Wisconsin cave holds tantalizing clues to ancient climate changes, future shifts

"Even in their dark isolation from the atmosphere above, caves can hold a rich archive of local climate conditions and how they've shifted over the eons. Formed over tens of thousands of years, speleothems — rock formations unique to caves better known as stalagmites and stalactites — hold secrets to the ancient environments in which they formed.

A U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study of a stalagmite found in a cave in southern Wisconsin reveals previously undetected history of the local climate going back thousands of years. The findings provide strong evidence that a series of massive and abrupt warming events that punctuated the most recent ice age likely enveloped vast swaths of the Northern Hemisphere.

Researchers analyzed a specialized microscope image of annual growth bands in the speleothem. The bright and dark bands represent differences in organic acid content. The difference in organic acid content from dripwater is due to seasonal changes in the overlying soil.

The research, conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, appears in the journal Nature Geoscience. It's the first study to identify a possible link between ice age warm-ups recorded in the Greenland ice sheet — known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events — and climate records from deep in the interior of central North America.

"This is the only study in this area of the world's recording of these abrupt climate events during the last glacial period," says co-author Cameron Batchelor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study is based on a detailed chemical and physical analysis of a stalagmite that formed in the Cave of the Mounds, a tourist attraction and educational destination. The stalagmite the team analyzed grew extremely slowly — taking roughly 20,000 years to reach the length of a human pinky finger..."
Caves and climate change 

Heat stress in U.S. may double by century's end

"Periods of extremely high heat are projected to double across the lower 48 states by 2100 if the world continues to emit high levels of greenhouse gases, according to a new study in Earth's Future, an American Geophysical Union journal.

The heat stress will be felt most strongly in areas with growing populations. The Pacific Northwest, central California and the Great Lakes region could experience as much as a threefold increase compared to the past 40 years. Heat stress occurs when both the temperature and relative humidity get high enough that the human body can't rid itself of the excess heat, leading to strokes, heat cramps and other health problems.

"Without doing any mitigation strategies, the impact of heat stress is likely to increase," said Ashok Mishra, a civil engineer at Clemson University and an author of the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded study.

Human-driven climate change is leading to an average increase in temperatures across the world. However, people don't necessarily notice a slow, even warming as much as an extreme event.

Mishra and co-authors wanted to see how heat stress would increase at the same time as a general increase in temperature and relative humidity. They assumed that while humans may experience higher temperatures on average in many areas, people will acclimatize to the new normal, but extremely high heat index peaks, above even the yearly median values, will continue to have negative impacts on human health.

While previous research has usually examined how extreme heat events may increase in severity, frequency and duration, most studies have looked at one of these in isolation. Mishra and his colleagues calculated how all these might increase together in the future under a high emissions scenario..."
Heat stress 

Farms, tables and revealing the vast impacts between and beyond

"Bountiful harvests in one location can mean empty water reservoirs and environmental woes far from farmlands. A study published in Nature Communications examines how food, energy, water and greenhouse gases create a vast front in the battle to feed the planet.

Scientists at Michigan State University and their colleagues used new sustainability science tools to understand how irrigating farm fields to grow food reverberates through the biggest drivers of sustainability.

It's not just the farmlands that shoulder environmental impacts. Sometimes, it's places that have no major stake in the plant-water-food game that end up paying an environmental price.

"Ensuring food security, while safeguarding the environment, is one of the greatest challenges for the world today, yet as the world has become globalized, it is an incredibly complicated process, and misunderstanding it or missing impacts can allow major setbacks in achieving sustainability," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, an ecologist at MSU. "We need to find new ways of looking at the world in a way that embraces its complexity."

The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded scientists used the framework of metacoupling, which helps look not only at irrigated farmlands, but also at massive projects to move water from one region to another. The framework allows scientists from different disciplines to look at the interactions between socioeconomics and environmental forces -- such as climate change, diet change, irrigation technologies, crop planting strategies and water diversion -- within and across borders.

"This study demonstrates the importance of understanding our increasingly connected world in a way that quantifies the often-missed and unrecognized connections involved in feeding the world," said Elizabeth Blood, a program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology..."
Farms and tables 

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Measuring Legal Quality on the U.S. Supreme Court

"The U.S. Supreme Court decides cases by way of an adversarial system of justice. In particular, lawyers from opposing sides of each case write legal briefs that attempt to persuade the justices that their view of the law is the most correct. To make their case, lawyers base their legal arguments in existing court decisions, known as precedent. Because some precedent is more relevant and influential than others, there will be differences in the overall strength of the lawyer's arguments. Consequently, this project will generate an empirical measure of legal quality that identifies the strength (or weakness) of each side's legal arguments in a case.

To generate this measure of legal quality, this project will draw extensively from the archival materials of retired Supreme Court justices. To do so, the project will examine bench memoranda, which are documents prepared by each justice's law clerks. The project will digitally photograph, content analyze, and make publicly available over 6,000 bench memoranda spanning nearly a dozen retired justices, from 1946-1994. These bench memoranda offer an evaluation of each side's legal arguments, based on the information provided in the legal briefs submitted by the parties, as well as that provided in the amicus curiae briefs, in each case. This project will use the information from the bench memoranda to evaluate and then create a measure of legal quality based on multiple aspects of legal doctrine. This resulting empirical measure, when combined with existing available data, will enable assessment of the impact of law on the Supreme Court's decision making process..."
Measuring legal quality of U.S. Supreme Court 

How the Pacific's marine heat wave came back

"Weakened wind patterns likely spurred the wave of extreme ocean heat that swept the North Pacific last summer, according to new research funded by the National Science Foundation and led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The study was conducted at NSF's California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research site.

The marine heat wave, named the "Blob 2.0" -- after 2013's "the blob," a large mass of relatively warm water in the Pacific -- likely damaged marine ecosystems and hurt coastal fisheries. Waters off the U.S. West Coast were a record-breaking 4.5 degrees F (2.5 degrees C) above normal.

"Most large marine heat waves have historically occurred in the winter," said Dillon Amaya, a researcher at CU Boulder and lead author of the study in Nature Communications. "This was the first summer marine heat wave in the last five years, and it's also the hottest -- a record high ocean temperature for the last 40 years.".."
Pacific marine heat wave

How much do climate fluctuations matter for global crop yields?

"The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO, has been responsible for recent widespread, simultaneous crop failures, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University, the International Food Policy Research Institute and partners.

The finding runs counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions such as the United States, China and Argentina are unrelated. The results underscore the potential opportunity to manage such climate risks, which can be predicted using seasonal climate forecasts.

The study, published in Science Advances, is the first to provide estimates of the degree to which different modes of climate variability, such as ENSO, cause volatility in global and regional production of corn, wheat and soy. Such variability caused a nearly 18% volatility in global corn production from 1980 to 2010, for example.

“Global agriculture counts on the strong likelihood that poor production in one part of the world will be made up for by good production elsewhere,” said Weston Anderson, a scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and lead author of the study.

Anderson and his co-authors looked at the impact that ENSO, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and other climate patterns have had on global production of corn, soybeans and wheat. They analyzed how these modes of climate variability influenced drought and heat in major growing regions.

The team found that ENSO can, and has, forced multiple breadbasket failures, including a significant one in 1983..."
Climate fluctuation and crop yields

Crabs, lobsters and shrimp now have a family tree dating 500 million years

"Researchers have for the first time traced the roots of crabs, lobsters and shrimp to create the family tree of crustaceans people love to eat.

The tree shows the 450-million-year evolution of these 10-legged decapods, when lobsters and crabs each diversified from a single evolutionary origin. Groups of shrimp evolved earlier.

The findings are part of a massive family tree project where researchers resolved the deep evolutionary relationships between crabs, shrimp and lobsters. The discoveries, made by analyzing more than 400 genes from 94 species could also inform conservation policies to ensure their longevity..."
Crabs, lobster origin

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering

"Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering provides statistical information about the participation of these three groups in science and engineering education and employment. A formal report, in the form of a digest, is issued every 2 years...."
"Women, minorities, disabled in science

Immigrants play increasing role in U.S. science and engineering workforce

"From 2003 to 2013, the number of scientists and engineers residing in the United States rose from 21.6 million to 29 million. This 10-year increase included significant growth in the number of immigrant scientists and engineers, from 3.4 million to 5.2 million.

Immigrants went from making up 16 percent of the science and engineering workforce to 18 percent, according to a report from the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). In 2013, the latest year for which numbers are available, 63 percent of U.S. immigrant scientists and engineers were naturalized citizens, while 22 percent were permanent residents and 15 percent were temporary visa holders.

Of the immigrant scientists and engineers in the United States in 2013:

• 57 percent were born in Asia.
• 20 percent were born in North America (excluding the United States), Central America, the Caribbean, or South America.
• 16 percent were born in Europe.
• 6 percent were born in Africa.
• And less than 1 percent were born in Oceania...."

Immigrants

Geography and mapping give new dimension to study of the Holocaust

"Numerous scholars in recent years have made the horrors of the Holocaust real to the public through various media, including books and memoirs, films, art, photography and museum exhibitions. Anne Kelly Knowles and her collaborators are using a different approach to better understand the genocide: geography and mapping.

More specifically, the researchers are employing historical geographic information systems (GIS), computer programs that store, display, and analyze data of past geographies to gain new insights into how the Nazis implemented the Holocaust, the patterns of events, and the impact of the Holocaust on different places..."

Geography and Holocaust

Six million graduates employed in science and engineering in 2013

"The number of college graduates in the United States nearly doubled between 1993 and 2013, according to a new report from the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

The report details that the number of graduates with degrees in science and engineering (S&E) fields grew faster than the number of those with other types of degrees. In 2013, 27 percent of graduates held degrees in S&E fields. Roughly 1 in 10 graduates were employed in S&E occupations, a proportion that has remained largely unchanged since 1993..."

Science and Engineering employment

Experts identify easy way to improve smartphone security

"Smartphones and tablets used by today's consumers include many kinds of sensitive information," says Ninghui Li, a professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in Indiana.
The apps downloaded to them can potentially track a user's locations, monitor his or her phone calls and even monitor the messages a user sends and receives--including authentication messages used by online banking and other sites, he says, explaining why unsecured digital data are such a big issue.
Li, along with Robert Proctor and Luo Si, also professors at Purdue, lead a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project "User-Centric Risk Communication and Control on Mobile Devices," that investigates computer security. The work pays special attention to user control of security features in mobile systems..."
Smartphone security

How much fertilizer is too much for Earth's climate?

"Helping farmers around the globe apply more precise amounts of fertilizer nitrogen can combat climate change.

That's the conclusion of a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the paper, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) provide an improved prediction of nitrogen fertilizer's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural fields..."
Fertilizers & climate change

Lyme Disease: Ten things you always wanted to know about ticks..

"May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month.
To find out how to steer clear of Lyme disease during "picnic season" - a time when people are more likely to pick up ticks - the National Science Foundation spoke with NSF-funded disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., and program director Sam Scheiner of NSF's Division of Environmental Biology..."
Lyme disease

dousing the southwest in rain or leaving it bone dry, oscillations in the ocean can have huge effects on the weather.


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Clarity for lake researchers' water quality questions

"Scientists engaged in a study of long-term water quality trends in Midwestern lakes found some good news: little change in water clarity in more than 3,000 lakes.

Look deeper, and the research becomes something more: a chronicle of a new source of data for scientists, data from residents of towns and villages surrounding the lakes..."

Lakes

Crib mattress dangers

"Babies spend over 50 percent of their day sleeping.  The National Science Foundation (NSF) Nordic Research Opportunity-funded researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland have discovered that while infants sleep, they also breathe in high levels of chemicals released from crib mattresses.

The team analyzed the foam padding in 20 new and old crib mattresses and found they emit significant amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), potentially harmful chemicals also found in household cleaners and scented sprays..."
crib mattress dangers

Will the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt in our lifetime?

"As with many things in nature, it helps to understand the past when trying to predict the future.
Ilya Bindeman, an associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Oregon, believes this is true of the Yellowstone supervolcano and the likelihood that it will produce an apocalyptic eruption as it has three times over the last the last 2 million years.
"Yellowstone is one of the biggest supervolcanos in the world," he says. "Sometimes it erupts quietly with lava flow, but once or twice every million years, it erupts very violently, forming large calderas," which are very large craters measuring tens of kilometers in diameter.
If it happens again, and he says most scientists think that it will, he predicts such an eruption will obliterate the surroundings within a radius of hundreds of kilometers, and cover the rest of the United States and Canada with multiple inches of ash. This, effectively, would shut down agriculture and cause global climate cooling for as long as a decade, or more, he says. A volcanic event of such magnitude "hasn't happened in modern civilization," he says.
Yellowstone volcano

The truth about Echinacea: Plant commonly used for colds and flu suffers from disappearing habitat

"Widely believed to ward off and treat colds and flu, Echinacea appears in many over-the-counter remedies sold in pharmacies and in health and nutrition stores.
What is Echinacea, and why is it being feted in 2014?.."
Echinacea

What Is a Species? Insight From Dolphins and Humans

"New species of insects, worms and other creepy-crawlers are announced on a monthly basis. Similarly, just last week, two new humpback dolphin species splashed into the headlines. And in October, news broke that early humans may have included fewer species than previously thought. This forces the question: what does it take to be a distinct species?..."
What is a species

Large Western Fires Increase

Researchers explore the reasons for the recent increase in the number of large western fires and what to do about them.

Large Western Fires