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petnoyer | March 18, 2008The global ocean has already taken up half of the atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by humans over the last 200 years, so the ongoing effects of climate change are dampened. That's right, you can thank the ocean for saving the planet so far. Without the ocean, what we would have? A place that looks a lot like Mars.
Ocean chemistry is changing, though, ever so slightly. The global ocean pH is about 8.2, slightly basic, but pH is falling (~0.1) due to an increased concentration of hydrogen ions resulting from the chemical reaction of water molecules and carbon dioxide at the ocean surface.…
esiegel | March 18, 2008This is the second key prediction of the Big Bang: the Universe was, before any stars formed, made up of about 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium, and much less than 1% of all other elements combined. How does the Big Bang predict this, and how to we observe it?
Well, remember we said the Universe was hot and dense in the past. At some point, it was so hot that neutral atoms couldn't form, because high energy photons would just come in and kick electrons off of nuclei. Like this:
Well, you know what? At some point, even before that, the Universe was hotter and denser, and you couldn't even form…
razib | March 18, 2008Read all about it. He was no prose stylist or a crafter of character, but oh the ideas!
edyong | March 18, 2008 A couple of new carnivals for your reading pleasure - have a look at:
Encephalon #41, the brain-blogging neuroscience carnival at Pure Pedantry
Oekologie #15, the ecology carnival at one of my favourite blogs, The Other 95%.
gregladen | March 18, 2008The Gene Genie Blog Carnival is up and running at DNADirect Talk. Please go check it out.
The next Gene Genie Carnival will be hosted here, at this blog (the one you are reading right now, this one). Please send me your entries! You can use the blog submission form or email them directly to me (with something like "Gene Genie Submission" in the subject line).
gregladen | March 18, 2008... known as Berry Go Round .... will happen here on or abouts the 25th of March. Please get me your posts on plant evolution and biology stuff!
You can email me here.
petnoyer | March 18, 2008Are deep-sea and pelagic habitats adequately represented in the new US plan for a national system of marine protected areas? I dunno, it just came out! We have 30 days to comment....
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of the Interior (DOI) is pleased to announce the release of the Revised Draft Framework for Developing the National System of Marine Protected Areas for a 30 day comment period ending April 16. You can find electronic copies of the draft framework and associated documents at http://www.mpa.gov.
The release of this revised draft…
cortex | March 18, 2008Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online):
Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a true war baby. "My mother was in the Wrems" - the Women's Royal Navy Service - "and her stories about World War Two were always quite interesting. She used to run home through an air rad, because she knew her mother would be worried. It was a very dangerous thing to do, but I'm afraid that wouldn't occur to my mother. She really adored the war. She was…
kevin z | March 18, 2008A blue whale from the eastern Pacific. According to the IUCN they are endangered. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
It amazes me that we can still in this day and era of satellites, technology and boats shipping goods everywhere that we can still find new populations of the world's largest living animal.
"...a century of commercial whaling almost pushed the blue whale to extinction. The slaughter peaked in 1931, when 29,000 were killed in one season. By the time hunting blue whales was outlawed in 1966 it is estimated that the population had been reduced by 99 percent, from perhaps half a million to…
esiegel | March 17, 2008This is the first of the key predictions of the Big Bang theory, that everything in the Universe will expand according to Hubble's Law, or that the speed that other galaxies recede from us is proportional to their distance from us. Let's jump into the details of why the Big Bang predicts it, and how we know it to be true.
We know that a static Universe is crazy. Sorry Einstein, I know you liked it, but it's nuts. Why? Because gravity is unstable. Mass attracts more mass. Imagine setting up a perfect, evenly spaced, infinite grid of points, all with the same mass:
Well, according to the laws…
cortex | March 17, 2008If I've got any readers in the Little Rock area, you might be interested in a little talk I'm giving tomorrow evening at the Clinton School of Public Service. The title of the talk is "Kanye West Was A Neuroscientist," which has poor Marcel rolling over in his grave.
cmcclain | March 17, 2008A reader brought to my attention a question that is floating around the internet.
Q: If lightning strikes the ocean, do the marine animals get hurt or killed? (Sault Ste. Marie, Minn.
Honestly, I have never given this question any thought. Given that I am a biologist and not a physicist means I may not even be the best to answer it. The first question is obviously how often lightning strikes the ocean?
The map below assembled by a crack team of NASA scientists shows the number of flashes per km2 per year. You can see that most of the worlds oceans are at less than 2 strikes per year (…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2008I visited the orthopedic surgeons at the hospital this morning just before the crosstown traffic in NYC became unbearable due to the evil influence of yet another holiday parade, this time, the annual Saint Patrick Day's Parade. While there, I was known as "proximal humerus"; as in "here's the proximal humerus's x-rays" and "the proximal humerus thinks she has a proximal ulnar fracture, can you check that out while you are at it?"
The bad news; after some very painful moving of my lower arm to maneuver it into a small portable x-ray machine, the docs did find a second fracture, at the…
cortex | March 17, 2008This is very depressing:
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations -- and coming up dry.
Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost…
cortex | March 17, 2008A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste:
A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded. One day, you catch the smell of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or bubble gum from a Gamay, or horse manure from a Shiraz, and from that point on you know exactly what people mean when they say they…
esiegel | March 16, 2008Here's a really fundamental question, and yet one that I think that most people don't know the answer to:
How do we know that the Big Bang is the right theory of the origin of the Universe?
There are a bunch of alternative theories out there, after all, like Plasma Cosmology, the Steady-State Theory, and Godel's Universe. But the Big Bang Theory explains three things that none of the other model's I've seen do, and they are these three:
The Hubble Expansion of the Universe. Things that are close to us move away from us with a certain velocity, things that are twice as far move away twice as…
cmcclain | March 16, 2008
This begins a new series here at DSN. With the addition of Kevin, we are filled to the gills with all deep and biology. This allows me to pursue some other interests of mine. I get really excited about all manner of mechanical things. I have very fond memories of the 1967 Ford Fairlane with a 289 V8 that I drove and loved like a member of the family. I enjoyed spending time with my father as a kid as he worked on a series of old cars. Indeed, those times infused we with continued interest in how things work, not to mention some floral language.
In the first installation I discuss the…
cmcclain | March 16, 2008
On with the next challenge! We continue to grow in ranks with almost forty signed up and many following along. Please sign up! Latter in the year, those signed up for my team will take on Oprah's people in a cage match!
The last challenge was graciously sponsored by Strictly Organic Coffee who will kick in some free organic Hazelnuts (type Deep-Sea News Just One Thing Challenge into the Special Order Instructions box) with every purchase for the entire month of March. You should order some because the coffee is organic, shade-grown, free-trade, and the coffee pulp left over from…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Environmental Issues
The most recent edition of Okeologie is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival focuses on environmental issues, and also provides a few glimpses into life in Washington DC, from where Kevin, the author, just returned.