News

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 20 individual chapters edited by Robert Hazen, Adrian Jones, and John Baross. Chapters include On the Origins of Deep Hydrocarbons, Nature and Extent of the Deep Biosphere, and The Deep Viriosphere: Assessing the Viral Impact on Microbial Community Dynamics in the Deep Subsurface.

The DCO website provides excellent updates about the program.

We are excited by the progress of the DCO since its founding 1 July 2009 and look forward to many significant discoveries during the coming years.  The DCO was initiated with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Jesse is proud to continue to help foster the program on behalf of Sloan.

The DCO’s early history is recounted here.

 

On 19-20 May 2013 in Jerusalem the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities conducted the first “Alexander Keynan Workshop on Science Policy” in appreciation of the wonderful career of Alex, who passed away in May 2012.  Jesse participated in the Workshop, whose theme was centers of excellence in scientific research, and offered a tribute, “The Germination of Alexander Keynan.” The “Alexander Keynan Workshop on Science Policy” will be organized every two years by the Israel Academy.

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.