SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
All Climates and Creatures, Great and Small
Last week the Economist looked into the costs and benefits of mitigating climate change, concluding that sequestering carbon by protecting rainforest, while feasible, may not be quite the bargain that some claim it to be. Besides being expensive, climate change may also lead to conflict. Investigators at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a strong connection between unusually warm years and the likelihood of civil wars in African nations. At the same time, some climate researchers took a credibility hit in the eyes of skeptics when their e-mail was hacked and released to the public.
In other environmental news, the New York Times reported on efforts by Columbia University conservation biologists to turn the environmentally degraded town of Miches, Dominican Republic, into an ecotourism site. Back stateside, the EPA announced tests of permeable paving materials that would reduce storm water runoff, particularly in cities, where 10 percent of the land area may be paved. Perhaps such developments will help control whatever is causing male fish in the Potomac River to grow eggs.
Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species, and Sean B. Carroll offers his thoughts on Darwin's near-obsession with "contrivances"—and particularly those of the land snail—in an essay in the New York Times. But Darwin could scarcely have imagined what a 10-year census of marine life below sunlight's reach would find—17,650 species, ranging from strange to utterly bizarre. For sheer photogenic brilliance, however, it would be hard to equal the exotic Ethiopian monkeys known as geladas, as this Smithsonian article and photo gallery demonstrate. Not nearly so attractive but fascinating in their own right, rats starred in a story of disease transmission in Baltimore.
Finally, sometimes fundamentals go unnoticed. Take, for example, the leaf-cutter ant, which has long posed a mystery: How do they feed as many as 8 million individuals in a single colony on nitrogen-poor leaves? It turns out that the fungus that the ants produce harbors a bacterium that is able to fix nitrogen from the air, providing 45 to 60 percent of the nitrogen in their food.
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