Last March a new kind of flu came on the scene–the 2009 H1N1 flu, a k a swine flu. Hatched from an eldritch mingling of viruses infecting humans, birds, and pigs, it swept across the world. Here in the United States, the CDC estimates that between 41 and 84 million people came down with swine flu between April and January. Of those infected, between 8,330 and 17,160 are estimated to have died. For more details on the evolution of this new flu strain, here’s a video ofa lecture I gave in November.
The warming climate may earn carbon dioxide all the headlines (including ones about senators who can’t tell the difference between a couple blizzards and a 130-year climate record), but the gas is having another effect that’s less familiar but no less devastating. Some of the carbon dioxide we pump into the air gets sucked into the ocean, where it lowers the pH of seawater. We’ve already dropped the pH of the ocean measurably, and as we burn more fossil fuels we will drop it more. Ocean acidification has the potential to wreak world-wide havoc on marine life.
Today in Yale Environment 360, I write about scientists comparing today’s ocean acidification to the last time something comparable happened–55 million years ago. Short answer: today’s is big. Really, really big. Check it out.
Originally published February 15, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Yale Environment 360, February 15, 2010
The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul.
They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.
Continue reading “An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification”
Discover, February 15, 2010
Any halfway decent thesaurus will provide a long list of synonyms for fear, and yet they are not very good substitutes. No one would confuse having the creeps with being terrified. It is strange that we have so many words for fear, when fear is such a unitary, primal feeling. Perhaps all those synonyms are just linguistic inventions. Perhaps, if we looked inside our brains, we would just find plain old fear.
That is certainly how things seemed in the early 1900s, when scientists began studying how we come to be scared of things. They built on Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments on dogs, in which Pavlov would ring a bell before giving his dogs food. Eventually they learned to associate the bell with food and began to salivate in anticipation.
Continue reading “The Primitive, Complicated, Essential Emotion Called Fear”
Charlie writes, “I am a scientist at the University of Minnesota. In 1999, as an undergrad on a plant science internship, a friend and I were sitting on our dorm roof, wondering what the best nerdy science tattoo would be. The double helix down the leg or back was suggested, but we concluded that a chloroplast was a better fit for our scientific interests. As the photon-collecting organelle in plants, it’s the source of energy for nearly all plant life and a fascinating biochemical machine. At that point in our careers, we found something that would represent our fascination with plants, no matter what field we chose to pursue. He is in botanical education (and didn’t go through with the tattoo), I’m in horticulture.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published February 14, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.