Program for the Human Environment

During the winter-spring of 2017, Mande Holford, Rod Nichols, and Jesse Ausubel  organized a seminar series for the 5th year in a row on Science & Diplomacy.   Participants May Dobosiewicz and Kimberly Siletti have posted a short essay about the series titled The Many Faces of Science Diplomacy.

The behavior of a dynamic system, be it biological or socio-technical, frequently resembles a series of logistic wavelets, or “loglets.” Loglet analysis involves the decomposition of growth and diffusion patterns into S-shaped logistic components.  In the easiest cases, a loglet appears as a single S-shaped curve.  LogletLab is designed for use with user data to help users analyze and decompose growth processes.

LogletLab software has gone through several development cycles since the initial release of LogletLab 1 in 1998 straight through to the recent release of LogletLab 4.1, an online tool with extensive statistical analysis capabilities built in.  The most recent edition of LogletLab 4.1 offer users numerous new features including an extended selection of fitting functions and advanced statistical analysis.

All versions of LogletLab are available free of charge.

Click here to access LogletLab 4

Here is an example, the space shuttle launch history.

http://ll4.ddns.net:8000/?page=index&preload=library.get.288

Thanks to David Burg, Eyal Schachter, Perrin Meyer, Jason Yung, Iddo Wernick, and Alan Curry.

Way back in 2007-2009, inspired by the late Tommy Gold, Jesse Ausubel joined Robert Hazen and Russell Hemley in launching the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO).  The program is now at a peak of activity, as well reported in the DCO’s August newsletter From the Deep.

We offer below some prior posts about deep carbon.

7 December 2016

The Deep Carbon Observatory, which Jesse Ausubel has helped create and manage, offers some new short, enjoyable videos about its work.  For example, Deep life Volcano prediction…

8 October 2016

Deep Carbon Observatory researchers have created an eye-popping animation that shows volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and associated emissions since 1960…and reveals the seamy structure of the Earth.  See the press release about Exhaling Earth and the 70-second E3 animation..

9 September 2016

Deep Carbon Observatory researchers set off on quest to find the top temperature limit for life.  Jesse, who helps manage the program for the Sloan Foundation, will join the shore-based team for a few days in early October.  You can enter your own guess for the limit and win a prize!

2 November 2015

Jesse offered the closing remarks in Italian at the 9 October symposium of the Deep Carbon Observatory at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.  An English translation is also included at the link.

15 December 2014

Deep carbon science is rising.  A Press release highlights publication of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s midterm scientific report and participation at the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting, 15-19 December 2014 in San Francisco, USA.  Jesse Ausubel continues to advise the program and marvel at the abundance of methane and hydrogen.

10 December 2013

The Deep Carbon Observatory announced exciting discoveries about hard rock life and production of hydrogen to feed the life by cooking water, rock, and aluminum oxide together.

5 June 2013

Yikes, we realize we never posted the 4 March news of the release of the baseline report of the Deep Carbon Observatory. The Press Release, which Jesse helped draft with Terry Collins, provides an excellent summary of the DCO program. The baseline is the landmark, freely available (open access) volume Carbon in Earth and its […]

19 March 2013

In 2008, with Robert Hazen and Russell Hemley of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Jesse helped initiate the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The DCO recently passed a major milestone with the publication of its 700-page baseline report, Carbon in Earth. A press release summarizes some of the […]

16 May 2011

The newsletter Oilprice.com takes an interest in the Deep Carbon Observatory and abiogenic methane in a good article,The Search for Deep Oil and Gas, by Brian Westenhaus. Deep Carbon Interest in the Oil and Gas sector

23 December 2009

The new international Deep Carbon Observatory http://dco.ciw.edu/ led by Robert Hazen and Russ Hemley has launched its website.  Jesse and Veselin Kostov have helped initiate the DCO and look forward to many discoveries. Enjoy Bob Hazen’s excellent radio interview on Science Friday.

11 February 2008

Where did petroleum come from? How did it form? When? These are the first few questions the great scientist Dmitri Mendeleev asked in the chapter “On the origins of petroleum” in his book “Petroleum industry in Pennsylvania and Caucasus“. The year was 1877, 120 years after Mikhail Lomonosov pronounced that oil is a fossil fuel. […]

15 November 2006

Under PHE auspices, Evgeny Yantovski, one of the originators of the concept of Zero Emission Power Plants, has written a startlingly imaginative tribute to the late Tommy Gold, “Thomas Gold and the Future of Methane as a Fuel,” in which Evgeny presents Fayalite as a fuel, with methane being the energy carrier. Viewed in this […]

23 September 2004

Our endlessly creative and provocative Cornell colleague Thomas Gold passed away on 22 June at age 84. Tommy pioneered thinking about abiogenic methane and the deep hot biosphere. He opened our eyes in the late 1970s to the possibility that the popular beliefs about the origins of “fossil fuels”, and their abundance and distribution, might […]

An article about the Hyperloop magnetically levitated train in the 10 August 2017 New York Times quotes Jesse Ausubel:

Why Even the Hyperloop Probably Wouldn’t Change Your Commute Time  

Humans have historically tended to travel about half an hour to work, regardless of how fast the mode of transportation.

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We first studied maglevs during the 1980s as part of a National Academy of Engineering project on cities and infratructures.  Not enough has changed.

R Herman, JH Ausubel. Cities and their vital systems: Synthesis and perspectives  Pp 1-21 in Cities and their vital systems: Infrastructure, Past, Present, and Future, National Academy, Washington, DC1988

More recent essays in this domain are:

The Nature of the City 2016

Cars and Civilization 2014

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Italy’s Corriere della Sera also runs a new story :Ecco perché auto senza pilota e treni iperveloci non ci faranno …   Corriere della Sera–Aug 15, 2017

PHE researcher Iddo Wernick co-authored a recent article, Comparative LCA of concrete with natural and recycled coarse aggregate in the New York City area, published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. Congratulations to the main co-authors, professors Ardavan Yazdanbakhsh and Larry Bank and student Thomas Baez, in the Department of Civil Engineering at City College of New York.

We post the polished text of Jesse Ausubel’s 2016 lecture on The Nature of the City.

For more information see What’s New entries from 19 December 2016

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/news/blog/2016/12/19/glasgow-talk/

and 4 March 2016

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/news/blog/2016/03/04/glasgow-cities-lecture/.

Thanks again to Prof. Colin McInnes of the University of Glasgow.

Shown here are PHE members Jesse, Doris, Mark and Alan during a tour of the new addition to the Rockefeller University campus, the River Campus.  Thanks to Alex Kogan, Rockefeller University’s Associate VP of Facilities.

We post Jesse Ausubel’s centennial address to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).  The address, Density: Key to Fake and True News about Energy and Environment, will appear in the AAPG’s Search and Discovery, as contribution #70272 (2017).

June 27, 2017 6pm

put on your calendar!

West Tisbury Library

Naked DNA in My Water

. . . including Tisbury Great Pond and Look Pond

by Jesse H. Ausubel

p.s.

The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette ran a good article about Jesse’s talk:

As did the Martha’s Vineyard Times:  https://www.mvtimes.com/2017/08/02/fishing-for-dna/

Naked DNA in Seawater was the subject of Jesse Ausubel’s 17 May evening at the Lower East Side Girls Club for the BioBus.  For some photos and a link to his 30-minute talk visit here.