News

Want a special Valentine? Forget diamonds, get Sardinian Ichnusaite.  The magazine American Mineralogist has published “On the nature and significance of rarity in mineralogy” by Robert Hazen and Jesse Ausubel.

People enjoy the news – covered in at least 51 countries and 19 languages.

BBC
Earth’s rarest minerals catalogued
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35569659

DPA / APA (newswires, Germany, Austria)
Weniger als ein Würfel Zucker: Manche Mineralien sind extrem selten
(Less than a sugar cube: Some minerals are extremely rare)

Die Welt, Germany
Vergessen Sie Diamanten! Verschenken Sie Edelsteine!
(Forget diamonds! Offer gems!)

Reuters
For Valentine’s Day gift, forget diamonds: try ichnusaite

New Scientist, UK
Earth’s rarest minerals could hint at life on other planets

Europa Press (Spain)
MÁS DIFÍCILES DE ENCONTRAR QUE LOS DIAMANTES Se contabilizan más de 2.500 minerales raros en la Tierra
(HARDER TO FIND THAN DIAMONDS more than 2,500 rare minerals are recorded on Earth)

Agencia EFE (Spain)
Los 2.550 minerales raros de la Tierra hacen único al planeta azul
(2,550 rare earth minerals make the blue planet unique )

ANSA Italia Anelli davvero unici? Dimentica i diamanti meglio un ichnusaite sardo  https://www.ansa.it/lifestyle/notizie/lusso/accessori/2016/02/10/anelli-davvero-unici-dimentica-i-diamanti-meglio-un-ichnusaite-sardo_5eec0492-7c5c-4928-88b4-81d4cc3e6504.html

Russian news https://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=2720495

Rare cobalt minerals (species burgessite, cobaltkortingite, cobaltomenite, pakhomovskyite, and theresemagnanite) are all pink or red.  Cobaltomenite is known from 4 localities: Argentina (the type locality), Congo, Bolivia, and Utah. Cobaltmenite samples from the Emery County, Utah locality:

1) https://bit.ly/1O8mtjR
2) https://bit.ly/20SjsRj

Photos: https://rruff.info/

For Galatee’s new film, The Seasons, for which Jesse Ausubel served as a science advisor, great 30-second Japanese teaser:
https://youtu.be/pRHfSgdCXMs

And a 1 minute 42 second teaser:

And one that shows some of the film’s techniques:

https://www.facebook.com/LesSaisons.lefilm/videos/1132390206780130/

One of our colleagues took his drone for this aerial tour of The Rockefeller University campus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TP1Hqy9Tb4

Exciting preliminary results from our NYC/NJ Aquatic Environmental DNA (eDNA) project are posted on our updated webpage https://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/blog/nycnj-aquatic-vertebrate-edna-project/ The project aims to detect fish and other aquatic vertebrates by analyzing the traces of DNA they leave behind in the water. So far we have analyzed about a dozen water samples and successfully detected eDNA of 8 freshwater and 10 marine fish species, as well as a variety of birds and mammals. This project is part of a joint initiative in oceans research with Monmouth University.

A 2-minute trailer for the new Jacques Perrin/Galatee film, The Seasons, shares great footage from the film, which opens 27 January in France, and soon after elsewhere.  Jesse has served as an advisor to Galatee.  The French narration explains that the film spans the end of the Ice Age to the present day, showing how the birth of the seasons, and then the emergence of humans, led to the natural world as we know it.  Filmed over a four-year period in the national parks and animal reserves of Poland, Romania, Norway, Holland, Scotland, and France at a budget approaching $40 million, the film makes use of cutting-edge technology like flying drones and high-speed scooters to allow viewers to share the experience of bison, reindeer, wolves, bison, owls, and other animals.

 

During the 1992 election, Josh Lederberg and Jesse Ausubel authored an editorial for The Scientist magazine about

Science And The Presidency: 1993

“Each four-year presidential election cycle frames an era of United States politics, including science in high politics. The greenhouse effect, the Valdez oil spill, and biodiversity; AIDS, tuberculosis, and other emerging diseases; fetal tissue research, genome mapping, DNA patents, and DNA fingerprinting; chemical weapons and unemployed Soviet bomb scientists; the space station and the supercollider: The past term has been a busy one for science in the White House. The next term will be …”

The article lists Josh as the only author at the top but the credits at the bottom correctly show the co-authorship. It is fun to reflect on the changes in the list of issues above, and how high policy did or did not affect them.

Honorary Fellowship, awarded by the American Geographical Society (AGS), will be bestowed on Jesse Ausubel on the 20^thof November during the AGS Fall Symposium, Geography 2050: Exploring our Future in an Urbanized World, to be held at Columbia University.  Here is the press release.