News

Seeing the good new film about Edward R. Murrow, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” reminded Jesse Huntley Ausubel that his godfather, Reverend Joseph Huntley, made the front page of the New York Times for attacking McCarthy in a sermon entitled “It can happen here” in July 1953, more than 3 months before Murrow aired his first show on CBS TV.

On April 23, 2003 Jesse visited with Craig Venter at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville MD to learn about IBEA’s plans for sequencing the microbial “marine genome”, which would strongly influence and advance the International Census of Marine Microbes of the Census of Marine Life. In response to a not-so-serious remark from Jesse about “What’s next after sequencing the ocean, the atmosphere?”, Craig answered very seriously, “Yes, exactly.” This led to a collaboration, ably implemented by Sloan Foundation colleague Paula Olsiewski and IBEA’s Bob Friedman, to explore the “air genome” in New York City. An October 17 2005 story in Genome Web reports good progress in the project, which was announced in a March 2005 press release.

The Rockefeller University honored Joshua Lederberg with an all-day Scientific Medley on 17 October 2005. Jesse had the honor of leading the organizing committee and moderating the program, which included outstanding talks by William Perry and others

As co-discoverers of “Decarbonization”, we were amused to find a container of Eucarbon (“Good carbon” in Greek) made by a Viennese manufacturer early in the 20th century. The old label advises that the product is a mild purgative and disinfectant, and one might take 1-2 tablets after breakfast, lunch, and dinner with some water. It turns out the same company, Trenka, still makes the product. Should attendees at global climate change conferences take Eurcarbon? Click here for product history and a Wienerlied about Eucarbon sung with true Viennese accent.

We post new scans of four of our older papers:
A Review of Estimates of Future Carbon Dioxide Emissions, part of “Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee” (360 KB)
Directions for Environmental Technologies (1 MB)
Technology and the Environment: An Overview (1 MB)
Regularities in Technological Development: An Evnironmental View (1.5 MB)

Also, we post a new color scan of a previously posted paper:
A Second Look at the Impacts of Climate Change (7.7 MB)

We post Mark Stoeckle’s beautifully illustrated brochure for the project to develop DNA barcodes for all birds, the All Birds Barcoding Initiative (ABBI).

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/docs/ABBI-barcoding%20life%20takes%20flight%20v1.1.pdf

The website for the project we helped start to develop DNA barcodes for all fish, appropriately called “FISH-BOL”, is now on-line at https://www.fishbol.org/.

We post some more of our older papers: Science International: A US View of its Institutional Needs, Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends, Consuming Materials: The American Way, and Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure, Past, Present, and Future

Fortune magazine’s 8 August issue publishes “Meet the Supergrid” about Chauncey Starr and the idea we have helped develop about a continental supergrid for joint transport and storage of electricity and hydrogen.

Two recent reports from the Census of Marine Life have drawn
worldwide attention.

1. Discoveries of the month-long Hidden Ocean expedition in the
   Arctic on the US Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy, which Jesse had
   the thrill of joining for its final week, are recounted in a
   press release and images.
2. The paper in Science magazine by Boris Worm and Ransom Myers
   on loss of diversity of top marine predators is also described
   in a press release.