Science/Technology blog

Pacific Madrone

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Imagine your dream college:

A green campus with a swan-filled lake to dream by and shady spots to sit and contemplate, classrooms with state of the art sound, dynamic classmates, organic and delicious food, shade-grown coffee, vibrant music and festive gatherings, small classes led by industry experts and large lectures led by industry heroes who create rapt, teary and inspired students. Now imagine that everything is focused on your favorite subject matter (and mine): nature and the environment. Wake up! It isn’t a dream, Friends. It is Bioneers, a conference happening this October 17-19 at The Marin Civic Center.

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Snipped from Scotsman.com.

I have had a strong curiosity about dolphins for a very long time. It started after I watched a special on them when I was a kid about how they could tell colors, shapes, sizes and solve problems. They could do all kinds of amazing things that no other comparable animal could do. Then, my curiosity peaked a decade later when I read an article about how the dolphin “language” was more complex than any of the human languages. I started thinking to myself, “what if dolphins were as smart or smarter than us, but they just lack an opposable thumb to show off their ‘intelligence’.”

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Welcome to the 25th weekly Carnival of Space — the best space-related blog carnival that you’ll find within a parsec of home! I’ve gathered up a bountiful crop of blogging goodness for you, so let’s get right down to business.

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (a.k.a. SETI)

If these gizmos were pointed at Washington, D.C., it’d be a long, grueling search…

Starting right at home (but looking outward) the interwebs are all atwitter with discussions of the new Allen Telescope Array. Named after Microsoft co-founder (and major project funding source) Paul Allen, the ATA has been a bit of a soap opera to date. It’s planning was announced, then construction was delayed, funding was on, then off… Well, as of the 11th of October, this beastie is officially a going deal.

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original image from flickr user
“Nemo’s great uncle“

Three years ago, I joined a small group at the Academy of Sciences named the Greenteam. Little did I know that green issues would be such a hot topic today because of global warming. Many people feel that little to nothing can be done about turning back the clock. Yet, if everyone did a few things it would lead to significant progress. I’ve observed over the past two years that little things people do consistently have a greater impact than going to the extremes. Our Executive Director recently took a step toward sustainability by banning water bottles at meetings and functions, noting that bottled water is expensive, wastes plastic, and is harmful to the environment. Better and cheaper alternatives are tap water as well as filtered water. The following bullet points explain why tap water is a more sustainable choice:

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This fall, fishing was banned or sharply limited in 18 percent of California’s ocean waters from Half Moon Bay to Santa Barbara under a landmark state plan. But that was only the first part. Now, scientists need to see how fast sea life recovers. QUEST finds out: how do you count the fish in the sea?

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In the Midwest and Northeast United States, homeowners are anticipating increased fuel oil costs this coming winter. Here in California, we don’t face their kind of extreme weather (in my freshman year at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, I woke up one morning in January to -25°F weather with the prospect of a one mile walk to a math class–it took me several months to thaw) but heating costs are still a significant part of our budgets, especially for low-income families. And electricity costs are still at an all-time high across the country and are expected to keep rising.

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Can you imagine what San Francisco Bay looked like 15,000 years ago?

Actually at that time– during the last ice age– San Francisco Bay wasn’t a bay at all. Instead, it was a valley dotted with grazing antelope. Hills jutted up here and there (destined to become the Bay’s islands). The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers of the Central Valley joined forces in the vast marshy Delta, flowed west through a 300-foot deep gorge in the Coast Range (now the Golden Gate), and across a broad coastal plain to the ocean. California’s coastline was out past the Farallon Islands.

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Did we get our backbones from animals like this?Lately I have been reading a book by Jeffrey Schwartz called Sudden Origins. In it Dr. Schwartz talks about the idea that species are not made gradually but instead just suddenly appear (in geological time anyway). Reading the book was a bit like panning for gold. It was hard work and I needed to sift through a lot of silt but every now and then I got a nugget of gold. One such nugget was about where backbones may have come from. Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a time when no animals had backbones. These animals also weren’t bilaterally symmetrical. This just means that their bodies weren’t set up as two sided (think right and left halves of a human). Instead, they were more like sponges and starfish. So how do you get from a starfish to a regular old fish? Seems like you’d need to make an awful lot of changes. You would– unless you were looking at the larval forms of some of these animals. Some modern creatures that just sit on the bottom of the sea have a larval form that moves around. This is useful in setting up distant colonies. What is interesting is that some of these larvae have bilateral symmetry– they have a right and a left side. And some of them even have the beginnings of a notochord on their back! So all we would need to do is somehow freeze the beast at the larval stage and you’re halfway to something with a backbone. Basically then, we need for the larva to sexually mature before it physically does. This sounds like a toughie but it isn’t as hard as you might think. It is common enough that scientists even have one of their awful names for it– neoteny.

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Grizzly bears are iconic Californian mammals — they’re on our state flag; many creeks, hills and passes are named after them; and they’re the mascot of many UC schools — but you won’t ever see one out in your backyard or anywhere else in California. Unlike black bears, which are relatively common in the state, grizzlies went extinct in California sometime in the 1920s. The last verified account was an individual shot in 1922 in Tulare County. The species is now restricted to populations that survive well north of California, in Idaho, Montana and through Canada and Alaska.

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