japan, the North Sea, and of course the infamous "Bermuda (or Devil's) Triangle."

Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.

Because of the correlations and existing data, the two envisioned what would happen when gigantic methane bubbles explode from natural fissures on the seafloor.

The methane—normally frozen at great pressure as gas hydrates embedded within subterranean rock—can become dislodged and transform into gaseous bubbles expanding geometrically as they explode upwards. When these bubbles reach the surface of the water they soar into the air, still expanding upwards and outwards.

Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean. If the bubbles are big enough and possess a high enough density they can also knock aircraft out of the sky with little or no warning. Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting

 

 

Hinchey seeks funding for Binghamton University research

by Rachel Coker, Binghamton University

Binghamton University could receive $9 million in federal funds to support energy-efficiency research with    defense applications, U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey announced Aug. 3.

The funding has been approved by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and will now go to the full Appropriations Committee and then the House of Representatives. The allocations are expected to support two projects:

$6 million to help establish the Center for Energy Efficient Electronic Systems, which will focus on reducing energy consumption in data centers and electronic systems.

$3 million to develop energy-efficient tent technology for the Marine Corps.
Hinchey described the projects as “critical to our security needs,” and noted that dozens of good-paying technical jobs are expected to be created.

“Binghamton University is perhaps the most important economic anchor in this region that I represent,” Hinchey told reporters who gathered for a press conference at the University’s Innovative Technologies Complex. “It puts technology into action and does it in an important way.”

Data centers – essentially massive banks of computers – are increasingly in demand to power online services for everything from medical records to shopping. Energy consumed by data centers is growing 12 percent annually, Hinchey said, and by 2020 data centers may produce more greenhouse gases than air travel.

Research conducted by the Center for Energy Efficient Electronic Systems has the potential to deliver more than $300 million in energy savings for New York companies and $3 billion in savings for companies around the nation. The U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center will collaborate on the project.

“As the largest energy consumer in the world, the military is beginning to embrace a new culture to address the department’s use of energy,” Hinchey said.

The goal of the tent research is to achieve up to a 75 percent reduction in fuel needs as well as increased protection for military personnel. The Marines use 800,000 gallons of fuel daily in Afghanistan alone, necessitating hundreds of trips to transport fuel.

“Improving energy efficiency in the battlefield is critical to the safety of our troops serving on the front lines,” Hinchey said. “According to the Army, reducing fuel consumption by only 1 percent in Iraq during 2007 would have prevented the need for 6,444 soldier trips. With half of U.S. military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan directly related to attacks on convoys, reducing the need to transport fuel will help save lives.”

New Questions Arise On Dispersant Use In Oil Spill

Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

BP inched closer to permanently sealing the blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico as environmental officials defended themselves Sunday against assertions they allowed the oil giant liberal use of chemical dispersants whose threat to sea life remains unknown.

The Coast Guard routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of chemicals per day to break up the oil, despite a federal directive to use the dispersant rarely, congressional investigators said.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) released a letter Saturday that said instead of complying with the EPA restriction, "BP often carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it."

Before leaving on a boat tour of recovery efforts Sunday off Venice, La., BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said the company had operated under a protocol agreed on by the Coast Guard and the federal government.

"Furthermore," spokesman Daren Beaudo said earlier, "we've complied with EPA requests regarding dispersants, which are an EPA-approved and recognized tool in fighting oil spills."

The EPA and the Coast Guard ordered BP on May 24, more than a month after the spill began, to cut the use of chemical dispersants by 75 percent.

The Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the Environmental Protection Agency order, according to documents reviewed by the investigators. Only in a few cases did the government scale back BP's request.

The EPA said in a statement that the company slashed its use by 72 percent through mid-July, when engineers placed a cap on the leaking well.

"While EPA may not have concurred with every individual waiver granted by the federal on-scene coordinator, the agency believes dispersant use has been an essential tool in mitigating this spill's impact, preventing millions of gallons of oil from doing even more damage to sensitive marshes, wetlands and beaches and the economy of the Gulf coast," the agency said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Coast Guard did not return calls seeking comment.

The chemical dispersant was effective at breaking up the oil into small droplets to be consumed more easily by bacteria, but the long-term effects to aquatic life are unknown. That environmental uncertainty has led to several spats between BP and the government over the use of dispersants on the surface and deep underwater when oil was spewing out of the well.

BP's apparently generous use of dispersants helps explain why so little oil has been spotted on the surface recently, said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Whether the benefits of dispersants outweigh the possible risks is a "debatable point," he said. They've protected the Gulf Coast's fragile wetlands from heavier bands of oil but are capable of killing shrimp and crab eggs and larvae.

"That's a debate with no right answer," he said.

State waters closed by the spill have slowly reopened to fishing, most recently in Florida, where regulators on Saturday reopened a 23-mile stretch of Escambia County shoreline to harvest saltwater fish. The area was closed June 14 and remains closed to the shrimp and crab harvesting pending additional testing. Oysters, clams and mussels were never included in the closure.

In Alabama, the Department of Public Health lifted all swimming advisories for the Gulf of Mexico.

A temporary cap has held the gusher in check for more than two weeks, and engineers were planning to start Tuesday on an effort to help plug the well for good. The procedure, dubbed the static kill, involves pumping mud and possibly cement into the blown-out well through the temporary cap.

If it works, it will take less time to complete a similar procedure using a relief well that is nearly complete. That effort, known as a bottom kill, should be the last step to sealing the well.

Before the static kill can take place, however, debris needs to be cleared from one of the relief wells. The debris fell in the bottom of the relief well when crews had to evacuate the site last week because of Tropical Storm Bonnie.

The attempt to start plugging the well remains on target for Tuesday, Suttles said in Venice.

Companies working to choke off the oil for good are engaged in a billion-dollar blame game. But the workers for BP, Halliburton and Transocean say the companies' adversarial relationship before Congress isn't a distraction at the site of the April 20 rig explosion, where Transocean equipment rented by BP is drilling relief wells that Halliburton will pump cement through to choke the oil well permanently.

"Simply, we are all too professional to allow disagreements between BP and any other organization to affect our behaviors," Ryan Urik, a BP well safety adviser working on the Development Driller II, which is drilling a backup relief well, said in an e-mail last week.

The roles of the three companies in the kill efforts are much the same as they were on the Deepwater Horizon, the exploratory rig that blew up, killing 11 workers. The Justice Department has opened civil and criminal investigations, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed, and congressional investigators are probing the blast and its aftermath.

Read the rest of the story here.
 

Cornell Researchers listen for whales amid undersea oil clouds

Twenty-two marine autonomous recording units (MARUs) will be anchored to the sea floor in an arc stretching from Texas to western Florida, along the edge of the continental shelf (red dots on map).

According to Pat Leonard, staff writer for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whales cruise out of sight in the Gulf of Mexico depths -- their hidden world threatened by huge clots of drifting oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well. At the same time, there is almost no data available to measure changes to the Gulf's ecosystem -- including whale populations -- caused by the massive leak.

"Night after night, on TV and on webcams, we see oil spewing from the bottom of the ocean," said Christopher Clark, head of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "You wonder 'What can we do? What's the impact of this?' In the case of marine mammals, we don't know because we don't even know what's there."

But now, Clark and his team are collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a multipronged effort to discover the numbers and locations of whales and assess the potential impact of oil clouds drifting below the surface -- a by-product of the oil spill and the dispersants used to break up the oil slick. The team will anchor 22 marine autonomous recording units (MARUs) to the sea floor in an arc stretching from Texas to western Florida, along the edge of the continental shelf. These units will record underwater sounds for three months before they receive a signal to let go of their tethers and pop to the surface for retrieval. After analyzing the data, the team will deliver a report to NOAA and other agencies involved in the oil leak response.

he MARUs will listen for endangered sperm whales and a small population of Bryde's (BRU-des) whales. They will also pick up sounds of fish and ship traffic. Some devices will be placed in areas apparently unaffected by the oil to collect "control" site information; others will be close to the gushing well. The goal is to document the state of the sounds in the ecosystem over an extended period of time and compare them with known information of the oil spill.

"This will be the first large-scale, long-term, acoustic monitoring survey in the Gulf of Mexico," Clark said. "We can provide one more layer of understanding about this ecosystem, using sound to measure animal occurrences, distributions and communication, as well as background noise levels from shipping and weather, and perhaps visualize how these features are being influenced by the oil. The whales are like oversized canaries in the coal mine -- they reflect the health of the environment they live in."

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Will you be eating gentically engineered salmon?

A gene-engineered fish, top, and a natural one of the same age.

According to an article in the New York Times, the Food and Drug Administration is seriously considering whether to approve the first genetically engineered animal that people would eat — salmon that can grow at twice the normal rate.

The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade. But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.

Some consumer and environmental groups are likely to raise objections to approval. Even within the F.D.A., there has been a debate about whether the salmon should be labeled as genetically engineered (genetically engineered crops are not labeled).

The salmon’s approval would help open a path for companies and academic scientists developing other genetically engineered animals, like cattle resistant to mad cow diseaseor pigs that could supply healthier bacon. Next in line behind the salmon for possible approval would probably be the “enviropig,” developed at a Canadian university, which has less phosphorus pollution in its manure.

The salmon was developed by a company called AquaBounty Technologies and would be raised in fish farms. It is an Atlantic salmon that contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, though the company says the modified salmon will not end up any bigger than a conventional fish.

“You don’t get salmon the size of the Hindenburg,” said Ronald L. Stotish, the chief executive of AquaBounty. “You can get to those target weights in a shorter time.”

AquaBounty, which is based in Waltham, Mass., and publicly traded in London, said last week that the F.D.A. had signed off on five of the seven sets of data required to demonstrate that the fish was safe for consumption and for the environment. It said it demonstrated, for instance, that the inserted gene did not change through multiple generations and that the genetic engineering did not harm the animals.

“Perhaps in the next few months, we expect to see a final approval,” Mr. Stotish said.

But the company has been overly optimistic before.

He said it would take two or three years after approval for the salmon to reach supermarkets.

The F.D.A. confirmed it was reviewing the salmon but, because of confidentiality rules, would not comment further.

Under a policy announced in 2008, the F.D.A. is regulating genetically engineered animals as if they were veterinary drugs and using the rules for those drugs. And applications for approval of new drugs must be kept confidential by the agency.

Critics say the drug evaluation process does not allow full assessment of the possible environmental impacts of genetically altered animals and also blocks public input.

“There is no opportunity for anyone from the outside to see the data or criticize it,” said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When consumer groups were invited to discuss biotechnology policy with top F.D.A. officials last month, Ms. Mellon said she warned the officials that approval of the salmon would generate “a firestorm of negative response.”

How consumers will react is not entirely clear. Some public opinion surveys have shown that Americans are more wary about genetically engineered animals than about the genetically engineered crops now used in a huge number of foods. But other polls suggest that many Americans would accept the animals if they offered environmental or nutritional benefits.

Mr. Stotish said the benefit of the fast-growing salmon would be to help supply the world’s food needs using fewer resources.

Government officials and industry executives say the F.D.A. is moving cautiously on the salmon. “It’s going to be a P. R. issue,” said one government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the issue.

Some of these government officials and executives said that F.D.A. officials had discussed internally whether the salmon could be labeled to give consumers the choice of avoiding them. 

Read the rest of the article here.

Where technology and music meet

Once upon a time, composer Eric Whitacre had a very cool idea. After a friend emailed him a video of a young singer performing one his pieces, he thought:

"What if hundreds of people did the same thing and then we cut them all together, creating the very first virtual choir?"

That first experiment resulted in the virtual choir performance of Sleep. Whitacre, thrilled by the success of the first experiment, decided to push the idea further.

"I made my own conductor track, filming it in complete silence, hearing the music only in my head. Then I watched the video and played in the piano accompaniment part to my conductor track. Then I offered the sheet music as a free download.

My goal with this 'chapter' of the Virtual Choir was to see if we could not just sing our parts separately and cut them together; I wanted to see if we could actually make music. There is a lot of rubato in my conducting and some very specific dynamic gestures, and the singers responded beautifully.

When I saw the finished video for the first time, I actually teared up. The intimacy of all the faces, the sound of the singing, the obvious poetic symbolism about our shared humanity and our need to connect; all of it completely overwhelmed me ... I'm hoping that this is just the beginning. My ultimate goal is to write an original piece for the Virtual Choir and have it receive its world premiere in cyber-space, hundreds (maybe thousands) of people singing alone, together."

Summer Solstice

The first day of summer officially kicks off today at 7:28 a.m. ET, the beginning of the summer solstice and the longest day of the year—at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

The summer solstice is a result of the Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the sun. The tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet.

Today the North Pole is tipped closer to the sun than on any other day of 2010. The opposite holds true for the Southern Hemisphere, for which today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

As a result, at high noon on the first day of summer, the sun appears at its highest point in the sky—its most directly overhead position—in the Northern Hemisphere.

That doesn't mean the sun will be exactly overhead at noon for everyone, said James Bell, an astronomer at Cornell University in New York State.

It depends on the viewer's latitude—the sun is only shining down directly overhead at noon at the Tropic of Cancer. "It's still at a low angle if you're up in Alaska," Bell explained.

No matter where you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the path of the sun across the sky—which rises in the lead-up to the first day of summer, then begins descending over the rest of the summer—seems not to change for the few days before and after the summer solstice.

In reality, the sun's position is still changing, but at a slower rate.

(Related story: "In Scandinavia, Solstice Means Fun in the Midnight Sun.")

Summer Solstice Wobbles Around the Calendar

While the June solstice generally occurs on the same day every year, the date does change every once in a while. For example, in 2008, the summer solstice occurred on June 20.

This date shifting is a result of the discrepancy between a human calendar year—which is usually counted as 365 days—and an astronomical year, which is 365.25 days.

Our leap year system—which adds an extra day to the calendar every four years—ensures our calendars are accurate, but it also causes the solstice date to flop around a bit.

"It's nothing astronomical changing. What's changing is the human side of it," Bell said.

Solstice Is Longest Day of the Year—Not Hottest

On the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere receives more sunlight than on any other day of the year, but that doesn't mean the first day of summer is also the hottest day of summer.

Earth's oceans and atmosphere act like heat sinks, absorbing and reradiating the sun's rays over time. So even though the planet is absorbing lots of sunlight on the summer solstice, it takes several weeks to release it. As a result, the hottest days of summer usually occur in July or August.

"If you think about turning up an oven—it takes it a long time to heat up," explained Robert Howell, an astronomer at the University of Wyoming. "And after you turn it off, it takes a while for it to cool down. It's the same with the Earth."

First Day of Summer Sparked Ancient Celebrations

The summer solstice is recognized and often celebrated in many cultures around the world, in both the past and present.

The ancient Egyptians, for example, built the Great Pyramids so that the solstice sunset, when viewed from the Sphinx, sets precisely between two of the Pyramids.

The Inca of South America celebrated the summer solstice with a ceremony called Inti Raymi, which included food offerings and sacrifices of animals and maybe even people. (See a picture of an Inca summer solstice festival.)

And perhaps most famously, Stonehenge in the United Kingdom has been associated with the winter and summer solstices for about 5,000 years.

Observers in the center of the standing stones can watch the summer solstice sun rise over the Heel Stone, which stands just outside Stonehenge's stone circles.

For many of the ancients, though, the summer solstice wasn't just an excuse to party or pray—it was essential to their well-being.

Associated with agriculture, the summer solstice was a reminder that a turning point in the growing season had been reached.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Reducing oil consumption

by Crystal Sarakas

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the resulting environmental devastation has caused many people to take a look at their own oil consumption. While few people can just give up their cars entirely, there are things you can do to help reduce your reliance on oil and petroleum-based items.

Part of the problem is that few people realize just how reliant we are on oil, not just for our daily commute, but for nearly everything we use on a day-to-day basis. From the clothing we wear to the food we eat to the homes we live in, our lives are dependent on oil.

When faced with these facts, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and to think that there's nothing we can do that will make a difference. But there are a number of relatively small lifestyle changes that can help reduce our oil and petroleum consumption. Here are the top five changes you can make today to help reduce oil consumption:

Stop buying bottled water. According to the Business Shrink, Americans went through 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. In order to manufacture these bottles, over 900,000 tons of plastic is needed. The mainstream manufacturing process that produces PET (polyethylene terephthalate) requires a combination of natural gas and petrolem. The production of this 31.2 billion liters of bottled water took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil. That's enough oil to run 1.5 million cars on U.S. roadways for an entire year. Worldwide, we consumed 154.3 billion liters of bottled water in 2004, which took roughly 87.4 million barrels of oil, or enough to run 7.5 million cars for an entire year.

Stop using plastic bags. Currently, the U.S. consumes 100 billion plastic shopping bags each year, and worldwide consumption is estimated to be from 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags. And just like plastic water bottles, oil is used in the manufacture of plastic bags. 100 billion bags takes 12 million barrels of oil a year. For worldwide consumption, the figure is around 60 million to 120 million barrels of oil each year just to produce plastic bags.

Buy local foods. Steven Hopp writes: "Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles. If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce oil consumption in the U.S. by over 1.1. million barrels of oil each week." For ideas on how to find local food, check with your local cooperative extension for a list of CSA's and farmer's markets. Even better, grow your own food. You can reduce the size of your lawn (thereby using less gas to power your lawn mower), have a 0-mile transportation cost for your meals, and you get exercise as you work the garden.

Eat less meat. According to the New York Times, "if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20%, it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan to an ultra-efficient Prius."

Drive less. There are a number of ways to achieve this goal. Take public transportation. Set up a carpool with your co-workers. Group your errands for maximum efficiency in driving. Walk and bike more. Choose to live closer to work. Aside from reducing your overall gas and oil consumption, you'll save money and/or get more exercise.

Wildlife caught in the BP Oil Spill

As the oil in the gulf continues to spread, wildlife are having a difficult time avoiding the black, tarry mess.  Below are some disturbing photographs taken by AP photographer Charlie Riedel, of wildlife trapped in oil trying just to survive. 

Here is a brown pelican covered in oil.  Brown pelicans are in the height of their nesting season in the gulf. 

This is a bird mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Public Broadcast station WSRE has several resources for parents, educators and studentsconcerning the spill.  There are classroom activities, live web cams, vocabulary and tips for discussing this environmental disaster with students.  This website has a wealth of resources and additional web-links for more information concerning containment and clean up efforts on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  
 

BP Oil Spill- still no end in sight.

According to NPR, "The Obama administration said Sunday that it has lost patience with BP's efforts to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and threatened to take over the operation, though it acknowledged that BP has expertise they lack in stopping the deep-water leak.

After talks at BP headquarters in Houston, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he's just about had it with the company, which leased the oil rig that exploded last month and is responsible for the cleanup.

"We are 33 days into this effort, and deadline after deadline has been missed," said Salazar. "If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing," said Salazar, "we'll push them out of the way appropriately."

At least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf, though some scientists have said they believe the spill already surpasses the 11 million gallon 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska as the worst in U.S. history.

Watch Live Streaming Video Of The Oil Leak
 
May 23, 2010
 In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal said that BP is falling far short in deploying boats — especially those owned by out-of-work fishermen — to collect oil now coating beaches and wetland areas farther inland. He says conditions are perfect for skimming operations, yet oil continues pouring past barriers he's monitoring.

Jindal said the state has begun work on a chain of berms, reinforced with containment booms, that would skirt the state's coastline.

"As we talk, a total of more than 65 miles of our shoreline now has been oiled," said Jindal.

He said the berms would close the door on oil still pouring from a mile-deep gusher about 50 miles out in the Gulf. The berms would be made with sandbags and sand hauled in; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also is considering a broader plan that would use dredging to build sand berms across more of the barrier islands.

Salazar said he is "not completely" confident that BP knows what it's doing. His remarks came as BP said it will be at least Tuesday before engineers can shoot mud into the blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf, yet another delay in the effort to plug up the break. The company had originally hoped to try the so-called top kill method as early as this weekend.

Earlier in the day, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is responsible for the oversight of the month-old spill response, said he, too, is frustrated, and that he understands the discontent among residents who want to know what's next.

"If anybody is frustrated with this response, I would tell them their symptoms are normal, because I'm frustrated, too," said Allen. "Nobody likes to have a feeling that you can't do something about a very big problem."

But Allen said only the private sector has the technical expertise to stop the spill. And he said the government must hold BP accountable. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska, Congress dictated that oil companies be responsible for dealing with major accidents — including paying for all cleanup — with oversight by federal agencies.

Delays, Setbacks Mark Efforts To Halt Spill

BP has tried and failed several times to halt the gusher, and has had some success with a mile-long tube inserted into the leaking well last week. But on Sunday, the company said that method isn't working as effectively as before.

BP spokesman John Curry told The Associated Press that the tube siphoned some 57,120 gallons of oil within the past 24 hours, a sharp drop from the 92,400 gallons of oil a day that the device was sucking up on Friday. However, the company has said the amount of oil siphoned will vary widely from day to day.

On Tuesday, crews plan to shoot heavy mud into a crippled piece of equipment atop the well. Then engineers will direct cement at the well to permanently stop the oil. The method has been tried on land but never 5,000 feet underwater, so scientists and engineers have spent the past week preparing and taking measurements to make sure it will stop the oil that has been spewing into the sea for a month.

"It's taking time to get everything set up," BP spokesman Tom Mueller said. "They're taking their time. It's never been done before. We've got to make sure everything is right."

Engineers are also developing several other plans in case the top kill doesn't work, including an effort to shoot knotted rope, pieces of tire and other material — known as a junk shot — to plug the blowout preventer, which was meant to shut off the oil in case of an accident but did not work.

As Spill Grows, So Does Anger

The spill's impact now stretches across 150 miles, from Dauphin Island, Ala., to Grand Isle, La.

On Sunday, oil reached an 1,150-acre oyster ground leased by Belle Chasse, La., fisherman Dave Cvitanovich. He said cleanup crews were stringing lines of absorbent boom along the surrounding marshes, but that still left large clumps of rust-colored oil floating over his oyster beds. Mature oysters might eventually filter out the crude and become fit for sale, but this year's crop of spate, or young oysters, will perish.

"Those will die in the oil," Cvitanovich said. "It's inevitable."

Each day the spill grows, so does anger with the government and BP. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa P. Jackson was headed Sunday to Louisiana, where she planned to visit with frustrated residents.

Salazar and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano were to lead a Senate delegation to the region on Monday to fly over affected areas and keep an eye on the response.

The head of the Senate's environmental committee, Democrat Barbara Boxer of California, has asked the Justice Department to determine whether BP made false and misleading claims about its ability to prevent a serious oil spill.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs also told CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday that Justice Department officials have been to the region gathering information about the spill. However, he wouldn't say whether the department has opened a criminal investigation.

President Obama has named a special independent commission to review what happened. The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, killing 11 workers; the rig sank two days later.

Marshes, Wildlife Feeling The Effects

Meanwhile, thick, brown oil continues to wash up into the marshes and onto the beaches of some barrier islands and in some coastal wetlands west of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana.

And experts say this is only just the beginning.

Much of the massive amount of oil has been floating around in Gulf currents away from shore. Now, residents along the Gulf Coast can expect to see oil continue washing ashore for weeks and months to come.

Crews trying to mop up the oil are finding it difficult to try to clean up the toxic mess, particularly when it gets deep inside of marshes and clings to the tall reeds and grasses.

In Barataria Bay, orange oil had made its way a good 6 inches onto the shore, coating grasses and the nests of brown pelicans in mangrove trees. Just six months ago, the birds had been removed from the federal endangered species list.

The pelicans struggled to clean the crude from their bodies, splashing in the water and preening themselves. One stood at the edge of the island with its wings lifted slightly, its head drooping — so encrusted in oil it couldn't fly.

Wildlife officials tried to rescue oil-soaked pelicans Sunday, but they suspended their efforts after spooking the birds. They weren't sure whether they would try again. U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Stacy Shelton said it is sometimes better to leave the animals alone than to disturb their colony.

Pelicans are especially vulnerable to oil. Not only could they eat tainted fish and feed it to their young, but they could die of hypothermia or drowning if they're soaked in oil.

Globs of oil have soaked through containment booms set up in the area. Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said BP needed to send more booms. He said it would be up to federal wildlife authorities to decide whether to try to clean the oil that has already washed ashore.

"The question is, will it do more damage because this island is covered with the mess?" Nungesser said."

Read the rest of the story here.

Parental involvement key to preventing child bullying

Communities across the United States are developing programs to address child bullying. New research shows that parents can play an important role in preventing their children from becoming bullies in the first place.

"Improving parent-child communication and parental involvement with their children could have a substantial impact on child bullying," said Rashmi Shetgiri, MD, MSHS, lead author of a study presented May 3 at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Dr. Shetgiri, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Children's Medical Center Dallas, and colleagues analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health. Among the questions asked of 45,897 parents with children 10-17 years old was whether their child bullies or is cruel or mean to others. Researchers then identified factors that increased or reduced the risk of a child being a bully.

Results showed the prevalence of bullying was 15 percent. Factors increasing the risk included race, emotional/behavioral problems and mothers' mental health.

African-American and Latino children had a higher likelihood of being bullies compared to white children. In addition, children with emotional, developmental or behavioral problems and those whose mothers reported having less than "very good" mental health also were more likely to be bullies. Other parental characteristics that increased the likelihood of child bullying were getting angry with their child frequently and feeling that their child often did things to bother them.

There also were factors that decreased the likelihood that a child will become a bully. Older children, those living in a home where the primary language spoken is not English and those who consistently did their homework were less likely to be bullies.

Parents also played a protective role. Those who shared ideas and talked with their child, and those who met most of their child's friends were less likely to have children who bully.

Read the full article here.

Tune in to WSKG's Community Conversation on May 18th for a program on kids and bullying. The program will include Dr. Meredith Cole and Dr. Brandon Gibb on their research studing bullying within the Union-Endicott School District in Broome County. A Community Conversation on kids and bullying, LIVE, Tuesday, May 18th at 7 p.m. on WSKG Public Radio.

Do Birds Play?

 
  

 According the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, they do. The lab features a weekly question on their website where you can ask scientists questions.  Here the lab's response, "Many animals engage in “play,” that is, activities that enhance learning of motor and sensory skills and social behaviors but otherwise serve no immediate purpose. Young screech-owls pounce at leaves; young crows and jays pick up, inspect, and hide all kinds of shiny objects; young gulls and terns carry small items aloft and drop them, catch them in midair, and drop and catch them again. All these activities probably help birds acquire the skills and coordination they’ll need for hunting and other essential activities as adults."

 

This is amazing to witness and helps us to relate a little closer with our animal counter parts.  "Some forms of play, called “locomotor play,” seem quite similar to the exhilarating play of children sledding down a steep hill. Some ducks have been observed floating through tidal rapids or fast-moving sections of rivers, and when they’ve reached the end, hurrying back to the beginning to ride over and over. Common Ravens have been observed taking turns sliding down a snow bank on their tails or rolling over and over down a hill. In the air, ravens and crows often rise on air currents only to swoop down toward earth, then glide back upwards, again and again." according to the Lab of Ornithology.  So next time you see animals acting funny, you will have a better idea of what they are up to.

 

  
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has received an award for their comprehensive and educational website.  According to the Ithaca Journal, "The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website has been named best lifestyle site of the year in the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' 14th annual Webby Awards, the top recognition among Internet sites."  The lab is located in Ithaca, New York and is open the public.   
  
Photos courtesy Nancy Coddington copyright 2010.

Is climate change making us sick?

by Florence Margai, Binghamton University

The answer is yes, and a geographically based approach can help fight diseases such as malaria and  swine flu.

Climate change and its anticipated health effects vary by place, with broad regional impacts and disproportionate risks among various populations. Emerging diseases are among the most far-reaching consequences of global warming. In the decades ahead, we need to develop a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. That will require partnerships with health professionals and policymakers.

What’s an emerging disease?

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, or ERIDs, are infectious diseases that have increased in incidence or geographic range, recently moved into new host populations, recently been discovered or are caused by newly evolved pathogens. Noteworthy also is their timeline; diseases have been classified as ERIDs if their incidence in humans has increased since the 1970s or threatens to increase in the near future.

ERIDs have received a lot of public attention due in part to recent pandemics and how rapidly they are diffusing globally. For example, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was the first pandemic to emerge in the 21st century. Following its initial diagnosis in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, it spread to more than 30 countries within six months. About 8,450 cases were diagnosed globally, with a 10 percent fatality rate.

Within a couple of years, concerns about SARS were overshadowed by the emergence of the H1N1 virus, which originated in Mexico and the southern United States in April 2009, and then spread to more than 206 countries in less than seven months. As of November 2009, H1N1 — also called swine flu — had infected 526,060 people, killing at least 6,770.

Commenting on this worrisome trend, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant noted that we might be entering the age of pandemics. This certainly may be the case since more than 30 new diseases have emerged or expanded their geographic territories during the last three decades. Some, such as the drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and tuberculosis, pose significant global health risks.

The climate change connection

Scientists are beginning to piece together the causal links between ERIDs and global warming. The underlying factors, the routes and the pathways of disease transmission, however, are complicated with potentially long latency periods. Alongside climate change and environmental disturbances, the underlying factors include the changing demographics of communities and human behaviors (urbanization, migration, risky behaviors); increasing global trade and travel; changes in industrial and agricultural practices (including food production, processing and distribution); the breakdown of public health measures in many countries; the overuse of antibiotics; and the development of resistant or new strains of disease pathogens.

More recently, some diseases have re-emerged because of bioterrorism (as in the case of anthrax), conflicts in world regions and persistent inequities among populations. Human susceptibility to ERIDs has also increased due to the aging population (longer life expectancies) and the adverse and synergistic effects of HIV/AIDs and other autoimmune diseases.

The spatial variability of climate change, the regional differentiation of its impacts and the rapid and intense spread of emergent diseases all suggest the need for a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. Such a framework will require a deeper level of understanding of the biophysical changes that are occurring in these places, the demographic characteristics of those areas and the range of social, institutional, technological and behavioral adaptations that are — or, in some cases, are not — being put in place to alleviate these challenges.

Like the anticipated changes in climate, the potential for loss of life as a result of exposure to these hazards varies. Some places, particularly low-lying coastal areas and floodplains, urban heat islands and disease vector border regions, are more likely to bear the brunt of these hazards than others. Societal impact will also vary from place to place, with disparate risks among different populations depending on pre-existing disadvantages such as racial/ethnic disparities and income inequalities.

Within the United States, for example, Hurricane Katrina uncovered the deep divide by race and class in New Orleans. Our study of the hazardous exposures arising from this 2005 catastrophic meteorological event showed that the most vulnerable populations living in the maximum inundated areas were minorities and low-income populations. This study confirmed that the biophysical attributes, socio-demographic characteristics and the local context of communities are key drivers of vulnerability when evaluating the health impact of climate change.

A recent call for public health preparedness for global climate change published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine underscores the need to formally incorporate a place-based approach in developing health strategies for these environmental threats. A focus on place, the authors argue, would emphasize the local nature of both human exposures and responses to these hazards. A spatial perspective would bring attention to the local areas that would be most affected by these events. The geographically based approach will showcase the strengths of the local people, enabling the collective participation of local stakeholders in environmental health planning to promote sustainable and livable communities.

Why look to geographers for answers?

Geographers bring numerous tools to the table to work with public health professionals and policy makers. Geographers can offer a number of analytical approaches and technologies for disease surveillance and intervention, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, geostatistics and cartography.

One such example can be drawn from the landscape epidemiology approach, which relies on geospatial methodologies to delineate the geographic territories of transmissible diseases. Using this approach, the ecological niche of a transmissible disease can be delineated by overlaying the spatial distribution of the pathogenic agent with the distribution of the disease vectors and host populations. Within this distribution range, one can determine the biophysical and social conditions that favor the survival and transmission of the disease pathogen. This approach has been used to monitor vector-borne ERIDs such as the West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the United States.

Another example of geography in action can be seen in the fight against malaria, another ERID. The disease is now endemic in 109 countries, with nearly 3.3 billion people at risk, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, poverty, armed regional conflicts and the scourge of HIV/AIDS have all contributed to the persistence of this disease. These conditions, along with increasing globalization and international migration, have heightened concerns about its potential emergence or re-emergence in temperate regions. In the United States, for example, malaria is now the most commonly imported disease, with more than 1,000 cases reported each year. With the anticipated changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity, there’s a real possibility of re-emergence in the United States.

The use of geospatial models to predict malaria risk and transmission has been quite informative, with projected net increases in the global at-risk population to 8 billion by 2080. Though these models have been criticized for using coarse spatial resolutions and overly emphasizing temperature changes, the results provide a valuable starting point for countries to develop public health strategies. Along with the development of the predictive models, geographic fieldwork and site-specific activities have been beneficial in assessing the social, economic and behavioral factors that influence disease transmission, and the treatment or preventive practices used in high-risk communities.

One such study was recently undertaken in a low-income community in Sierra Leone, in which we assessed the prevalence, severity and duration of malaria episodes among 731 residents; their risk factors; knowledge, access and use of reliable treatment options; and the efficacy and benefits of alternative therapies. Chloroquine was still the most widely used therapy for malaria in this community despite the growing resistance of p falciparum parasites to this drug. The research findings provided a useful context for developing a health intervention program for the community. Educating residents about the environmental risk sources of malaria, in addition to promoting the use of bednets, homeopathic methods and artemisia-based therapies, offers hope for reducing the malaria burden in this community.

These efforts demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagements to develop and advance meaningful and sustainable approaches for dealing with environmental risks and health challenges that affect the livelihoods of residents in vulnerable communities.  As the threats from global climate change continue to emerge, the need for scientific networks that bolster such initiatives and collaborative partnerships across disciplines such as geography and public health becomes even greater.

About the author:

Florence M. Margai is associate professor in the Department of Geography at Binghamton University, where she teaches courses on geo-statistical techniques, environmental justice, environmental health hazards and disparities. Her current research projects include pediatric lead poisoning and hazardous health exposures in the United States, malaria burden and treatment approaches in Sierra Leone and food insecurity and childhood nutritional health outcomes in Burkina Faso. She is the author or co-author of three books and numerous journal articles and is working on a new manuscript titled “Environmental Health Hazards and Social Justice: Geographic Perspectives of Race and Class Disparities.”

For more research news from Binghamton University, visit Discover-e.

Taxidermy- a Dying Art.

 
Every natural history museum worth its stuffing used to have a whole crew of taxidermists working behind the scenes. And many of the animals now displayed in the National Museum of Natural History's spacious Hall of Mammals date from that era, many decades ago. Paul Rhymer, the Smithsonian's last taxidermist, points to a panda crouching in a glass case.  "That mount's probably 80 or 100 years old," he says.

Rhymer's job tends toward repairing such mounts, especially when they're hard to find or endangered species like this venerable panda, which had been nearly falling to pieces.

"The black hair had faded. The white hair had yellowed from dust and dirt from back in the day when you could smoke in the museum, so we literally took ... bleach and bleached the white hair," Rhymer says. He dyed the black hair, remounted the animal and fixed up the nose and claws.

 

Many of these exotic creatures are themselves historic, such as a hulking rhino donated by Theodore Roosevelt, Rhymer says. "Right after he left the White House, he and his son went on a massive collecting expedition in East Africa for a year and they collected thousands of animals," Rhymer says.

 

OK, "collecting" and stuffing animals may make some people squeamish. But Rhymer says taxidermists are nature lovers. Darwin had to learn taxidermy before he went on his ship the Beagle. It used to be how people learned about animals. Even in a time of Animal Planet and the National Geographic Channel, Rhymer says, there's still a place for mounted animals in museums.

 

 

The taxidermy team (left to right): Paul Rhymer, John Matthews, Ken Walker, Walter Sorrell, and Glenn Rankin. Photo by Carl Hansen 

 

"I think there's something about the real," he says. "TV and ... the Internet cannot substitute, and I think taxidermy gives you that 'It's this tangible thing in front of you.' "

Rhymer's father and grandfather were Smithsonian taxidermists. And they showed him tricks he says are a dying art in museums. His tiny backroom workspace is filled with gorilla death masks, fake beaks and eyeballs, and grim little tools like a whirring wire wheel he is using to strip the fat from the corpse of a pintail duck. He then rinses the skin and twists it over the sink like an old washcloth.

 

"People are always amazed you can do this to a bird skin," Rhymer says with a laugh.

 

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Rattlesnakes sound warning on biodiversity

Like the canary in a coal mine, the timber rattlesnake may be telling us something about the environment we share. Roads -- even small, low-traffic roads -- can fragment wildlife populations    genetically, reports a new Cornell study.

Such fragmentation can make populations less genetically diverse, which can make them more susceptible to illness or environmental changes that threaten their survival.

Cornell researchers -- using cutting-edge tools, including fine-scale molecular genetics and microsatellite markers -- tracked rattlesnakes in four regions of upstate New York to understand how wildlife habitats are affected by even modest human encroachment.

"We used this species as a model to investigate general processes underlying population-level responses to habitat fragmentation," said the authors, led by former Cornell postdoctoral researcher Rulon Clark, Ph.D. '04, now an assistant professor at San Diego State University, in the paper "Roads, Interrupted Dispersal and Genetic Diversity in Timber Rattlesnakes," available online and to be published in the August issue of Conservation Biology.

The researchers discovered that fragmentation of natural habitats by roads has had a significant effect over the past 80 years on genetic structure of timber rattlesnakes in New York. "Our study adds to a growing body of literature indicating that even anthropogenic habitat modifications that does not destroy a large amount of habitat can create significant barriers to gene flow," the researchers write in their  paper.

The new findings reinforce earlier work on other terrestrial animals -- from grizzly bears to frogs -- and provides a fresh warning about habitat fragmentation that all plans for future human development must consider.

The researchers used fine-scale molecular genetics as well as behavioral and ecological data to look at timber rattlesnakes from 19 different hibernacula -- shared wintering quarters -- in four regions in New York: the Adirondacks, Sterling Forest, Bear Mountain and Chemung County. In each case they used microsatellite markers to track how populations dispersed from their winter dens, their subsequent reproductive patterns and how roads in these areas altered that gene flow. The roads themselves -- all paved roadways built in the late 1920s to early 1930s for motorized traffic -- were examined for use and relationship to natural barriers. Tissue samples from more than 500 individual snakes were examined.

"Over all four regions and 19 hibernacula, none of the genetic clusters ... spanned either major or minor roads; hibernacula belonging to the same genetic deme (a local population of organisms of one species) were always on the same side of the road," the paper states. "This fine-scaled analysis, repeated over four geographic regions, underscores the significance of roads as barrier to dispersal and natural population processes for timber rattlesnakes and perhaps other species."

The research team also included Kelly Zamudio, Cornell ecology and evolutionary biology professor; William Brown of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and Randy Stechert, an environmental consultant for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the New York State Biodiversity Research Institute.

Scientists say Giant Lizard Is A New Species

 
Researchers have concluded that a giant, golden-spotted monitor lizard discovered in the forested mountains of the Philippines six years ago is a new species, according to a study released Wednesday.

The 6.5-foot-long lizard was first spotted in 2004 in the Sierra Madre mountains on the main island of Luzon when local researchers saw local Agta tribesmen carrying one of the dead reptiles.

But it took until last year to determine it was a new species. After capturing an adult, researchers from the University of Kansas and the National Museum of the Philippines obtained DNA samples that helped confirm the lizard was new to science.

The Northern Sierra Madre Forest Monitor Lizard or Varanus bitatawa feasts on fruits and snails rather than carcasses, unlike many monitors, including its larger relative, the Komodo dragon, according to American and Filipino researchers who wrote about the discovery in Wednesday's peer-reviewed Royal Society journal Biology Letters. It spends much of its time in the treetops and has unique claws that allow it to reach its favorite fruits.

"I knew as soon as I saw the animal that it was something special," Luke Welton, a graduate student at the University of Kansas and one of the co-authors of the study, said in a statement.

It is not that unusual to find a new species of tiny fish, frog or insect these days. But Welton and his colleagues said it was a "rare occurrence" to discover such a large vertebrate, particularly on an island hit by deforestation and nearby development. They compared their find to the 1993 discovery of the forest-dwelling Saola ox in Vietnam and a new monkey species discovered in the highlands of Tanzania in 2006.

"The discovery of such a large, charismatic, and strikingly distinct new species of vertebrate in the unexplored forests of the northern Philippines accentuates the degree to which the diversity of this global conservation hotspot is still poorly known," Mundita Lim, chief of the country's Department of Environment and Natural Resources Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau, said in a statement.

Eric R. Pianka, a lizard expert at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an e-mail interview that it was an "incredible find."

"This is truly a spectacular discovery," Pianka said. "Worldwide, there are about 60-plus species of monitor lizards. In all probability, some as yet undescribed species will be found on various islands in Indonesia," he said.

Read the rest of the article here.

Cornell expert: World has underestimated climate-change effects

from the Cornell Chronicle

The world's policymakers have underestimated the potential dangerous impacts that man-made climate change will have on society, said Charles H. Greene, Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences.

As one of the authors of "A Very Inconvenient Truth," published in the peer-reviewed journal Oceanography (March 2010), Greene said that he and his co-authors conclude that the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 4th assessment report underestimates the potential dangerous effects that man-made climate change will have on society.

"Even if all man-made greenhouse gas emissions were stopped tomorrow and carbon-dioxide levels stabilized at today's concentration, by the end of this century the global average temperature would increase by about 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 2.4 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, which is significantly above the level which scientists and policymakers agree is a threshold for dangerous climate change," Greene said.

"Of course, greenhouse gas emissions will not stop tomorrow, so the actual temperature increase will likely be significantly larger, resulting in potentially catastrophic impacts to society unless other steps are taken to reduce the Earth's temperature.

"Furthermore, while the oceans have slowed the amount of warming we would otherwise have seen for the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean's thermal inertia will also slow the cooling we experience once we finally reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This means that the temperature rise we see this century will be largely irreversible for the next thousand years.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone is unlikely to mitigate the risks of dangerous climate change. Society should significantly expand research into geoengineering solutions that remove and sequester greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Geoengineering solutions must be in addition to, not replace, dramatic emission reductions if society is to avoid the most dangerous impacts from climate change."

Greene's co-authors are D. James Baker of the William J. Clinton Foundation and Daniel H. Miller of the Roda Group, Berkeley, Calif.