New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Applied Climate-Change Analysis: The Climate Wizard Tool:

Although the message of "global climate change" is catalyzing international action, it is local and regional changes that directly affect people and ecosystems and are of immediate concern to scientists, managers, and policy makers. A major barrier preventing informed climate-change adaptation planning is the difficulty accessing, analyzing, and interpreting climate-change information. To address this problem, we developed a powerful, yet easy to use, web-based tool called Climate Wizard (http://ClimateWizard.org) that provides non-climate specialists with simple analyses and innovative graphical depictions for conveying how climate has and is projected to change within specific geographic areas throughout the world. To demonstrate the Climate Wizard, we explored historic trends and future departures (anomalies) in temperature and precipitation globally, and within specific latitudinal zones and countries. We found the greatest temperature increases during 1951-2002 occurred in northern hemisphere countries (especially during January-April), but the latitude of greatest temperature change varied throughout the year, sinusoidally ranging from approximately 50°N during February-March to 10°N during August-September. Precipitation decreases occurred most commonly in countries between 0-20°N, and increases mostly occurred outside of this latitudinal region. Similarly, a quantile ensemble analysis based on projections from 16 General Circulation Models (GCMs) for 2070-2099 identified the median projected change within countries, which showed both latitudinal and regional patterns in projected temperature and precipitation change. The results of these analyses are consistent with those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but at the same time, they provide examples of how Climate Wizard can be used to explore regionally- and temporally-specific analyses of climate change. Moreover, Climate Wizard is not a static product, but rather a data analysis framework designed to be used for climate change impact and adaption planning, which can be expanded to include other information, such as downscaled future projections of hydrology, soil moisture, wildfire, vegetation, marine conditions, disease, and agricultural productivity.

On the 'Duel' Nature of History: Revisiting Contingency versus Determinism:

What is the relationship between external--physical and biological--influences on increasingly complex matter over billions of years? In his most recent book, Islands in the Cosmos: the Evolution of Life on Land, Dale Russell attempts to answer this question. Russell is the senior curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and, among other things, is well known for proposing in 1971 an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs [2]. This places Russell among the first paleontologists to consider this extinction as a relatively sudden event in Earth's history. Dale Russell has spent his lifetime pondering grand evolutionary questions, and it is a quest that Islands in the Cosmos well illustrates.

School Playground Surfacing and Arm Fractures in Children: A Cluster Randomized Trial Comparing Sand to Wood Chip Surfaces:

Playgrounds and outdoor play equipment provide children with a place to let steam off, play creatively, socialize, and learn new skills. And, in a world where childhood obesity is a burgeoning problem, playgrounds provide a place where children can be encouraged to exercise. But playgrounds are not without hazards. Even in well-maintained and well-run facilities, children can hurt themselves by falling off climbing frames, monkey bars, and other equipment or by falling from standing height during playground games such as tag. In the US alone, more than 200,000 children are treated in emergency departments for injuries sustained in playgrounds every year and about 6,400 children are admitted to hospitals because of playground injuries, most of which are bone fractures (broken bones). In fact, playground injuries in the US are more severe and have a higher hospital admission rate than any other sort of child injury except those involving vehicles.

Structural Basis for the Aminoacid Composition of Proteins from Halophilic Archea:

Life on earth exhibits an enormous adaptive capacity and living organisms can be found even in extreme environments. The halophilic archea are a group of microorganisms that grow best in highly salted lakes (with KCl concentrations between 2 and 6 molar). To avoid osmotic shock, halophilic archea have the same ionic strength inside their cells as outside. All their macromolecules, including the proteins, have therefore adapted to remain folded and functional under such ionic strength conditions. As a result, the amino acid composition of proteins adapted to a hypersaline environment is very characteristic: they have an abundance of negatively charged residues combined with a low frequency of lysines. In this study, we have investigated the relationship between this biased amino-acid composition and protein stability. Three model proteins - one from a strict halophile, its homolog from a mesophile and a totally unrelated protein from a mesophile - have been largely redesigned by site-directed mutagenesis, and the resulting mutants have been characterized structurally and thermodynamically. Our results show that amino acids with short side-chains (like aspartic and glutamic acid) are preferred to the longer lysine because they succeed in reducing the interaction surface between the protein and the solvent, which is beneficial in an environment where water is in limited availability because it also has to hydrate the salt ions.

Surviving Salt: How Do Extremophiles Do It?:

Immersed in waters saltier than chicken soup, salt-tolerant "halophilic" microorganisms are able to thrive in conditions that would reduce a less-adapted organism to a shriveled remnant. One way halophilic archaea avoid this fate is by bathing their molecular machinery in a similarly salty intracellular environment that would cause ordinary proteins to lose their shape. How do the proteins inside these cells survive?