In Defense of Difference

Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.

from SEED magazine
by Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog's legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

All these seemingly disconnected events are the symptoms, you could say, of a global epidemic of sameness.

link

A Fast, Programmable Molecular Clock

"UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast, and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source, or other environmental conditions change."

Technology Review 10/29/08
Link

BudBurst

Citizen science to study climate change

from Boing Boing:
POSTED BY DAVID PESCOVITZ, MARCH 11, 2008

Project BudBurst looks like an interesting citizen science project to engage the public as researchers on climate change. Participants volunteer to look out for first bud bursts, first leafing, first flower, and seed or fruit dispersal in their area. Those are all phenological events, meaning biological phenomena that are sensitive to climate variations. From Project BudBurst:
Phenology is the study of the timing of life cycle events in plants and animals. In other words, studying the environment to figure out how animals know when it is time to hibernate, and what ‘calendar’ or ‘clock’ plants use to begin flowering, leafing or reproducing.

Phenology is literally “the science of appearance.” Scientists who study phenology – phenologists -- are interested in the timing of specific biological events (such as flowering, migration, and reproduction) in relation to changes in season and climate. Seasonal and climatic changes are some of the non-living or abiotic components of the environment that impact the living or biotic components. Seasonal changes can include variations in day length, temperature, and rain or snowfall. In short, phenologists attempt to learn more about the abiotic factors that plants and animals respond to...

Phenological observations have been used for centuries by farmers to maximize crop production, nature-lovers to anticipate optimal wildflower viewing conditions, and by almost all of us to prepare for seasonal allergies. Today, this well established science is also used by scientists to track the effect of global warming and climate change on organisms and to make predictions about the future health of the environment. By tracking changes in the timing of these phenological events, scientists are able to better understand how our environment is changing.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

link:

Augmented Ecologies , A Kinesthetic User Experience

Guido Maciocci
feature on Archinect



The integration of biological and technological systems in the design of an interactive human interface is explored through an installation where plants rigged up with sensors provide a kinesthetic user experience based on movement, touch, sound and light. Human interaction with the system affects an algorithmic projection and soundscape.

//Augmented Ecologies
BIOLOGICAL + TECHNOLOGICAL

The project explores the integration of biological and technological systems in the development of an interactive human interface. This notion is investigated through the design and construction of an interactive installation where user interactions with hybrid systems affect the light and sound-scape of the installation space. The design is suggestive of an information rich, technologically augmented landscape. Kinesthetic user/landscape relationships are forged within a mediated spatiality of light and sound.

link

EMOTIONAL RESCUE

If we're serious about building a society that makes scientifically informed decisions, then science needs to figure out a way to get its message across effectively.

SEED Magazine by Chris Mooney • Posted May 29, 2007 04:34 PM

EMOTIONAL RESCUEClimate change is being called the "perfect moral storm," and scientists may need to throw the public a lifeline.

Finally, at long last, it has happened. As the planet continues to warm, active global warming skepticism has most decidedly become uncool.

The signs were unmistakable in early February, following the release of the policymakers' summary of the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The document bluntly stated that the warming of the climate system is "unequivocal," with a nine in 10 chance that humans are causing it. A few scattered attacks on this conclusion emerged from the usual quarters—right-wing think tanks, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, congressional crackpots like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—but they were few and far between. There was nothing remotely resembling the barrage of volleys that followed the 1995 and 2001 IPCC report rollouts.

Instead, as newly empowered Democrats pledged to make carbon-emission caps a top priority, the Bush administration tried to erase its own previous stance of global warming skepticism. Two White House officials misquoted the president himself in order to suggest Bush had always acknowledged that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing global warming. It was a lie, but one that told a deep truth about how the climate issue has evolved over the past several years.

Those concerned about preserving the planet should find these latest developments heartening. In the long run, apparently, reality does indeed prevail. Eventually—and just as with Big Tobacco's campaign to question the health risks of smoking—the active denialists and strategic doubt-generators can be driven into obscurity, if not into outright retreat. Eventually.

That's the good news.

But as I attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco in February and listened to the climate-related discussions going on there in the wake of the IPCC report, I heard a less heartening theme being sounded as well. Despite ever-increasing scientific certainty, global warming remains a relatively low priority for the US public: Most Americans worry far more about issues like crime, taxes, war, education, and health care. And while the doubt-creation industry has gone into recession (at least for this issue), an insidious partisan divide still persists on climate change. A recent Pew survey revealed that over 50 percent more college-educated Democrats than Republicans accept that humans are to blame for rising temperatures. Without both acceptance and concern on the part of the public, politics won't move fast enough either. With each day that we fail to cut emissions, we're passing the buck to future generations. Yet we delay, delay, delay.

Ethicist Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington-Seattle is one of many thinkers who've looked closely at the disconnect between the hard evidence of human-caused global warming and our failure to deal with the problem. He calls climate change a "perfect moral storm" because it uniquely tests our capacity to do the right thing (cut emissions). That climate change is global means we need coordination across societies that have vastly different values, priorities, and technological capabilities. That the most severe impacts won't be felt immediately means we have to sacrifice today to protect generations yet to come. And that there is still considerable uncertainty about future consequences means we can debate endlessly about how bad things are going to get. It's no surprise, then, that decades have passed without a coordinated global response that's adequate to the problem at hand.

But admitting and recognizing all of these hurdles doesn't let anyone off the hook. In fact, I've grown increasingly convinced that scientists and science defenders must realize that they are also responsible, to a significant extent, for failing to communicate the nature of this "perfect problem" to the rest of the public in a way that truly mobilizes action.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/05/emotional_rescue.php