News

A lively new ocean news site, Terramar’s Daily Catch, reports on a recent paper about biomass and diversity from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge team of the Census of Marine Life.

 

IT World and Boingboing run stories about progress of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).
Encyclopedia of Life: Better than Wikipedia!
What leeches and ligers can teach you about evolution

The intention to create the EOL was publicly announced 8-9 May 2007 with a great video by Avenue A Razorfish, a press release, and remarks by MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton.  Jesse Ausubel served as the founding chairman of the board and James Edwards as executive director.  The EOL site was launched 27 February 2008 with content on 30,000 species.  As of today EOL has over 1.3 million pages.

 

 

Sex hormones make empires, as reported in the color booklet of Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires by Cesare Marchetti and Jesse Ausubel adapted from the 2012 article of the same name in International Journal of Anthropology. The color booklet has added text and much richer illustration. Thanks to editor Dale Langford and Prof. Brunetto Chiarelli of the International Institute for Humankind Studies.

John LaCava’s Sounds of Science project continues making good music mixing traditional instruments with laboratory instruments and machines. New coverage of the project is in the lower part of this article.

Alan Curry began working with PHE as a consultant in the spring of 2012 on trends in technologies and their implications as well as the limits to predictability. We are pleased that Alan is now a Herlands Fellow and research specialist and full member of The Rockefeller University community.

A book from the History of Marine Animal Populations project of the Census of Marine Life program has earned a top history prize.  The Bancroft Prize is “generally considered to be among the most prestigious awards in the field of American history writing.”    Winners are a Who’s Who of American Historians — Samuel Eliot Morison, C Vann Woodward, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, George Kennan, Daniel Boorstin, Bernard Bailyn, Robert Fogel, Alfred Chandler, Edmund Morgan, Drew Gilpin Faust.  Amazingly, Jeff Bolster’s about the North Atlantic, The Mortal Sea, is one of the two winners for 2013!

Congratulations, Jeff.

Review in Times Literary Supplement 20 March 2013

 

Bravo to David Schindel and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life for spurring further application of DNA barcoding to reduce trade in endangered species with an initiative in Nigeria.

Todd “Ike” Kiefer has published a shorter version of his landmark 86-page monograph on biofuels.  The new article appears in Strategic Studies Quarterly  7(1), 2013

Energy Insecurity: The False Promise of Liquid Biofuels
CAPT T. A. “Ike” Kiefer, USN
The United States cannot achieve energy security through biofuels, and even the attempt is ironically achieving effects contrary to “clean” and “green” environmental goals and actively threatening global security.

Valuable papers continue to stream from the Census of Marine Life. We note:

Liu JY (2013) Status of Marine Biodiversity of the China Seas. PLoS ONE 8(1): e50719. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050719
and
Narayanaswamy BE, Coll M, Danovaro R, Davidson K, Ojaveer H, et al. (2013) Synthesis of Knowledge on Marine Biodiversity in European Seas: From Census to Sustainable Management. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58909. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058909

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 major discoveries.

The DCO is a 10-year global quest to discover the quantity, movements, origins, and forms of Earth’s deep carbon; to probe the secrets of volcanoes and diamonds, sources of gas and oil, and life’s deep limits and origins; and to report the known, unknown, and unknowable by 2019.

Conducting field studies, laboratory experiments, and simulations, the DCO aims to advance significantly, and perhaps change fundamentally, our understanding of carbon and the role it plays in our lives.  The DCO aims to create legacies of instruments measuring at great depths, temperatures, and pressures; networks sensing fluxes of carbon-containing gases and fluids between the depths and the surface; open access databases about deep carbon; deep carbon researchers integrating geology, physics, chemistry, and biology; insights improving energy systems; and a public more engaged with deep carbon science.