Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

News

2010s verbal Time Machine

Jesse evokes the decade just ended with a verbal time machine.

2010s Time Machine

Yowza!

The kombucha cheeseball airballed flyover states.

A flashmob of microbiomes pinged frenemies with fake news about emojis.

Bestie truthers in gender dysphoria friended crunchy snowflakes with selfies.

Muggles on staycation clickbaited eco grief with chai latte before Brexit.

Digerati on hoverboards vaped Bibimbop while cloud computing their carbon credits.

Locavore hashtags unfriended ringtones.

Bling ransomware exfoliated the deep state over net neutrality.

Sriracha fitbits f-bombed safe spaces with froyo in go-cups.

Uber & Lyft doxx’d bougie Anthropocene woo-woo.

The worstest guac onboarded vegan qubits.

Buzzy connectomes face-palmed oppo memes.

Unplugged vulture capitalists binge-watched paywalls.

Micro-aggressions woke the Alt-right in airplane mode.

Anti-vax traumatology misgendered #MeToo.

Sounds like a plan.  OMG LOL fuhgeddaboudit.

Jesse H. Ausubel 8 May 2020

PHE during COVID-19: IQOE, COVID game, deep carbon science

We all continue healthy and working long hours and hard, though mostly from our homes. We are catching up on lots of writing and editing but also trying to seize immediate, unique opportunities.

For example, COVID-19 may have created the reduction of additions of human noise that we dreamed about for the International Quiet Ocean Experiment. IQOE welcomes ideas about how the present quieting of the world economy may advance research in marine sound.  High-quality observations of the ocean soundscape, as well as possibly related behavior of marine life during this period, may offer unique opportunities of exceptional value.

Resuming our interest in Serious Games, we are also please to encourage a team at the Indian Institute of Technology in Tirupati that is developing SurviveCovid-19 — A Game for Improving Awareness of Social Distancing and Health Measures for Covid-19 Pandemic

Jesse has also written a foreword for Simon Mitton’s forthcoming history of deep carbon science, From Crust to Core, to be published by Cambridge U. Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/from-crust-to-core/E0E2E8FC30B4C784B0FB268AC4AA8371

New genus and species of Bryozoan named for Jesse Ausubel

Dating back to the Ordovician period about 450 million years ago, Bryozoa are small aquatic invertebrates with exoskeletons that typically sieve food particles out of the water with a crown of tentacles.  The individual zooids live in colonies forming fans, bushes, and sheets.  

Haeckel Bryozoa.jpg
“Bryozoa”, from Ernst Haeckel‘s Kunstformen der Natur, 1904

Dennis P. Gordon, distinguished taxonomist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, has described “New Hippothoidae (Bryozoa) from Australasia” in the journal Zootaxa. 

Dennis and Jesse Ausubel worked together in the Census of Marine Life 2000-2010.  Dennis has named a new genus of Hippothoidae Bryozoans the Jessethoa and the first species Jessethoa ausubeli.

Jessethoa ausubeli, ovicellate zooid, scalebar: 0.1 millimeter, photographed with scanning electron microscope; collected about 60 m deep NE of Spirits Bay, North Island, New Zealand

This brings the total of described hippothoid genera to nine (plus two fossil) and species to 83 recent (plus 15 fossil).

The Jessethoa page in the World Registry of Marine Species

The Jessethoa ausubeli page in the World Registry of Marine Species

On behalf of the entire Census of Marine Life, Jesse is greatly honored to be permanently associated with this fascinating taxon.  Thank, Dennis Gordon!

Popular versions of our work

During the past couple of years several authors have made good use of our work in their books. These include:

The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It – December 31, 2019 – by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister

Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance

by Laurence B. Siegel | Dec 5, 2019

More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources?and What Happens Next – October 8, 2019

by Andrew McAfee

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress – January 15, 2019 by Steven Pinker

It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear – March 5, 2019 by Gregg Easterbrook