Tar balls are not likely to float up to the New England from the Gulf of Mexico, according to a Globe report on a Tuesday state Department of Environmental Protection hearing Tuesday.

As far as fish go, Paul J. Diodati director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said the crude would only have an impact on larvae and eggs. The tiny larvae, about the size of a pencil tip, would not survive the encounter, he said.

But because bluefin tuna are known to live about 20 years and most tuna caught by the industry are between 5 and 6 years old, Diodati said, the region probably would not notice if tuna larvae died in the gulf, and in any case it would be difficult to measure…

Thomas W. French of the state’s Natural Heritage program said not many New England species spend time the Gulf.

Still as the NY Times reports in a preview of a Sunday Magazine story, it’s our appetite for sushi, not our appetite for fossil fuel that will do in the tuna.

(T)the Atlantic bluefin is just a symptom of a metastasizing tuna disease. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 7 of the 23 commercially fished tuna stocksare overfished or depleted. An additional nine stocks are also threatened. The Pew Environment Group’s tuna campaign asserts that “the boats seeking these tuna are responsible for more hooks and nets in the water than any other fishery.”

Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.

Plans for the UKCMRI, which will become one of the largest biomedical sites in Europe, were unveiled this past weekend. The video below is a fly-through of the planned site.

Researchers from the University of Greenwich are celebrating after their improbable device made it into a poll of top university discoveries over the past 60 years. They devised an artificial cow that uses a chemical attractant to lure in tsetse flies, which are then killed by insecticide. The mock bovine, first trialled in the 1980s, is thought to have saved thousands of lives in Africa by lowering the number of cases of ‘sleeping sickness’, which is spread by the fly.

The mooish intervention came eighth in a poll of UK academics asked to vote for the best scientific breakthrough to come from a UK university since 1950. Top of the list, quite predictably, is Watson and Crick’s determination of the DNA double helix. The list also features the contraceptive pill, embryonic stem cells and genetic fingerprinting.

See the full list here.

Mike’s Maze at Warner Farm in Sunderland, Mass. Outside Amherst in the heart of the Happy Valley aka Pioneer Valley.

Our maze game is inspired by Darwin’s famous quote “I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.” Mazegoers will be challenged to identify and classify all living vertebrates and more. Because that’s too easy they will also make their own close observations from images of biological curiosities found in the natural history collections of Amherst College and Greenfield Community College. And wait! There’s more. They will need to naturally select the right trails in and out of Chuck’s curly chin cilia. We expect no complaints this year that the maze and the game are too easy!

Please join us JUNE 24 at an afternoon symposium to honor and pay tribute to Co-Founder and Co-Director Professor Henry D. “Jake” Jacoby of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The afternoon will consist of a series of guest lectures on the topic: “Perspectives on Energy and Climate Policy Research”

1:00 Professor Ronald G. Prinn, Co-Director, MIT Joint Program; Director, Center for Global Change Science

Opening Remarks

1:30 Professor William F. Pounds, Dean Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management

Contributions to Energy Policy Research

2:00 Assistant Professor Mort D. Webster, MIT Engineering Systems Division

Uncertainty, Decision Making, and Climate Policy

2:30 Dr. Brian P. Flannery, Exxon Mobil Corp., Environmental Policy and Planning

A Personal Private Sector Perspective: The Role of Integrated Assessment in the Climate Policy Debate

3:00 Break – Ting Foyer

3:30 Dr. Paul L. Eckbo, CEO, and Dr. Arlie G. Sterling, President, Marsoft Inc.

From Research to Practical Policy and Decision Support

4:00 Associate Professor Ian Sue Wing, Boston University, Geography and Environment

Induced Technical Change and Climate Policy

4:30 Professor Martin Zimmerman, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

Regulating Fuel Economy: Where We’ve Been; Where We Are; Where We Are Going

5:00 Dr. John M. Reilly, Associate Director for Research, MIT Joint Program

Closing Remarks

https://globalchange.mit.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for Energy & Environmental Policy Research, Center for Global Change Science, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, MIT Energy Initiative, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

Posted on behalf of Stu Hutson

A mother in Freiburg, Germany finds her three-year-old son comatose in a pool of his own vomit. She immediately begins CPR as his twin brother looks on. The ailing boy is rushed to the local university hospital where he is stabilized — his life ultimately saved by quick thinking. However, two and half hours later, his father returns home to find the twin brother dead.

Both boys’ bodies had dangerously high levels of codeine — the unintended consequence of a treatment for lingering colds. But what had caused the overdose? Had the boys been given too much, or did they lack the ability to process the drug? After this scene played out three years ago, investigators turned to genetic tests to help them find out who, if anyone, was liable for the deaths (Int. J. Legal. Med. 123, 387–394, 2009).

Pharmacogenetic tests, used to help predict how an individual will react to medication, are becoming increasingly common in medical settings. The tests, although still rare, can sometimes be used proactively to help predict what medication is most likely to be effective or whether a severe adverse reaction is likely to occur. They can also be used forensically to help determine what went wrong.

Such forensic use is popping up in legal proceedings and investigations around the globe — but the judicial system may not be ready for the new technology.

Continue reading →

A decade of vicious, internecine battles between chimps has been documented in a new paper in Current Biology.

Twenty-one chimps were killed or fatally wounded in Kibale National Park, Uganda, over this time period by a group of male chimps from a large community in a region of the park called Ngogo. As many as 13 of the victims may have belonged to a single neighbouring group, representing an extremely high rate of mortality due to intergroup violence, exceeding median rates of mortality due to intergroup violence reported for humans in agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations and compared to the median rate suffered by individuals in 9 well-studied chimp communities. The motive appears to be territory.

John Mitani from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues spent 10 years observing the 150 Ngogo chimps. They even watched 18 of the killings (the other three were inferred from carcasses and faeces containing chimp remains).

Most of the time, male chimps behave like rowdy, loud frat boys, but once every 10 to 14 days, they act like cooperative adults and wage war. The New York Times reports:

A band of males, up to 20 or so, will assemble in single file and move to the edge of their territory. They fall into unusual silence as they penetrate deep into the area controlled by the neighbouring group. They tensely scan the treetops and startle at every noise… If a single chimp has wandered into their path, they will attack. Enemy males will be held down, then bitten and battered to death. Females are usually let go, but their babies will be eaten.

After the bloodshed, the Ngogo chimps usurp the area once occupied by their victims, literally enjoying the fruits (genus Morus) of their labour. “The take-home is clear and simple,” Mitani says (news release). “Chimpanzees kill each other. They kill their neighbours. Up until now, we have not known why. Our observations indicate that they do so to expand their territories at the expense of their victims.”

The Ngogo chimp patrols have expanded their 29-square-kilometre territory over the years, but during the summer of 2009, they nabbed a sizable 6.4-square-kilometre chunk to the northeast – increasing their land by 22%. With bountiful land and resources, the males grow stronger and their females – who likely increase in number – have more babies.

While the study has implications for the evolution of cooperation, the authors caution against extrapolating their study into the realm of human warfare. “Invariably, some will take this as evidence that the roots of aggression run very deep,” Mitani says (Time). But even if that were true, “we operate by a moral code chimps don’t have” he adds.

Image: NIH