The Census of Marine Life (CoML) has partnered with the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) to produce a pair of videos, a press release, and a website about improving ocean observing for the GEO Ministerial Summit that will take place this week, 28-29 November 2007 in Cape Town. The POGO video (covering all aspects of ocean observing) and the CoML video (focusing on biological observing) are available in both high and low resolution on the POGO site for the Cape Town Summit. We hope these outreach activities will help create a durable legacy of CoML and its cousin experimental observing programs. We are heartened that Reuters has distributed a news story. Australian Radio did a short interview with Jesse about ocean observing.

Our long-standing interest in science and diplomacy bears fruit in the growing use of Asi Burak’s interactive video game Peacemaker, supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. The Peres Center for Peace is distributing 100,000 free copies of the game to people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, Carnegie-Mellon faculty are using Peacemaker in a social science experiment about behavioral aspects of conflict resolution.

National Geographic’s weekly tv show Wild Chronicles featured the Census of Marine Life, including a few comments from Jesse.

We welcome our new Research Assistant Veselin Kostov!

We post “Future Knowledge of Life in Oceans Past”, the published version of Jesse’s opening speech to the October 2005 Census of Marine Life conference on Oceans Past (see What’s New 25 October 2005). Congratulations to David Starkey, Poul Holm, and Michaela Barnard and the History of Marine Animal Populations community on completing the book (Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, D. J. Starkey, P. Holm, and M. Barnard, eds., Earthscan, London and Sterling VA, 2008).

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Conference Center hosted the pair of meetings in 2003 that gave birth to the DNA barcoding movement. Jesse opened the “Banbury III” meeting 28 October 2007 on “Using Barcode Data in Studies of Molecular and Evolutionary Dynamics” with a talk on “Telescopes, Microscopes, Macroscopes and DNA Barcodes.”