Program for the Human Environment

We post Jesse’s keynote talk, “On the Difficulty of Seeing What is Near”, delivered to the 2006 Kobe , Japan , conference of the Census of Marine Life on life in the near-shore marine environment

Our Census of Marine Life colleagues exploring Australia ’s reefs have discovered hundreds of undescribed corals and other species, including a little animal that eats the tongues of fish. Browse at the bottom the Image Gallery, view Video and read the full Press Release.

An engaging and amusingly illustrated update on DNA Barcoding by Mark Stoeckle and Paul Hebert appears in the October 2008 issue of Scientific American, on newsstands and web today, with the story highlighted on the cover and top of web page.

Barcode of Life: DNA Tags Help Classify Animals [SciAm]
PDF version

The cool web app Wordle creates interesting word cloud summaries of papers, blogs. etc.  Here are some summaries of PHE papers:

• Live Like America (original paper)
• St. Hubert (original paper)
• Logistic Primer (original paper)
• Death (original paper)
• Poppies (original paper)
• Elektron (original paper)
• Working Less (original paper)
• Does Climate Still Matter? (original paper)
• Chernobyl (original paper)
• APPEA (original paper)

Sushigate continues! The discovery of inaccurately labeled fish by Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss (see 22 August 2008 What’s New entry) evoked a NY Times sequel story where chefs claimed supreme expertise, but then today Edward Dolnick countered with a wise Op-Ed “Fish or Foul” about the judgment of experts.