Too many paywalled recent interesting science stories [science, work]

[rebeccmeister]

This post brought to you by some efforts to clear out email inboxes and browser tabs, also known as efforts to procrastinate from grading.

1. From the NYT: A story about the roles of insects and other small organisms in the hypothetical colonization of Mars: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/science/mars-needs-insects.html

This story is less interesting to me from the standpoint of trying to colonize Mars, and more interesting from the standpoint of potential agricultural transformations of landscapes on this planet. I'm thinking, in particular, about learning about some of the agricultural challenges in parts of Sudan. What I learned about in that case had more to do with the soil organic matter fraction. I don't know that black soldier fly larva frass is the answer for Sudan, but the topic sure gets me wondering about fertilizer applications of other types of frass or invertebrate wastes, such as worm castings or cricket frass. At the end of the day, these things are all potential hooks for future undergraduate research projects here. After all, I've got all these cricket colonies here, producing tons of frass. Why not put more of that frass to use?

2. I've been following the work of Madhusudan Katti for a while, as he's a reconciliation ecologist, an area of interest to me. I was pleased to see his name appear in this recent NYT article about the impacts of historic housing redlining practices on urban wildlife: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/science/birds-cities-redlining.htmld

I don't have a ton of other comments to make on this particular article, but the included figure from a 2020 article published in (also paywalled) Science is great for helping to highlight how scientific thinking is developing in the arena of thinking about social/historical legacies and ecology. To me this is an important topic because if you want to get people to care about environmental issues, they need to have exposure to the living world around them. Humans are generally bad at abstract thinking; we need concrete starting points. It all starts with urban ecology. Even New York City has its ants.

3. Speaking of the journal Science, here's a brand-new commentary piece on efforts to get the oceans to absorb more carbon dioxide: https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-crisis-sparks-effort-coax-oceans-suck-carbon-dioxide

This commentary piece is exciting because it gives me an example I can point to, for students who might be wondering what they can do with regards to climate change. We spend a lot of time in Animal Physiology talking about gas transport, which is not a simple topic to comprehend; I can use this article to highlight how they can potentially apply their expertise to a real-world problem.

4. Last but not least, right now is the season when I start to think about the theme to use for the spring seminar I teach for our "Advanced" General Biology students. Last year's theme was a big hit: we talked about the biology of sleep. That included talking about how frigatebirds manage to sleep while in midair, about sleep-deprived bees, about sleepless flies, and about REM sleep in jumping spiders. Towards the tail end of the semester, a brand-new paper came out, too late for me to include, about how seals take naps when they're at the bottom of their dives.

Well. Just now, an article has come out about how chinstrap penguins sleep, too: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2398

Microsleeps, apparently!

The main element here is that I think there are enough new discoveries related to the biology of sleep, that I could justify using the same theme a second time. Especially given how popular the theme was. It's a highly relatable topic, really, for undergraduates, isn't it?

Comments

[moodyduck]

A lot of my colleagues have been involved in marine carbon dioxide removal research. Unfortunately the higher ups (at DOE? not sure) have decided that ecologically based solutions aren't large-scale enough to be worth the research money, sigh. I get it to some extent, but also argh.

[rebeccmeister]

It does at least sound like there are other sources that consider these projects worth the effort to explore, at least.

[moodyduck]

To be clear, DOE is interested in more "industrial" solutions, under the assumption that blue carbon isn't a big enough payoff*. They could be right, I don't know, but plunking big machines into a bay or whatever has its own issues!

*doing coastal or marine ecosystem stuff at all is fairly new for DOE, they usually leave that to other agencies, which is why our research group is such an odd duck for our laboratory as a whole. And why most of us have worked more for the Corps of Engineers, Navy, NOAA, EPA, etc.

[twoeleven]

The ocean carbon sequestration proposal is at least not stupid. Based on the current costs for power plants, the 8% of global electricity generation mentioned would cost about $720 billion. That's about the same as the US defense budget or medicare, as of last year.

It's certainly affordable, but not something we're gonna pay for all at once; that's about 3% of US GDP. But over a decade, with the other major nations paying their share, certainly plausible. I'm not optimistic anybody's going to volunteer to chip in, though.

[rebeccmeister]

I'm a little more optimistic about the ocean-based solutions compared to, for example, the solution that involves getting it to bond to chemical air scrubbers, then baking the scrubbers to release the CO2 and pumping that CO2 deep underground. That just sounds like cellulosic ethanol all over again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/climate/direct-air-capture-carbon.html

[twoeleven]

Yeah, CO₂'s concentration in the air is so low that pulling it in directly is pushing a Sisyphean boulder up the side of a deep energy well. If we want that, there are these low-cost, environmentally-friendly devices called "trees" which are much better at it than we are. :)