Blog

The 23 February 2015 New Yorker magazine features the acoustic company of our long-time research associate, Perrin Meyer, in a fascinating article about controlling sonic microenvironments, such as individual tables in restaurants, in Wizards of Sound.

Working with colleagues at National Taiwan University, PHE researcher Iddo Wernick coauthored a paper, published in the journal Sustainability, on environmental evaluation of supply chains.  The full citation is:

Ching-Ching Liu , Yue-Hwa Yu , Iddo K. Wernick, and Ching-Yuan Chang, 2015, Using the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct to Evaluate Green Supply Chain Management: An Empirical Study of Taiwan’s Computer Industry, Sustainability 2015, 7(3), 2787-2803; doi:10.3390/su7032787

In a 2011 lecture at Iowa State University, Prof. Thomas Sinclair (North Carolina State) concluded from models and projections of yields of maize that maximum US corn yields would be in the neighborhood of 254 bushels per acre, that is, 16 metric tons per hectare.

Between 2009 and 2012 the national average corn yield has been 123 to 165 bushels per acre, about half Sinclair’s maximum of 254. Because Sinclair was speaking of maximum and the US Department of Agriculture reported actual yields for the vast US crop, the excess of Sinclair’s maximum over an actual average is not surprising and shows the opportunity for agronomist scientists is considerable.

Fortunately other reports, these of actual experience, show an even greater opportunity than that between Sinclair’s projected maximum and averages over the entire USA.

For 50 years the National Corn Growers Association has conducted a national contest, and in 2014 the NCGA reported seven participants beat 400 bushels per acre. One participant, Randy Dowdy of Valdosta, Georgia produced 503.

Thus, actual yields of corn show that farmers and suppliers have plenty of room to raise the US average yield from about 150 bushels per acre toward a maximum of 503.

And that performance that professors conclude impossible in theory can happen in practice.

PHE’s Iddo Wernick was named a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute for his work on the decoupling of resource use from the environment.  This continues our connection with the Institute, as PHE was recognized last year with the award of the Breakthrough Paradigm Prize to Jesse for his work on harnessing technology to lighten the human footprint.

Back in 2003, PHE’s Mark Stoeckle and Jesse Ausubel organized a pair of meetings at the Banbury Center  with Paul Hebert, Norton Zinder and others on Taxonomy, DNA, and the Barcode of Life supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Mark led the writing of a December 2003 meeting report that envisioned “a world in which any  person anywhere anytime can identify any species at little or not cost.  That world is technologically upon us. This report addresses the formative stages of an initiative to bring this to society sooner rather than later.”  In a breakthrough application of DNA barcoding, reported 3 February in the NY Times, “New York Attorney General Targets Supplements at Major Retailers.”

New York’s lead owes much to the work of George Amato at the American Museum of Natural History, Damon Little at the New York Botanical Garden, and Mark here at Rockefeller.  Mark, Damon, and Selena Ahmed together with three terrific NY high school students pioneered use of barcoding for analysis of botanical products in their paper:

MY Stoeckle, CC Gamble, R Kirpekar, G Young, S Ahmed & Damon P. Little. Commercial Teas Highlight Plant DNA Barcode Identification Successes and Obstacles. Nature Scientific Reports 1:42 2011

Co-authors of the new widely reported PNAS paper “Sulfur-cycling fossil bacteria from the 1.8-Ga Duck Creek Formation provide promising evidence of evolution’s null hypothesis” include our close Chilean collaborators, Victor Gallardo and Carola Espinoza, via their work in the International Census of Marine Microbes of the Census of Marine Life.  Bravo to all for a great discovery about evolutionary stasis.