scientific research

Research funded by seafood industry concludes that moms should eat fish

A group of scientists affiliated with the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB) announced conclusions yesterday that new moms and moms-to-be should eat at least 12 ounces of seafood per week to encourage wee ones’ brain development. Federal agencies, which advise moms to consume no more than 12 ounces of seafood per week to […]

Unmanned space missions will free up more cash for scientific research

A few days ago, I blogged on NASA's insane and delusional plans to build a manned base on the Moon. My point was not that this is intrinsically a bad idea, but rather that we will never spend the money required to do this ... so money spent now is basically wasted.

Ecologist Sandra Steingraber explores the eco-causes of early puberty

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know,” written by Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., and published by the Breast Cancer Fund. In the full report (downloadable here), Steingraber reviews several causes of and contributors to early puberty, including environmental factors. […]

The benefits of using prizes to drive alternative fuel research

An article on the benefits of using economic prizes instead of subsidies as incentives for alternative fuel research appeared in Monday's edition of National Review Online, an extremely right-wing publication.

Besides the fact that this is a good idea that economists have been increasingly talking about over the past few years, there are a couple additional take-away points:

1. There are many people on the right who are sincerely interested in environmental progress and who are thinking seriously about the best ways to move forward.
2. Being able to converse relatively proficiently about economics and market principles, not just acknowledgment of the problems, is the best way to create a bipartisan consensus on policy. People on the right will listen to these and often agree.

Moon base project sucks up potential climate research dollars

In the annals of self-delusion, NASA's Moon-Mars mission ranks right at the top. Today's NY Times, for example, carries details about NASA's plans for a moon base to be built sometime around 2020.

Let me be clear. There is a 0 percent chance that this Moon base or anything like it will ever be built, for the following reason: the moon missions in the '60s and early '70s cost something like $100 billion in today's dollars. There is no way that setting up a semipermanent lunar base will be anything other than many times more expensive. That would put the total cost at one to a few trillion dollars.

NASA, however, is spending a few billion dollars each year on this -- something like 1 percent of the money they would need to spend each year to actually accomplish this task, well short of the $100 billion or so actually required. Given this reality, there is no way we will ever actually do this.

Magnetic cooling tech hits a milestone

Now this is hopeful: a real advance in refrigeration. Lots of potential here. How cool.

A new study gathers 20 years of public opinion about global warming

Matthew Nisbet of Framing Science and his colleague, T. Myers, trawled through two decades of data on public opinion about global warming (sounds fun, huh?). The results will be published in the fall issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

An abstract:

Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of news organization, academic, and nonpartisan public opinion surveys on global warming, yet there exists no authoritative summary of their collective findings. In this article, we provide a systematic review of trends in public opinion about global warming. We sifted through hundreds of polling questions culled from more than 70 surveys administered over the past 20 years. In compiling the available trends, we summarize public opinion across several key dimensions including (a) public awareness of the issue of global warming; (b) public understanding of the causes of global warming and the specifics of the policy debate; (c) public perceptions of the certainty of the science and the level of agreement among experts; (d) public concern about the impacts of global warming; (e) public support for policy action in light of potential economic costs; and (f) public support for the Kyoto climate treaty.

Unfortunately, the full text isn't available online, but Nisbet says that if you drop him an email, he'll send you a PDF. I look forward to reading it myself tonight.

Thoughts on the GISS temperature adjustment

There has been a lot of blogging recently about the problem with the temperature record for the continental U.S. RealClimate described the problem thusly:

Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. ...

The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).

A few comments about this:

Scientists uncover underwater community on Atlantic seamount

Scientists encountered what may be a new species of seed shrimp, a translucent crustacean that swims at a depth of 50 to 200 meters. On a seamount in the Northern Atlantic, remote-operated vehicles shed light on what one researcher referred to as an underwater "continent."

Clutching to the rocky cliffs was a menagerie of corals and sponges, as well as brittle stars and starfish, sea cucumbers, and worms. Some of the creatures are quite rare, not found anywhere else in the world -- all the more reason to be mindful of the brilliant life thriving below the surface.