Welcome to the Anthropocene!
We've got cyborg ecology! Augmented ecosystems! New nature! Rewilding! Postenvironmentalism! Novelty landscapes! Companion species ad much more!
In the age when human sociomatabolism become the dominant force on Earth, we have to rethink nature. We've never asked for this.
Itâs the first time RNA interference will be used to kill insect pests.
DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You donât spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in the DNA of the crop itself. If a pesky western corn rootworm comes munching, the plantâs self-made DvSnf7 dsRNA disrupts a critical rootworm gene and kills the pest. Â
The first product DvSnf7 dsRNA will show up in is SmartStax Pro, a line of genetically modified corn seeds made in collaboration between two agricultural giants, Monsanto and Dow. The RNAi part comes from Monsanto, which has its eye on a number of RNAi applications. Monsanto expects corn seed with RNAi to be on the market by the end of this decade.
For some corn farmers, this canât come soon enough. The western corn rootworm is known as the âbillion dollar pestâ because of the damage it wreaks on cornfields. And it keeps becoming resistant to the toxins farmers throw against it. First it was spray-on pesticides; then it was corn genetically modified to make the Bt toxin, a technology also commercialized by Monsanto. âWhen I go out and I talk to farmers,â says Joseph Spencer, an entomologist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, âyou talk about Bt resistance and invariably the moment will come where they say, âWeâll have the RNAi soon and thatâll take care it.ââ To cover all the bases, SmartStax Pro will contain both Bt and DvSnf7 dsRNA.
RNAi is useful because it can be highly specific: Itâs supposed to, in theory, turn off one specific gene in one specific species while leaving others unharmed. Plants and animals naturally use this process to âsilenceâ their own genes. And scientists have previously harnessed RNAi to create genetically modified crops, like applesand potatoes that donât brown because their browning gene is silenced. With Monsanto and Dowâs genetically modified corn, however, the DvSnf7 dsRNA is actually silencing a gene in another living organism, the western corn rootworm. Rather than modifying itself, it modifies its environment. Â
A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.
The law, which was supported by 58 percent of voters in a binding referendum on Sunday, bans new nuclear plants and subsidizes renewable energy.
ZURICH â Swiss voters on Sunday backed the governmentâs plan to ban new nuclear plants, provide billions of dollars in subsidies for renewable energy and help bail out struggling utilities.
Provisional final figures from a binding referendum showed support at 58.2 percent under the Swiss system of direct democracy, which gives voters the final say on major policy issues.
The law, known as Energy Strategy 2050, will ban the construction of new nuclear plants. Switzerland has five such plants, with the first scheduled to close in 2019. The others will be allowed to run as long as they meet safety standards.
Great read. I did not know there were 5,000 minerals in nature. Nor can I fathom that there are 180,000 artificial ones. Incredible. Also incredible to think that the number of minerals is a sort of indicator of the so-called Anthropocene (a new geologic age on earth dominated by humans).Â
The human handprint on the natural world has become evident in all too many ways in recent decades. The changing climate, the decline of wildlife and the loss of forests and other natural landscapes â all of these factors have led many scientists to conclude that weâre living in a new age theyâve dubbed the âAnthropocene,â in which the planet is dominated by human, rather than natural, influences.
Now scientists have presented some stunning new evidence in support of this idea. Theyâve found  human activity is responsible for a huge explosion in the diversity of minerals on Earth â possibly the biggest such event in the history of the planet, according to Robert Hazen, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washingtonâs Geophysical Laboratory who led the new research. The last major mineral diversification event is believed to have occurred about 2 billion years ago. Â
The research team, which includes Hazen and colleagues Marcus Origlieri and Robert Downs of the University of Arizona and Edward Grew of the University of Maine, published their findings Wednesday in the journal American Mineralogist.
âHumans are doing this amazing increase in the number of crystals and the kinds of crystals that occur at or near a surface â and many of these minerals are going to persist for billions of years,â Hazen said. âIf youâre a geologist who came back 100,000 years or a million or a billion years from now ⊠you would find amazing mineralogical evidence of a completely different time.â Â
The International Mineralogical Association (IMA) recognizes about 5,000 different mineral species. Every mineral must have a certain type of crystal structure, and it must be naturally occurring, forming on its own through geological processes. But the strict definition of a mineral may be growing a little hazier, Hazen said. Â
For one thing,Â
read the rest here:Â https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/01/humans-have-caused-an-explosion-of-never-before-seen-minerals-all-over-the-earth/Â
The sportswear giant has a goal of creating 1 million pairs of the popular running shoes from recovered ocean plastic in 2017.
Excerpt:
Adidas is getting serious about ocean plastic, turning the pollution âfrom threat into thread.â
The sportswear giant, along with partner Parley for the Oceans, has released three new models of its shoes made from marine debrisâthe Ultraboost, Ultraboost X and Ultraboost Uncaged.
According to Business Insider, each pair uses an average of 11 plastic bottles and incorporates recycled plastic into the shoeâs laces, heel webbing, heel lining and sock liner covers.
The company has a goal of creating 1 million pairs of the popular running shoes from recovered ocean plastic in 2017.
âThe new additions to the adidas x Parley collection are another step in our journey to creating one million pairs of Ultraboost from up-cycled marine plastic,â said Mathias Amm, a product category director at adidas.
The new, ocean-inspired sneakers will be available in-store and online May 10.
Adidas partnered with Parley for the Oceansâa team of artists, musicians, actors, directors, fashion designers, journalists, architects, product inventors and scientists addressing major threats to the worldâs oceansâ to develop materials made from ocean plastic waste to use in its products starting in 2016. Last November, adidas and Parley rolled out 7,000 pairs of its 3D-printed shoes made from recycled ocean plastics.
In one measurement, the entire sea has become a trash gyre.
The Arctic Ocean is small, shallow, andâmost importantlyâshrouded. Unlike the other large oceans of the world, it is closely hemmed in by Asia, Europe, and North America, with very few watery entrances in and out. Some oceanographers call it the âArctic Mediterranean Sea,â a nod both to its between-the-terra-ness and its similarity to that smaller ocean.
Often, that remoteness has played to its ecological advantage. Very few ships pass through the area (with all their attendant pollution and environmental disruption), at least compared to nearby waterways like the Bering Sea. It also helps that much of the Arctic freezes over every winter.
But a paper released this week in Science Advances argues that its location is now harming it. The first survey of the region has found that roughly 300 billion pieces of floating plastic, most of them tiny but visible to the unaided eye, have clogged the planetâs northernmost sea. The plastic, having been carried to the pole over decades, now has very few ways out.
It found a couple key differences in how plastic pollution works in the Arctic. To the south, in the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, plastic tends to accumulate in enormous subtropical âtrash patches.â While these are not the dense and churning gyres of garbage that many people imagine, they can be accurately described as parts of the ocean with a lot of garbage in them. In a way, theyâre like the asteroid belt, an otherwise void place in the world-ocean where plastic is much more likely to accumulate.
The Arctic does not so much have trash patches inside it; it is giant trash patch. The Arctic Ocean has about the same median density of plastic as the Atlantic and Pacific do. But unlike in the southern oceans, where plastic has unevenly congregated in certain areas, it has spread itself throughout the entirety of the Arctic.
Ocean currents matter because theyâll help researchers learn if the plastic is trapped in the Arctic permanently or whether it will eventually work its way out. Other scientists are still trying to come up with solutions to the worldâs long-term plastic problem. In the meantime, says Cabañas, the only way to fix the problem is to mitigate its scale. Countries and coastal communities should work harder to keep plastic from winding up in the ocean.
âWe should properly manage the plastic waste at its source,â he told me. âOnce the plastic enters the ocean, its destination and impacts are uncontrollable.â
The best way to encourage conservation is to share our success stories, not to write obituaries for the planet, says Nancy Knowlton.
In 2001, my colleagues and I at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Core to our programme was an interdisciplinary summer course, which brought together students ranging from marine biologists to physical oceanographers, economists and anthropologists. We thought of it as medical school for the ocean.
We began with what we thought was a logical starting point â the state of the ocean. These were depressing lectures. Doom and gloom consumed the entire course. Basically, we were training our students to write ever-more-refined obituaries for the seas.
We quickly realized the folly of focusing so much on the problems â we could see it on our studentsâ faces. There had to be another way. After all, in medical school the focus is on preserving life, not describing death. So in 2009, my husband Jeremy Jackson and I began running symposia at academic meetings called âBeyond the Obituariesâ, which were about success stories in ocean conservation. A small workshop in 2014 led to a Twitter campaign, #OceanOptimism, which has now reached more than 76 million Twitter accounts.
This journey has taught me several lessons. First, unrelenting doom and gloom in the absence of solutions is not effective. Social scientists have known for decades that large problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action. Yet much of conservation communication still seems to be focused on scaring people into caring.
As a community, we seem to be addicted to despair. For example, when the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) was bumped down from endangered to threatened status under the US Endangered Species Act last month, many environmentalists protested and worried about relaxed protections, rather than celebrating the practices (boat speed limits and winter-refuge safeguards) that enabled the animalsâ partial recovery.
Second, an extraordinary number of success stories are largely unknown â not just to the general public but also to conservation scientists, policymakers and philanthropists. Searching Twitter for #OceanOptimism (and its offspring #EarthOptimism) is still one of the best ways to find examples. My favourite instance of unrecognized success was the 2015 announcement of the recovery of seagrasses in Tampa Bay, Florida, to 1950s levels. Of the 300 or so people I have mentioned this to (including 200 marine scientists at a research meeting in Tampa), fewer than 10 were aware of this important conservation achievement, which was the result of keeping fertilizer-filled run-off waters from flowing into the bay. Elsewhere, stocks of Chilean loco (an edible sea snail), Madagascar octopus and marine fish in parts of the Philippines are healthier thanks to the establishment of small-scale, locally empowered, sustainable fisheries.
A decade ago Dubai had one of the largest ecological footprints of any city in the world. By 2050 it wants to have the smallest. Can it get there?
ââWhen you look at how Dubai has been growing, itâs just been this obsession with building outward into the desert,â says Yasser Elsheshtawy, an Egyptian architect who has taught at the university in Al Ain for 20 years. âThere were no limitations. Energy was cheap. You had cars. So why not?ââ
Congress can transform farming and food distribution with wise data policies.
Thereâs nothing more important than our food supply. America is a country synonymous with wheat farms and orange trees. But according to McKinsey & Company, about a third of food produced is lost or wasted every year. Globally, thatâs a $940 billion economic hit. Inefficiencies in planting, harvesting, water use and trucking, as well as uncertainty about weather, pests, consumer demand and other intangibles contribute to the loss. On the consumer end, inadequate packaging and labeling can lead to waste and potentially life-threatening illness due to food-borne pathogens.
These are problems desperately in need of solutions and many of those solutions can be found in emerging technologies.
Big data is moving into agriculture in a big way. Need proof? Several well-known investors recently dropped a combined $40 million into Farmers Business Network, a data analytics startup. Venture capital has flooded the ag tech space, with investment increasing 80% annually since 2012, as investors realize big data can revolutionize the food chain from farm to table.
Sensors on fields and crops are starting to provide literally granular data points on soil conditions, as well as detailed info on wind, fertilizer requirements, water availability and pest infestations. GPS units on tractors, combines and trucks can help determine optimal usage of heavy equipment. Data analytics can help prevent spoilage by moving products faster and more efficiently. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, can patrol fields and alert farmers to crop ripeness or potential problems. RFID-based traceability systems can provide a constant data stream on farm products as they move through the supply chain, from the farm to the compost or recycle bin. Individual plants can be monitored for nutrients and growth rates. Analytics looking forward and back assist in determining the best crops to plant, considering both sustainability and profitability. Agricultural technology can also help farmers hedge against losses and even out cash flow.
The software market for these sorts of precision farming tools (such as yield monitoring, field mapping, crop scouting and weather forecasting) is expected to grow 14% by 2022 in the United States alone. Researchers suggest the full-scale adoption of these technologies could mean an increase in farm productivity unseen since mechanization.
For consumers, packaging sensors detect gases emitted as food starts to spoil and verify packaging integrity and freshness. Algorithms can even help create a recipe out of whatever you have in the pantry. Several startups are building finger-sized scanners that tell the composition of food on your plate, from ingredients to nutrient content, by sending data to an app on your smartphone. These applications help not only health-conscience consumers but also those with chemical sensitivities or food allergies. Some projections say it could help reduce overall health care costs, too, as consumers are increasingly empowered to customize their nutrition and avoid potentially spoiled or contaminated foods.
The equine ability to read human emotion through sound and touch is exquisite. But horses can also read the expression on a personâs faceâas a Biology Letters paper earlier this month confirmed for the first time. This sophisticated capacity has only ever previously been demonstrated in dogsâand even further disproves the myth (that I believed until now, despite riding for 15 years) that horses have bad eyesight. While horses canât see color, and have a blind spot directly in front of them as a result of eyes positioned on the side of their head, their vision is actually more acute than domestic catsâ or dogsâ.
A University of Sussex research team, led by Amy Smith alongside the veteran animal-behavior scientist Karen McComb, showed a group of 28 horses large photographs of manâs face making either a positive (smiling) or negative (angry, brows furrowed) emotional expression. The results showed that horses were able to automatically distinguish between the two expressions, and what they meant.
The horses tended to look at the angry faces out of their left eyeâa response well-documented in horses and in dogs, indicating that an animal is engaging the right hemisphere of its brain where novel and fear-provoking stimuli are processed. The horsesâ heart rates also rose more quickly when they were presented with the angry face. Being able to tell a smiling handler from an angry one is a useful skill for a domestic horseâbeing approached by a frown rarely results in happy consequences.
The authors speculated that horses may simply have been applying an ancestral ability to read the facial expressions of their own species âonto a morphologically different species,â in this case, humans. These same University of Sussex scientists found last year that horses have 17 distinct facial expressionsâmore than dogsâ 16, or chimpanzeesâ 14âmany of which are similar to humansâ 27 facial movements, like creased brows or eyes widened in fear. (So far, this method of coding facial expressions hasnât been applied to wild animals, and those that arenât part of humansâ evolutionary lineage.)
However, since the horses tested in this particular study came from riding schools, where they interact with humans all day every day, their face-reading ability may also have been learned within their lifetime. Previous research has demonstrated that familiarity was a significant factor in dogâs ability to recognize human expressionsâthey performed better when faced with their owners than with a stranger.
Last century, the cliff-dwelling bird of prey almost became extinct in Britain. Now it has reinvented itself as a city creature. What is behind this spectacular recovery?
These fearsome wild birds of prey, the fastest member of the animal kingdom, are thriving in the capital. There were three pairs in London at the turn of the century; now there are 30, probably the second-highest density of peregrines anywhere in the world â after New York. The peregrine, once considered a bird of lonely rocky cliffs, almost fell extinct in Britain in the last century. Now it has reinvented itself as an urban creature. Pairs nest in many cities and towns, including Manchester, Derby, Coventry, Chichester, Ipswich and Norwich. The peregrine is safer in the city than the countryside.
It seems ironic that this supremely wild animal is safer in a busy city than the countryside. In rural Britain, peregrines are still illegally shot or poisoned. Conservationists believe that these birds of prey are illegally killed because they threaten the profitability of lucrative grouse shoots. Lindo also points out that pigeon-fanciers âabsolutely detestâ peregrines. âAny peregrine nesting in an urban area is less likely to be persecuted,â says Lindo. âBecoming more urban is a blessing, but they still face dangers when they wander. When the youngsters move off into the surrounding countryside, thatâs where their problems start.â
Peregrine populations in provincial places are limited by the lack of high buildings, apart from cathedral spires. But as London becomes more high-rise, is there any limit to its peregrine population? Just as city-dwelling people adapt to less personal space, so do peregrines. According to Morrison, the average peregrine territory has shrunk from 2.5 miles (4km) in radius at the turn of the century to 1.5 miles today. âI get contacted a lot by people saying, âWeâve got pigeons, can we have peregrines?ââ says Morrison. âEveryone wants them.â
Geochemical signatures include elevated levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticide residues, as well as increased 207/206Pb ratios from leaded gasoline, starting between ~1945 and 1950. Soil nitrogen and phosphorus inventories have doubled in the past century because of increased fertilizer use, generating widespread signatures in lake strata and nitrate levels in Greenland ice that are higher than at any time during the previous 100,000 years.
Detonation of the Trinity atomic device at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945 initiated local nuclear fallout from 1945 to 1951, whereas thermonuclear weapons tests generated a clear global signal from 1952 to 1980, the so-called âbomb spikeâ of excess 14C, 239Pu, and other artificial radionuclides that peaks in 1964.
Atmospheric CO2 and CH4 concentrations depart from Holocene and even Quaternary patterns starting at ~1850, and more markedly at ~1950, with an associated steep fall in Ύ13C that is captured by tree rings and calcareous fossils. An average global temperature increase of 0.6o to 0.9oC from 1900 to the present, occurring predominantly in the past 50 years, is now rising beyond the Holocene variation of the past 1400 years, accompanied by a modest enrichment of Ύ18O in Greenland ice starting at ~1900. Global sea levels increased at 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/year from 1993 to 2010 and are now rising above Late Holocene rates. Depending on the trajectory of future anthropogenic forcing, these trends may reach or exceed the envelope of Quaternary interglacial conditions.
Scientists discover a 'clear signal' of urbanisation in the evolution of organisms around the globe.
In analysis of more than 1,600 cases around the globe, researchers said the changes could affect ecosystem services important to humans.
âWe found that there is a clear urban signal of phenotypic change, and also greater phenotypic change in urbanising systems compared to natural or non-urban anthropogenic systems,â said co-author Marina Alberti from the University of Washingtonâs Department of Urban Design and Planning.
âSo urbanisation, globally, is clearly affecting things.â
Professor Alberti said the changes that were observed in more than 1,600 studies were having an impact on evolution and that human activity, in the form of urbanisation, would have a lasting legacy on life on Earth.
These findings add weight to the idea that the planet is now entering an Anthropocene epoch, a geological measurement of time in which humans are having a significant global impact on the Earthâs geology and ecosystems.
Prof Alberti and colleagues suggested that these changes meant that the alteration in the functions performed by the species, such as food production or the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases, would also be modified.
âThere have been a lot of studies on individual cities but there had been no studies that considered the global picture to identify a global urbanisation influence on evolution,â she added.
âWe live on an urban planet already. This is a change that has implications for where we are heading in the future.
"We are changing the evolution of Earth and urbanisation has a role, a significant role, in that.â
The country's electricity is now the cleanest it has been in 60 years.
In 2016, just 9.3% of British (not UK â as Northern Ireland is calculated separately) electricity was generated from coal, down from more than 40% in 2012. This is the lowest share coal has ever provided in the systemâs 100-plus year history, and the lowest absolute quantity burnt since the start of World War II.
In fact, at 10.2% of generation, wind farms produced more electricity, a significant milestone in Britainâs low-carbon transition. Natural gas has picked up most of the slack and posted its best year since 2010; but nuclear, solar and biomass are all also on the rise.
The demise of coal means British carbon emissions from electricity generation have halved over the past four years. This is not greenwashing or creative accounting. When factoring in the emissions released abroad from producing electricity and biomass that is then imported, Britainâs electricity sector released 82.4m tonnes of CO2. The last time annual emissions were below 100m tonnes was back in 1955.
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