To celebrate friends who share Jesse’s interest in growing fruit, Jesse penned the poem “It was fruit” about growing fruits and berries on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Paul Kedrosky and Sam Arbesman of venture capital firm Lux posted a podcast in their Intersections series of an interview with Jesse Ausubel about energy and resources, transportation and food.
Hard copy version of our paper applying concepts of rarity in biology to rarity in geology published: American Mineralogist, June 2016; 101 (6) Invited Centennial Article
On the nature and significance of rarity in mineralogy
Robert M. Hazen, Jesse H. Ausubel
American Mineralogist, v. 101, i. 6, p. 1245-1251, Published on June 2016, First Published on June 02, 2016, doi:10.2138/am-2016-5601CCBY
Biological Sampling in the Deep Sea edited by Malcolm Clark, Mireille Consalvey, and Ashley Rowden presents a large fraction of what we know about this subject in 19 chapters and 472 pages. Published in April 2016 by Wiley-Blackwell (ISBN-10: 0470656743), the book emerged from the dozens of field projects in the deep sea organized under the flag of the Census of Marine Life. The editors led the seamounts project of the Census and for this book attracted experts also on abyssal plains, vent & seep communities, and the continental margins and all the challenges involved.
Initial chapters cover habitats and fauna, survey and sampling design, and mapping. The heart of the book describes and analyses a panoply of approaches spanning trawls, longlines, epibenthic sledges, corers and grabs, landers (including baited cameras and traps), towed cameras, submersibles and remotely operated vehicles, and even seafloor observatories. Later chapters address sorting, recording, preservation and storage, information management strategies, and data analysis. Concluding chapters ponder application of studies to governance and management and the future of biological sampling in the deep sea. The 50+ authors are a who’s who of deep sea biology and technology.
The book, carefully edited and attractively produced, is the first comprehensive compilation of deep sea sampling methods for the full range of habitats. It is hard to imagine writing a sound and successful research proposal in deep sea biology without making use of its breadth and depth. All the authors and especially the editors and their host institution, New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), merit thanks for a volume that advances our chances to excel individually and collectively. Jesse Ausubel wrote the Foreword for the volume.
Team members of the project “Using New Anthropological and Biological Tools to Learn about Leonardo da Vinci” with seed money from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation met 2-3 May in Florence, Italy, and have issued a press release about the publication of a set of papers from the project in Human Evolution. Jesse Ausubel mediated the opening seminar on 2 May sponsored by Eugenio Giani, President of the Regional Council of Tuscany. Jesse’s introductory essay is here. The press release earned wide attention, for example,
BBC radio:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03tb7ht
Gizmodo, USA
The Brilliantly Insane Plan to Reconstruct Leonardo da Vinci’s Genome
https://gizmodo.com/the-brilliantly-insane-plan-to-reconstruct-leonardo-da-1774873148
Daily Telegraph, UK
Leonardo da Vinci paintings analysed for DNA to solve grave mystery
La Repubblica –
Agencia EFE, Spain (Spanish)
INVESTIGADORES QUIEREN EL ADN DE LEONARDO DA VINCI PARA RECONSTRUIR AL GENIO (RESEARCHERS WANT THE DNA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI TO REBUILD THE GENIUS)
In May 2005, under auspices of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), David Schindel organized a meeting in London of a Database Working Group that addressed access to biodiversity literature. Their discussions led directly to establishment of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of libraries of natural history museums, under the leadership of Thomas Garnett (Smithsonian, Washington DC) and Graham Higley (Museum of Natural History, London) and to a request for funds, which the Richard Lounsbery Foundation supported 25 April 2006. Jesse Ausubel encouraged the development at each stage. April 11th kicks-off the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s 10th anniversary celebration, “BHL at 10: Celebrating Ten Years of Inspiring Discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.” BHL now offers about 50 million pages. Congratulations to all, and enjoy.
We are pleased to read that North Carolina-based company NET Power Breaks Ground on Demonstration Plant for World’s First Emissions-Free, Low-Cost Fossil Fuel Power Technology. The NET Power technology, which uses carbon dioxide as a working fluid to drive a combustion turbine, is precisely what we proposed in our work on Zero Emission Power Plants during the 1990s with Cesare Marchetti, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Eugen Yantovski, and colleagues at Tokyo Electric Power. See, for example, the sections on ZEPPs in Five worthy ways to spend large amounts of money for research on environment and resources (The Bridge 29(3): 4-16, 1999) and JH Ausubel Big green energy machines (The Industrial Physicist 10(5): 20-24, 2004). We wish for the success of NET Power and also Clean Energy Systems, another firm with promising ZEPP technology.
The Energy Xchange, an independent producer of podcasts, recorded a 1-hour conversation on energy of
Scott W. Tinker – director, Bureau of Economic Geology,University of Texas at Austin;
Steven E. Koonin– former undersecretary for science, U.S. Department of Energy
Jesse H. Ausubel – director, Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University;
Podcast and transcript are here. Faster to browse the text than listen.
Glasgow University will host a lecture by Jesse Ausubel Monday 17 April on The Nature of the City as part of a workshop, “Future cities: Do cities have limits?”
Here is the lecture on YouTube: