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March 31, 2017
Certain pathogenic microbes in the environments of the killer whales are threatening the species to clinical disease. There is a type of endangered whale, the southern resident killer whale, that live in the Pacific Ocean, whose population has dropped by almost 40 whales over the past 10 years. Changes in habitat, higher number of boats carrying cargo, noise, contaminants, and less prey have all been found to be causing this species population to drop. But, these do not explain why the population has not recovered. A scientist discovered that there is bacteria in the whales that cause disease in humans and land-based animals like Slamonella, Phoma, and Penicillium. The bacteria could be in the whales because of waste and runoff that introduce microbes into the water and cause fungi to grow in the whale's mouth. There is also evidence of antibiotic resistance in the bacteria that could be from human activities. Overall, the scientists were able to find ways to check a sick whale using the microbiata and pathogens that were exhaled by the whales.

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Droplets and exhaled breath caught from the blowholes of killer whales along the Pacific coast are providing scientists with insights into whale health and revealing bacteria and fungi that may be a threat to the mammals.

"We wanted to find out what sort of bacteria and fungi represent in healthy whales and the potential pathogens they are being exposed to in their environment," said Stephen Raverty, the lead author on the study and an adjunct professor at UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. "In some circumstances, these pathogenic microbes could pose a threat to the animals and contribute to clinical disease."

A group of fish-eating killer whales, known as southern resident killer whales, are an endangered species that live in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California north to the Salish Sea off the western coast of British Columbia. Over the course of one decade in the 1990s, their numbers dropped from about 108 animals to about 70. Some of the threats to whales include changes to their habitat like increased shipping traffic, noise, contaminants, and less prey. But these factors alone do not explain why the whale population hasn't recovered.

This latest effort gives scientists a look at the microbiome of the large mammals. The findings can be used as a baseline to compare how the health of whales change over time, especially when there is evidence of disease.

Raverty and his colleagues found bacteria and fungi in the whales that cause disease in humans and land-based animals including Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus and fungi such as Penicillium, and Phoma, among others. These results were compared to the microbial pathogens that Raverty and his colleagues are finding in whale autopsies, also known as necropsies, of stranded killer whales in the region.

"We're not sure if these microbes naturally occur in the marine environment or if they may be terrestrially sourced," said Raverty. "These animals are long ranging and as they migrate along the coast, they are exposed to agricultural runoff and urban discharge which may introduce a variety of microbes into the water."

Researchers also found evidence of antibiotic resistance in some of the bacteria, possibly related to human activities in coastal regions and in the marine habitat.

"Assessing whether animals are healthy or sick is virtually impossible to do for live animals as big as whales," said Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at UBC who was not involved in the study. "Raverty and his colleagues found a way to assess health by collecting microbiota and pathogens when the whales exhaled between dives. It is an ingenious way to give whales a checkup."

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dolphins and whales; marine biology; sea life; microbes and more; animals; fish; endangered animals; bacteria

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'Whale breath' reveals bacteria threatening endangered killer whales

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Droplets and exhaled breath caught from the blowholes of killer whales along the Pacific coast are providing scientists with insights into whale health and revealing bacteria and fungi that may be a threat to the mammals.

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China's Severe Winter tied with Climate Change

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China's Severe Winter tied with Climate Change

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March 15, 2017
The sea levels changing and the snowfall changes have effected China's winter monsoon, which were creating different conditions in the environment that could "trap pollution" over the country. A professor in Georgia said that the "Emissions in China have been decreasing over the last four years, but the severe winter haze is not getting better...because of a rapid change in the high polar regions where sea ice is decreasing and snowfall is increasing." She claims that because of this, cold air is not reaching eastern China to clear out the pollution. China does have regulations to control emissions that go into the atmosphere which seem to be working, which causes scientists to think of other factors that could contribute to the change in weather. Researches had to analyze historical records, creating a Pollution Potential Index that used air temperature and wind speeds to show conditions over Eastern China to help predict what is causing this. The Index was able to prove to scientists that there was something preventing the ventilation of the air, leading them to be able to work with that and help the pollution of China.

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China's severe winter air pollution problems may be worsened by changes in atmospheric circulation prompted by Arctic sea ice loss and increased Eurasian snowfall -- both caused by global climate change.

Modeling and data analysis done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest that sea ice and snowfall changes have shifted China's winter monsoon, helping create stagnant atmospheric conditions that trap pollution over the country's major population and industrial centers. Those changes in regional atmospheric conditions are frustrating efforts to address pollution through emission controls.

"Emissions in China have been decreasing over the last four years, but the severe winter haze is not getting better," said Yuhang Wang, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Mostly, that's because of a very rapid change in the high polar regions where sea ice is decreasing and snowfall is increasing. This perturbation keeps cold air from getting into the eastern parts of China where it would flush out the air pollution."

To be reported March 15 in the journal Science Advances, the research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency. The paper presents a clear example of how large-scale perturbations caused by global climate change can have significant regional impacts, and is believed to be the first to link sea ice and snowfall levels to regional air pollution.

Haze problems in the East China Plains -- which include the capital Beijing -- first gained worldwide attention during the winter of 2013 when an instrument at the U.S. embassy recorded extremely high levels of PM 2.5 particles. The haze prompted the Chinese government to institute strict targets for reducing emissions from industry and other sources.

Though these emission controls appear to be working, the haze during December and January continues. So Wang and colleagues Yufei Zou, Yuzhong Zhang and Ja-Ho Koo wondered if other factors may be playing a role.

Long-term air quality measurements aren't available in China, so the researchers had to piece together estimates based on visibility measures and satellite data. To analyze the historical records, they created a new Pollution Potential Index (PPI) that used air temperature gradient anomalies and surface wind speeds as a proxy for ventilation conditions over eastern China.

"Once we generated the PPI and combined it with the visibility data, it was obvious that January 2013 was well beyond anything that had ever been seen before going back at least three decades," said Wang. "But in that month emissions had not changed, so we knew there had to be another factor."

The East China Plains consist of interconnected basins surrounded by mountain ranges to the west and the ocean to the east, a mirror image of the polluted Southern California. Pollution generated by industry and vehicles can be removed effectively only by horizontal dispersion or by vertical mixing in winter, and when those processes fail to move out stagnant air, pollution builds up. It seemed likely that something was preventing the ventilation that would have kept the air cleaner.

The researchers next looked at climate features such as sea ice, snowfall, El Niños, and Pacific Oscillations. They conducted principal component and maximum covariance analyses and found correlations of stagnant air conditions over China to Arctic sea ice -- which reached a record low in the fall of 2012 -- and snowfall in the upper latitudes of Siberia, which had reached a record high earlier in the winter. They then used atmospheric model simulations to study how those factors change large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns and pollution ventilation over eastern China.

"The reductions in sea ice and increase in snowfall have the effect of damping the climatological pressure ridge structure over China," Wang said. "That flattens the temperature and pressure gradients and moves the East Asian Winter Monsoon to the east, decreasing wind speeds and creating an atmospheric circulation that makes the air in China more stagnant."

The results of the model were consistent with observations that Korea and Japan had been unusually cold that winter, while eastern China had been unusually warm -- both suggesting that the cold center had moved.

The winter of 2017 saw the same factors, with low levels of Arctic sea ice in September 2016, high snowfall -- and severe haze. Wang says those factors are likely to continue as the global climate change disrupts the normal structure of the atmosphere.

"Despite the efforts to reduce emissions, we think that haze will probably continue for the future," he said. "This is partly climate-driven now, so it probably won't get much better in the winter. Emissions are no longer the only driver of these conditions."

Wang hopes to continue the study using new data from China's air quality monitoring network. The impact of global climate change, he said, may be unique to China because of its geography and sensitivity to changes in atmospheric circulation structure. Though the problem is now manifested in air pollution, he said the results of the study should encourage the nation to continue addressing climate change.

"The very rapid change in polar warming is really having a large impact on China," he said. "That gives China an incentive to not only follow through on air pollutant emission reductions, and also to look at the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our research shows that cutting greenhouse gases would help with the winter haze problem."

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climate; environmental issues; global warming; air pollution; environmental awareness; environmental science; air quality; pollution

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China's severe winter haze tied to effects of global climate change

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China's severe winter air pollution problems may be worsened by changes in atmospheric circulation prompted by Arctic sea ice loss and increased Eurasian snowfall -- both caused by global climate change.

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March 15, 2017
The article is discussing the aftermath of the Permian mass extinction, where 81% of marine species were lost. Studies were made using marine life invertebrate fossils that found that the extinction rates were high at two times during the early Triassic period. The high rates of extinction were caused by carbon isotope shifts causing stress on the environment and the organisms. When there was the second biotic crisis, the diversity of the ecosystem mincreased . The scientists hypothesis that marine recover after the Permian mass extinction was delayed by biotic crisis, was supported. The conditions after the crisis that caused the animals to have to adapt, are similar to the ones that will take place in the future because of climate change. This will allow scientists to do studies on how the marine life adapted, which will help them see how to prevent them from dying in a similar scenario due to Global warming.

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Biotic crises during the Triassic period may have delayed marine recovery after a mass extinction during the late Permian, according to a study published March 15, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by William Foster from University of Texas, Austin, USA, and colleagues.

The late Permian mass extinction was a catastrophic biotic crisis- an estimated 81 percent of marine species were lost, and recovery took longer than for any other extinction event. Some researchers had previously hypothesized that biotic crises subsequently impeded the recovery of life at the bottom of the oceans. To investigate further, Foster and colleagues examined marine invertebrate fossils in the Werfen Formation in the Dolomites, Italy. They assessed diversity and other measures of ocean floor marine communities during the Triassic, the geological period which followed the mass extinction. They were able to gather the highest-resolution, most continuous dataset from this formation to date.

The researchers found that extinction rates of these marine invertebrates peaked twice during the early Triassic. Moreover, these raised extinction rates were associated with carbon isotope shifts, possibly indicating increased stress in the environment which could have affected species' ability to survive and diversify. After the second biotic crisis, ecological diversity increased, possibly following a relaxation of the environmental stresses that had previously limited marine recovery. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that after the late Permian mass extinction, marine recovery was delayed by subsequent biotic crises.

William Foster, the lead author on the study, says, "The early evolution of marine ecosystems 252 million years ago wasn't only ushered by the greatest mass extinction of all time, but also affected by two more subsequent extinction events associated with climate change. This is not only interesting from an evolutionary point of view, but also because those environmental conditions that life had to adapt to, to survive back then, are similar to those predicted for future climate warming scenarios."
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Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Foster WJ, Danise S, Price GD, Twitchett RJ. Subsequent biotic crises delayed marine recovery following the late Permian mass extinction event in northern Italy. PLoS ONE, 2017 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172321

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environmental awareness; global warming; oceanography; ecology; dinosaurs; evolution; early climate; origin of life

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Marine recovery after mass extinction was likely delayed by further biotic crises: Late Permian mass extinction was followed by two Triassic extinction events

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Biotic crises during the Triassic period may have delayed marine recovery after a mass extinction during the late Permian, according to a study published March 15, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by William Foster from University of Texas, Austin, USA, and colleagues.

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March 2, 2017
There has been a new theory that the Amazon Rainforest's trees were cultivated from indigenous people decades and decades ago. Scientists are able to compare forest composition and analyze them to figure out how Columbian people influenced the biodiversity of the rainforest. There were 85 tree species that the scientists were studying that were known to be shaped by Amazonian people for food and shelter thousands of years ago and appeared to be much more common today as being the mature trees that we would find in the Amazon. Before finding this out, people believed that the Amazon Rainforest was an untouched piece of nature. This causes a debate among different scientists about the people who settled in the Amazon thousands of years ago. This also changes the way that the scientists will feel about all of the destruction to the forest, because now they know that lots of hard work was put in by the pre-Colombian people to cultivate the trees.

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We often think of the Amazon rainforest as a vast expanse of nature untouched by humans. But a new study in Science suggests that's not true -- in fact, today's rainforest is shaped by trees that were cultivated by indigenous peoples thousands of years ago.

"Some of the tree species that are abundant in Amazonian forests today, like cacao, açaí, and Brazil nut, are probably common because they were planted by people who lived there long before the arrival of European colonists," says Nigel Pitman, the Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist at Chicago's Field Museum and a co-author of the study.

The team made the discovery by overlaying data from more than 1,000 forest surveys on a map of more than 3,000 archaeological sites across the Amazon. By comparing forest composition at varying distances from archaeological sites, the analysis generated the first Amazon-wide picture of how pre-Columbian peoples influenced Amazonian biodiversity. The study focused on 85 tree species known to have been domesticated by Amazonian peoples for food, shelter, or other uses over the last several thousand years. The researchers found that throughout the Amazon basin, these species were five times more likely to be common in mature upland forests than non-domesticated species. In some parts of the basin, domesticated species were found to be both more common and more diverse in forests closer to archaeological sites.

"That's even the case for some really remote, mature forests that we'd typically assumed to be pristine and undisturbed," says Pitman.

The finding promises to heat up a long-simmering debate among scientists about how thousands of years of human settlement in the Amazon basin have influenced modern-day patterns of Amazonian biodiversity. The immense size of Amazonian forests has historically hampered archaeological research and given the impression of an untouched landscape, but a large number of new archaeological sites have been discovered in recent years.

The team, made up by hundreds of ecologists and social scientists worldwide, was led by Carolina Levis, a PhD student at Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research and Wagenigen University and Research in the Netherlands. "For many years, ecological studies ignored the influence of pre-Columbian peoples on the forests we see today. We found that a quarter of these domesticated tree species are widely distributed in the basin and dominate large expanses of forest. These species are vital for the livelihood and economy of Amazonian peoples and indicate that the Amazonian flora is in part a surviving heritage of its former inhabitants," says Levis.

The study also pinpointed regions of the Amazon that today concentrate especially high diversities and large populations of domesticated species. Southwestern Amazonia, where large stands of Brazil nut trees remain a foundation of local residents' livelihoods, is one such example. Other regions showed fewer domesticated species, or a weaker relationship between domesticated species and archeological sites, highlighting the need for more research on the history of Amazonian settlement. The degree to which the recent history of Amazonian settlement has affected the distribution and abundance of domesticated species in the Amazon also remains to be studied.

While the small number of domesticated species used in the study was sufficient to reveal a strong human signal in modern forests, the authors point out that the signal may be even stronger than they documented, since hundreds of other Amazonian tree species were used by pre-Colombian peoples and also deserve study. Untangling the complex interplay of historical, environmental, and ecological factors structuring the 16,000-species Amazonian tree flora remains a focus of the team's work.

"The questions are pressing," says Pitman, "since both types of pre-Columbian heritage -- archeological sites and the forests that surround them -- are at risk from road-building, mining, and other threats to the Amazon."
Story Source:
Materials provided by Field Museum. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

C. Levis, F. R. C. Costa, F. Bongers, M. Peña-Claros, C. R. Clement, A. B. Junqueira, E. G. Neves, E. K. Tamanaha, F. O. G. Figueiredo, R. P. Salomão, C. V. Castilho, W. E. Magnusson, O. L. Phillips, J. E. Guevara, D. Sabatier, J.-F. Molino, D. Cárdenas López, A. M. Mendoza, N. C. A. Pitman, A. Duque, P. Núñez Vargas, C. E. Zartman, R. Vasquez, A. Andrade, J. L. Camargo, T. R. Feldpausch, S. G. W. Laurance, W. F. Laurance, T. J. Killeen, H. E. Mendonça Nascimento, J. C. Montero, B. Mostacedo, I. L. Amaral, I. C. Guimarães Vieira, R. Brienen, H. Castellanos, J. Terborgh, M. de Jesus Veiga Carim, J. R. da Silva Guimarães, L. de Souza Coelho, F. D. de Almeida Matos, F. Wittmann, H. F. Mogollón, G. Damasco, N. Dávila, R. García-Villacorta, E. N. H. Coronado, T. Emilio, D. de Andrade Lima Filho, J. Schietti, P. Souza, N. Targhetta, J. A. Comiskey, B. S. Marimon, B.-H. Marimon, D. Neill, A. Alonso, L. Arroyo, F. A. Carvalho, F. C. de Souza, F. Dallmeier, M. P. Pansonato, J. F. Duivenvoorden, P. V. A. Fine, P. R. Stevenson, A. Araujo-Murakami, G. A. Aymard C., C. Baraloto, D. D. do Amaral, J. Engel, T. W. Henkel, P. Maas, P. Petronelli, J. D. Cardenas Revilla, J. Stropp, D. Daly, R. Gribel, M. Ríos Paredes, M. Silveira, R. Thomas-Caesar, T. R. Baker, N. F. da Silva, L. V. Ferreira, C. A. Peres, M. R. Silman, C. Cerón, F. C. Valverde, A. Di Fiore, E. M. Jimenez, M. C. Peñuela Mora, M. Toledo, E. M. Barbosa, L. C. de Matos Bonates, N. C. Arboleda, E. de Sousa Farias, A. Fuentes, J.-L. Guillaumet, P. Møller Jørgensen, Y. Malhi, I. P. de Andrade Miranda, J. F. Phillips, A. Prieto, A. Rudas, A. R. Ruschel, N. Silva, P. von Hildebrand, V. A. Vos, E. L. Zent, S. Zent, B. B. L. Cintra, M. T. Nascimento, A. A. Oliveira, H. Ramirez-Angulo, J. F. Ramos, G. Rivas, J. Schöngart, R. Sierra, M. Tirado, G. van der Heijden, E. V. Torre, O. Wang, K. R. Young, C. Baider, A. Cano, W. Farfan-Rios, C. Ferreira, B. Hoffman, C. Mendoza, I. Mesones, A. Torres-Lezama, M. N. U. Medina, T. R. van Andel, D. Villarroel, R. Zagt, M. N. Alexiades, H. Balslev, K. Garcia-Cabrera, T. Gonzales, L. Hernandez, I. Huamantupa-Chuquimaco, A. G. Manzatto, W. Milliken, W. P. Cuenca, S. Pansini, D. Pauletto, F. R. Arevalo, N. F. Costa Reis, A. F. Sampaio, L. E. Urrego Giraldo, E. H. Valderrama Sandoval, L. Valenzuela Gamarra, C. I. A. Vela, H. ter Steege. Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition. Science, 2017; 355 (6328): 925 DOI: 10.1126/science.aal0157

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nature; trees; new species; extinction; forest; rainforests; ecology; exotic species

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Ancient peoples shaped the Amazon rainforest: Trees domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples remain more common in forests near ancient settlements

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We often think of the Amazon rainforest as a vast expanse of nature untouched by humans. But a new study suggests that's not true -- in fact, today's rainforest is shaped by trees that were cultivated by indigenous peoples thousands of years ago.

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November 3, 2016
Germany is set to launch its first hydrogen fuel cell train in 2017. This will leave zero emission because of the replacement of carbon dioxide with steam. The fuel source is recycled, and the train is said to work just as well, if not better, and standard regional trains. The recycled fuel source is the water waste from the chemical industry. The hydrogen is burned with oxygen from the atmosphere, which creates the power for the train to run. The first route of this train is 60 miles and will be in Lower Saxony. If all goes well, Germany is hoping to replace over 400 of their current trains with this new, zero emission train. Aside from Germany, other countries such as Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands have shown interest in this train and will most likely be planning to have it in their land.

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Alstom

Steam locomotion is about to go full circle, as Germany prepares for the launch of the first hydrogen fuel cell train-replacing carbon dioxide emissions for steam.

The Coradia iLint regional train is being built by French engineering firm Alstom and is expected to be rolled out on a portion of Germany's rail network in December next year.

"Alstom is proud to launch a breakthrough innovation in the field of clean transportation, which will complete its Coradia range of regional trains," said Alstom CEO Henri Poupart-Lafarge.

"It shows our ability to work in close collaboration with our customers and develop a train in only two years."

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Alstom claims the performance of the Coradia iLint will match the performance of existing regional trains, which run off heavily polluting diesel. As well as producing zero emissions, the next-generation trains use a recycled fuel source that is collected as a waste product of the chemical industry.

The power for the train is produced when the hydrogen is burned with oxygen from the atmosphere.

The first hydrogen-powered train service will take place on a 60-mile route in Lower Saxony, while four other German states plan to purchase the emission-free locomotives if it proves a success.
See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshows
According to Alstom, Germany has 4,000 diesel-powered trains that could conceivably be replaced by the Coradia iLint.

Other countries to have expressed interest in Alstom's hydrogen-powered trains include Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway.

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The world's first zero-emission train is set to roll out in Europe

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Steam locomotion is about to go full circle, as Germany prepares for the launch of the first hydrogen fuel cell train-replacing carbon dioxide emissions for steam. The Coradia iLint regional train is being built by French engineering firm Alstom and is expected to be rolled out on a portion of Germany's rail network in December next year.

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October 27, 2016
As the planet has been heating up over the years, species of fish living in the ocean have fond ways to adapt to the changing environment. The species "winter skate" fish are able to turn on genes that helps them adapt to the changing ocean temperatures. This adaptation is not effecting the chemical makeup of their DNA, but rather not using a specific gene. Because waters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where winter skate were observed, are warmer,  these fish are smaller than those found in the Atlantic Ocean. The genes that the fish turns on can also be just altered to being stronger or weaker, and not just completely turned off. These findings give hope to animal scientists to find new ways to help protect endangered species and find ways to have them show genes to help them survive.

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Certain marine species could adapt quickly to climate change by tinkering with their genes.

Recent research from the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence off the Labrador Peninsula found that the types of winter skate-a flat, cartilaginous species of fish-were changing their body structure to better suit the area's warmer waters. But they weren't evolving. Instead, they were simply switching which genes they chose to "turn on."

"This is evidence that species can adapt over relatively short periods of time in the evolutionary context," said Paul Bentzen, a professor with Dalhousie University's biology department. "In some cases, not by changing their DNA sequence but simply by changing how they express their genes."

This form of adaptation is caused by what researchers cause "epigenetic changes," and it's different from the normal process of evolution. Bentzen said the researchers' attention was first drawn to the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence because of the peculiarities of the winter skate there. While the species is found all along the North American coast, this particular population was much smaller in size than its counterparts in the rest of the Atlantic Ocean. The researchers hypothesized that this could be because the waters in the gulf tend to be much warmer due to their shallower depth.

They found that while this was in fact the case, the species didn't really display any evolutionary changes. Evolution generally involves changes in the actual composition of a species' DNA, which occur between generations and at a fairly low rate, according to Jackie Lighten, with the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences in the United Kingdom.

"On the other hand, changes in gene expression do not rely on these slow changes to the DNA. This process describes switching on or off parts of the DNA that have specific functions. These can also be turned up or turned down so that their function becomes stronger or weaker," he said.

Unlike evolution, this process is extremely quick-it can sometimes take place in just a matter of days-which means that certain species could be better equipped to deal with rapid changes in climate. This is particularly the case for species that have a longer life span and lower reproductive rates, like the skate.

The researchers hope that their findings could have implications in the conservation field and help shape policy that would protect endangered species. The winter skate is part of this list, in part because there has been a lot of momentum toward increasing the numbers of gray seals in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.

"People tend to care more about a cute, fluffy seal pup than a strange-looking fish on the ocean floor. The sad thing is that this fish, and potentially others, in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence could provide real insight into how future climate change may affect marine biodiversity, and just as we are becoming to realize this, they may not be around for much longer," said Lighten.

However, Bentzen warned against overestimating the ability of different species to adapt because there are still unanswered questions as to how rapidly the changes occur. The skate in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence has been in that habitat for around 7,000 years, or around 318 generations given its life span.

"That's a long time in terms of the rate of environmental change we're seeing today," he said.

The researchers intend to continue working to plug gaps in their knowledge, including carrying out more experimental work in the laboratory and focusing on individual animals to get a closer understanding of how they adapt.

"There is lots of scope to investigate similar scenarios in other species, too. For instance, we see similar adaptations in a flat fish that occupies a similar oceanographic range, and other evidence leads us to suspect that this may also be due to regulation of gene expression in response to warmer waters," said Lighten.
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net. Click here for the original story.

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Fish Turn on Genes to Adapt to Climate Change

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Certain marine species could adapt quickly to climate change by tinkering with their genes. Recent research from the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence off the Labrador Peninsula found that the types of winter skate-a flat, cartilaginous species of fish-were changing their body structure to better suit the area's warmer waters.

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November 9, 2016
One of the largest geysers in the world, Old Faithful, has been erupting in Yellowstone National Park, and scientists are trying to figure out the flow of water that is creating these eruptions. Scientists from the US and Denmark will be conducting observations and tests to figure out where and how hot the water is flowing underneath the surface. The scientists will conduct flights over the geyser with an electromagnetic system attached to a helicopter. 13,800 years ago, there was an explosion that left a 1.5 mile long crater in Yellowstone Lake, which is the largest crater in the world. Yellowstone Park is hoping to use the results of these experiments and observations to create a better experience for tourists without damaging the land or having the people get harmed.

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BILLINGS, Mont. - Scientists from the United States and Denmark are seeking to map out the plumbing system hidden inside the earth's crust that is responsible for the famous Old Faithful geyser and other hydrothermal features at Yellowstone National Park.

Throughout November, the research team will conduct flights over the park using a giant, hoop-shaped electromagnetic system suspended from a helicopter.

The device acts like an X-ray machine to determine where and how hot water flows beneath the surface.

The team also hopes to gain insights into the infrequent but sometimes major hydrothermal explosions that occur in the park, said Carol Finn, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey. One such explosion, or possibly several, that occurred roughly 13,800 years ago left a crater that measures one and a half miles across at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake.

It is believed to be the largest such crater in the world.

Similar to the regular eruptions of Old Faithful, hydrothermal explosions occur when huge pockets of boiling water beneath the ground experience a sudden drop in pressure, causing the water to convert to steam and explode violently to the surface.

Similar work elsewhere in the United States has helped reveal hazards from volcanoes.

"Nobody knows anything about the flow paths" for the hot water that erupts from Yellowstone's geysers, Ms. Finn said. "Does it travel down and back up? Does it travel laterally?"

The electromagnetic system was developed in Denmark to map out groundwater supplies in the country. It is able to discern between water and rocks to a depth of about 1,500 feet beneath the surface.

In Yellowstone, a better understanding of the hydrothermal plumbing could help administrators plot out future development so tourists can enjoy the park's features without damaging them or being put into harm's way.

The study is a collaboration between the United States Geological Survey, Yellowstone National Park, the University of Wyoming and Aarhus University in Denmark.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: With Aerial System, Scientists Will Try to Map Water's Flow Beneath Yellowstone. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Scientists to Try to Map Water's Flow Beneath Yellowstone

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BILLINGS, Mont. - Scientists from the United States and Denmark are seeking to map out the plumbing system hidden inside the earth's crust that is responsible for the famous Old Faithful geyser and other hydrothermal features at Yellowstone National Park.

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As solar panels had become very popular since the idea of renewable energy at home came about, people have been looking for more cost efficient ways to become more sustainable. Solar shingles were introduced, which are supposed to look like shingles on your roof but provide energy. These are less expensive than solar panels. and convert energy using an inverter box. The biggest company that produces solar shingles has their product producing 12 watts per square foot. These shingles are wireless and can be snapped together. By using solar power, a typical  residential home electricity bill can be cut down by 40-60%. This is not only good for the homeowner, but good for the environment as well.  The government offers 30% tax credit to those who use solar power energy in their homes. The prices of these shingles are very reasonable and may continue to go down and become even more popular.

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Advertisement

Dear EarthTalk: I'm getting my roof redone and have heard about solar shingles. Are they available-and are they practical for the Northeast?-John Denson, Glastonbury, Conn.

Solar shingles are photovoltaic cells designed to look like and integrate with conventional asphalt roof shingles. First commercially available in 2005, solar shingles were much more costly than traditional "bolt-on" photovoltaic panels, and thus were used mainly by those wanting to go solar but maintain a traditional roofline. But more recently solar shingles have become price-competitive with bolt-on panels, and are getting much more popular accordingly. Eco-conscious home and building owners might find solar shingles especially attractive when they are re-shingling anyway since the solar shingles also double as functional, protective and weatherproof roof shingles in their own right.

The biggest name in solar shingles is Dow's Powerhouse line, which uses cutting edge Copper Indium Gallium Selenide solar cells (aka "thin-film" solar) to turn sunlight into electricity via a supplied inverter box. The Powerhouse shingles generate 12 watts per square foot and are "grid-tied," meaning they're designed for structures already connected to the power grid and can send excess power back to the grid. They are wireless, snap together and can be installed by regular roofing contractors just like (or alongside) conventional asphalt shingles (an electrician needs to set up the inverter box).

Dow reports that a typical residential cluster of 350 solar singles on a roof could slash one's household electric bill by 40-60 percent. Such an installation can cost a homeowner over $20,000, but federal, state and local incentives can bring the cost to half that in some areas. Powerhouse shingles are currently available (from Dow-authorized contractors) in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Washington, D.C.

Another leader in solar shingles is building products manufacturer CertainTeed. The company's Apollo line of grid-tied monocrystalline solar shingles and roofing tiles offers efficiency similar to larger "bolt-on" photovoltaic arrays at around the same price (and incentives similar to those for Dow may also apply) but with less bulk: Each Apollo tile is less than an inch thick and will integrate with, replace, or lay on top of existing asphalt roof shingles or tiles and generate 12 watts of power per square foot.

CertainTeed says a typical installation will save homeowners 40-70 percent on their electric bills. Their Apollo products are available across the U.S. but the company recommends using one of their authorized roofing contractors to make sure they are installed properly.

Now is an especially good time to go solar-shingles or otherwise-because costs have started to come down and the federal government is still offering 30 percent tax credits with no cap on the purchase of solar electricity equipment. Twenty-seven states and several cities offer additional incentives that can get pricing on solar gear and installations down even lower. For more information check out the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE), a free online resource provided by the North Carolina Solar Center and IREC with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy.

CONTACTS: Dow Powerhouse, www.dowpowerhouse.com; CertainTeed Solar, www.certainteed.com/products/roofing/solar; DSIRE, www.dsireusa.org.

EarthTalk is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine ( www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

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Sun Roof: Solar Panel Shingles Come Down in Price, Gain in Popularity

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Dear EarthTalk: I'm getting my roof redone and have heard about solar shingles. Are they available-and are they practical for the Northeast? -John Denson, Glastonbury, Conn. Solar shingles are photovoltaic cells designed to look like and integrate with conventional asphalt roof shingles.

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November 2, 2016
Scientists have always wanted to find new ways to enhance the crops that are grown in the fields of our country. Crop engineers from around the world are looking to fix rice so that it will use water more efficiently therefore it will be more efficient to harvest and sell. Also, they want to make cereals that require less fertilizer to grow the wheat. But, there are various issues that slow down this process. It is very hard to add new genes into a plant because it is very time consuming and unreliable. Certain types of plants have an easy transformation when the genome is placed inside of the bacterium then allow for the plant to fertilize.  But, the use of that specific plant gene is not safe because it is considered a pest. Instead, DNA-coated gold beads are placed inside of plant cells to be bathed in growth hormones to then become a full plant. One of the plants that does very well with this treatment is corn. A robot was created to help with transformation processes. The robot digests the cell wall using enzymes so that new genes can be introduced. Although these processes are very difficult, new technology is constantly being brought out which will help speed up  transformations.

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When crop engineers from around the world gathered in London in late October, their research goals were ambitious: to make rice that uses water more efficiently, cereals that need less fertilizer and uberproductive cassava powered by turbocharged photosynthesis.

The 150 attendees of the Crop Engineering Consortium Workshop were awash with ideas and brimming with molecular gadgets. Thanks to advances in synthetic biology and automation, several projects boasted more than 1,000 engineered genes and other molecular tools, ready to test in a researcher's crop of choice. But that is where they often hit a wall. Outdated methods for generating plants with customized genomes-a process called transformation-are cumbersome, unreliable and time-consuming.

Asked what hurdles remain for the field, plant developmental biologist Giles Oldroyd of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, had a ready answer: "The big thing would be to improve plant transformation," he said.

"What we're all facing is this delivery problem," says Dan Voytas, a plant biologist at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul. "We have powerful reagents, but how do you get them into the cells?"

At issue is the decades-old problem that it is difficult to modify plant genomes and then regenerate a whole plant from a few transformed cells. Genome-editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 hold out the promise of sophisticated crop engineering that would once have been unthinkable-making it all the more frustrating when researchers run up against an old roadblock.

On 28 September, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized this frustration by announcing that it would fund research into better transformation methods. That focus is one of four in a new plant-genome research programme that will receive a total of US$15 million.

"Everybody agrees that it really is the bottleneck for genome engineering," says Neal Stewart, a plant biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who co-organized an NSF workshop about plant transformation last November. "And I think there's enough interest now in trying to come up with ways to fix the problem for major crops."

Obstinate crops

Some plants, such as the diminutive thale cress ( Arabidopsis thaliana), the 'lab rat' of plants, are easily transformed using a bacterium that can add genes to plant genomes. Researchers insert the genes they want to test into the bacterium ( Agrobacterium tumefaciens), and then coax the microbe to infect the reproductive cells of the plant. When the plant then produces offspring, some of them express the new genes.

But this does not work for many crops, and use of Agrobacterium triggers extra scrutiny from government agencies such as the US Department of Agriculture because it is considered a plant pest. As an alternative, researchers can use 'gene guns' that fire DNA-coated gold beads into plant cells. Those cells are then bathed in growth hormones and coaxed to regenerate a full plant. Some plants, such as maize (corn), readily bend to this treatment. Others, such as wheat and sorghum, do not.

For recalcitrant crops, it can take months of painstaking cell-culture work-optimizing growth conditions and hormone concentrations-to regenerate the full plant. The conditions needed for success vary not only from crop to crop, but also between plants of the same species.

Plant-transformation experts are a rare breed, says Joyce van Eck, one such specialist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "There's a lot of art in what we do," she said at the London workshop. "It's difficult to find people with that training."

Add to that a dearth of funding for new methods, and researchers are left having to rely on decades-old techniques.

A better way

But that could change as the hunt for alternatives heats up. Stewart and his collaborators have developed a robot that performs an established technique called protoplast transformation faster and more accurately than is possible by hand. The method uses enzymes to digest the cell wall, making it easier for researchers to introduce new genes. The problem of regenerating the whole plant, however, remains. Researchers used a similar approach, without robots, to perform CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in a variety of plants, including lettuce and rice.

The cell-culture steps are still difficult. Stewart says that one person in his lab laboured unsuccessfully for two years to transform a tall grass that he uses for biofuel research. But the declining cost of enzymes allows researchers to perform more experiments, and the robotics improve throughput. Stewart is so enamoured with his creation that he has composed a song for it. "It's our baby right now," he says.

Others, such as Fredy Altpeter of the University of Florida in Gainesville, are hunting for a suite of genes that, when switched on or off, would make plant cells more amenable to transformation and regeneration from culture. "I think it will lead to much broader application of this technology, and will enable people who are not experts in cell culture to make those improvements," he says.

But researchers can't afford to wait for those developments, says Oldroyd. His project, which aims to develop cereals that use nitrogen from the soil more efficiently, will plough through tests of hundreds of transgenes using the old, cumbersome methods. "We just have to be patient," he says.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on November 2, 2016.

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Plant-Genome Hackers Seek Better Ways to Produce Customized Crops

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When crop engineers from around the world gathered in London in late October, their research goals were ambitious: to make rice that uses water more efficiently, cereals that need less fertilizer and uberproductive cassava powered by turbocharged photosynthesis. The 150 attendees of the Crop Engineering Consortium Workshop were awash with ideas and brimming with molecular gadgets.

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November 9, 2016
This article discussed Donald Trumps election into office. People from the UN gathered to discuss environmental issues, and since everyone believed that Hillary would win the election, there was not any further discussion about what to do about the climate if Trump wins. Since Trump is skeptical about global warming, which is actually real, he has not made any clear plan, or any at all, for what he will do to prevent issues with the environment relating to global warming. Trump wants to get the United States out of the Paris Agreement, which is an agreement to cut pollution rates and is basically  a pledge to help the environment. But, since the Paris agreement is already live and going on, it will take more than Mr. Trump's 4 year term to remove the United States from the signing.

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Delegates gathered at a U.N. climate conference in Morocco this week did not expect a U.S. election upset.

"No one believes Trump can win so no real Plan B here!" wrote Saleemul Huq, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, of the GOP nominee, who was seen trailing in the polls before the election. "Hope we are right!"

They weren't. The election of the billionaire businessman and climate skeptic as president of the world's largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter occurred overnight, while delegates slept. They woke to find the international climate process thrown into chaos. President Obama, who invested personal political capital in brokering a landmark global agreement on climate change, would be succeeded by a man who has pledged to cancel it.

"It changes the story; it changes everything completely, both in terms of domestic climate policy and in terms of the progress on international climate policy," said Robert Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University.

Donald Trump, who last night was elected the 45th president of the United States, took the stage just before 3 a.m. EST in New York to say that his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, had called to concede the hard-fought race.

"I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans," Trump said in his victory speech. "It is time for us to come together as one united people," he declared.

But in hotel rooms and conference halls, as negotiators, activists and journalists prepared to convene for a round of talks aimed at putting the Paris Agreement into motion, many were left grasping for reaction to a Trump presidency.

"Depressing US news, but the response has to be action not resignation-especially on climate," tweeted Paul Watkinson, a French climate negotiator.

"I don't have enough thoughts on President-elect Trump's energy plans to fill 140 characters," tweeted Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, when someone asked his thoughts on Trump's 100-day "action plan" on energy issues.

Though he did push back on the assumption that the Paris Agreement would be meaningless without U.S. participation, saying, "I think you will find it redoubles the commitment of other nations to address climate change."

The Paris Agreement, reached by nearly 200 countries in December, entered into force last week. The 10-month sprint to the finish line was a record for a U.N. deal, and its framers cited it as evidence of global momentum for tackling climate change.

"For communities in the global south, the U.S. citizens' choice to elect Donald Trump seems like a death sentence," said Wilfred D'Costa from the Asian Pacific Movement on Debt & Development. "Already we are suffering the effects of climate change after years of inaction by rich countries like the U.S., and with an unhinged climate change denier now in the White House, the relatively small progress made is under threat."

"The international community must not allow itself to be dragged into a race to the bottom," he said. "Other developed countries, like Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, must increase their pledges for pollution cuts and increase their financial support for our communities."

But Stavins said the very momentum that climate advocates have been touting coming out of Paris is what will make the impact of last night's election so devastating.

"It's like driving down an interstate highway at 65 miles an hour and then virtually plunging into a wall, because it is going to bring progress to a halt," he said. "It doesn't mean that the negotiations will cease, but what it would mean if we are to take Mr. Trump at his word ... is that he would essentially remove the United States from the process of implementing the Paris Agreement."

Trump and his transition team have considered several options for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, which under international law would be impossible for four years now that it is live and the United States is a party. The new administration might submit it to the Senate for ratification, which would likely be denied. Or it could claim that because Obama issued an executive agreement to join Paris, an executive agreement can untangle the United States from it.

The election-night surprise occurred at the beginning of the first week of talks in Marrakech. The person most likely to be feeling whiplash is U.S. chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing, whose team is preparing to represent the Obama administration in the talks as a radically different administration waits in the wings.

Some participants expressed hope that Trump's stance during the campaign would not be his position once he enters the White House.

"President-elect Donald Trump has been the source of a lot of bluster on climate change over the last year, but now that the election campaign has passed and the realities of leadership settle in, I expect he will realize that climate change is a threat to his people and to whole countries which share seas with the U.S. including my own," said Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, in a statement.

Paul Bodnar, the former climate chief of the White House National Security Council, said Pershing and the U.S. team could consider banding with other major economies to show that the Paris deal meets the criteria of shared commitment and effort that the Senate demanded of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

"It would be useful to put on a show of force among the major economies-to demonstrate that all of America's major partners on the international stage are committed to moving forward with their climate targets," said Bodnar. "They need to send a collective signal to Trump, who has said he wants to renegotiate trade and security deals with these countries: 'Don't mess with Paris.'"
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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No Plan B at Climate Talks, Given Trump Win

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Delegates gathered at a U.N. climate conference in Morocco this week did not expect a U.S. election upset. "No one believes Trump can win so no real Plan B here!" wrote Saleemul Huq, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, of the GOP nominee, who was seen trailing in the polls before the election.

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December 14, 2016
In the North Atlantic, a 6 story high wave was recorded from a buoy. This surpassed the record of the highest wave, 59 feet. The wave was caused by a cold front that produced 50mph winds. The wave broke out in the ocean between Iceland and the United Kingdom. The importance of meteorological and ocean observations were noted because large waves like this can effect people out on boats or shipping lanes for international deliveries. It is important to be able to predict these weather phenomenons like the cold front that could cause giant waves. These large waves most often occur in the area of the North Atlantic because of atmospheric pressure and wind circulation patterns.  The southern coast of Iceland, the Canadian coast, and the west coast of the UK are where there are usually big waves.

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The largest wave ever recorded was a six-story monster in the North Atlantic Ocean, scientists have revealed.

A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expert committee found data from a buoy between Iceland and the U.K.

Scientists attributed the 62.3-foot surge to a "very strong cold front, which produced winds of up to 43.8 knots [50.4 miles per hour] over the area" on Feb. 4, 2013.

The previous record of 59.96 feet was measured on December 8, 2007, also in the North Atlantic.

The WMO Commission for Climatology's Extremes Evaluation Committee classified it as "the highest significant wave height as measured by a buoy."

The committee consisted of scientists from Great Britain, Canada, the U.S. and Spain.

"This is the first time we have ever measured a wave of 19 meters. It is a remarkable record," WMO Assistant Secretary-General Wenjian Zhang said. "It highlights the importance of meteorological and ocean observations and forecasts to ensure the safety of the global maritime industry and to protect the lives of crew and passengers on busy shipping lanes."

Wave height is defined as the distance from the crest of one wave to the trough of the next.

The highest waves typically occur in the North Atlantic, because wind circulation patterns and atmospheric pressure in winter leads to intense extra-tropical storms.

Waves are created by wind energy being transferred onto the water. Large waves occur when strong winds hit the ocean and then the water travels over large distances, growing in size.

Because of this, the area from the Grand Banks underwater plateaus off the Canadian coast around Newfoundland to south of Iceland and to the west coast of the U.K. are prime locations for giant waves.

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Gnarly! 6-story wave is revealed as biggest ever recorded

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The largest wave ever recorded was a six-story monster in the North Atlantic Ocean, scientists have revealed. A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expert committee found data from a buoy between Iceland and the U.K. Scientists attributed the 62.3-foot surge to a "very strong cold front, which produced winds of up to 43.8 knots [50.4 miles per hour] over the area" on Feb.

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December 22, 2016
The first public solar road has opened in Normandy, France. It stretches about half of a mile and is covered in solar panels that convert solar energy into energy that can be used to power streetlights. The article did not mention whether this road will be used to power electric cars, but in the future there will most likely be a road that can. By different countries making efforts to use more renewable energy, global warming may be stopped. This road will under go a two year test period, with 2,000 motorists driving over it per day. Other places in the world have already caught on, like Missouri has planned to put solar panels on the side of Route 66. These solar panels will replace concrete and generate enough electricity that the road will be the first to pay for itself. These solar panels will be able to show land markings and lanes also for drivers driving at night.

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France has just opened what it claims is the first public solar panel road in the world, officials said on Thursday.

The French Ministry of the Environment announced the inauguration of the "unprecedented" new road on Thursday, which is covered by solar panels and stretches for more than half mile in the town of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France.

The road, called the Wattway, was officially opened Thursday by French Minister of Ecology Ségolène Royal and Mayor Guy Monhée, according to a statement from the environmental ministry.

The stretch of road is covered in photovoltaic panels, which transform solar energy into electricity.

"This new technology is unprecedented," the ministry said in its statement.

French officials hope the road will generate enough electricity to power streetlights in the small town of about 3,400 residents.

The program is designed to test on a large scale the behavior of the solar road under average car and truck traffic, according to the ministry's statement.

Related: Missouri Plans to Build Solar Panels into Road Along Old Route 66

The road will be used by approximately 2,000 motorists a day during its two-year test period, according to the Guardian.

Royal, the ecology minister, said earlier this year that she wants to pave 1000 kilometers (621 miles) of road with solar panels over the next five years.

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Paved with sunshine: World's first solar panel road opens in Normandy, France

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France has just opened what it claims is the first public solar panel road in the world, officials said on Thursday. The French Ministry of the Environment announced the inauguration of the "unprecedented" new road on Thursday, which is covered by solar panels and stretches for more than half mile in the town of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France.

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Portugal Runs on Renewable Energy for 4 Days

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Portugal Runs on Renewable Energy for 4 Days

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June 21, 2016
Portugal was the first nation to ever run its country solely on renewable energy for four consecutive days. They accomplished this through the use of solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal heat, and hydroelectric power. This greatly reduced greenhouse gas emissions and will allow Portugal to continue moving forward to using 100% renewable energy in the future. If this trend spreads across Europe, countries like Denmark will follow Portugal's lead and attempt to go 100% renewable. Denmark did do something like this last year, but Portugal extended it even further. The Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) is a good area to hold wind farms because of the mountain ranges that cause more gusty winds. Hopefully the US and other countries in Europe and Asia and South America will be able to develop technology to use renewable energy more efficiently.

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Using Only Renewable Energy, Portugal Powered Its Entire Country for Four Days

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Using a combination of solar panels, wind turbines, biofuels, geothermal heat and hydroelectric power, Portugal powered everything requiring electricity for 107 hours between Saturday morning, May 7, 2016, and Wednesday evening, May 11, 2016. The country's ZERO System Sustainable Land Association, in collaboration with the Portuguese Renewable Energy Association, released information about this impressive achievement on its website.

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January 16, 2017
100% of electric trains in the Netherlands are now running solely from wind power produced by an energy supplier, Eneco. These trains do not give off any carbon emissions therefore are so much better for the environment. The original plan was to have all trains running on reusable energy by 2018, but since they had already almost reached that goal a year early, they decided to push even further to just wind energy. This power is from wind farms in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Belgium that have been newly built to use for the trains. This ensures a constant flow of energy because it is not only coming from domestic wind farms, but from other countries. If other countries are able to do what the Netherlands have done, carbon emissions emitted by trains can be reduced by a very great amount in the future, reducing the effects of global warming.

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January 23, 2017
Spanish scientists have created a model for a 3D printer that will print human skin. The skin can be used for transplants and hospital needs, or for cosmetic companies to test their products instead of testing on animals or humans. This is going to be a major scientific development because it means that people who need a skin donor will not have to wait for someone eligible, they can just get it printed. It may cost a lot more money, but if death is on the line then they may choose to go for it. The printer is able to replicate the structure of skin with the different layers. Instead of a normal 3D printer with inks and plastics, this bioprinter has cartridges of biological components and the materials that are found in human skin. If this new technology succeeds and is able to save lives, there will be more major developments in hospitals and there may even be printers in the future to print other organs.

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Spanish scientists create a 3D bioprinter to print human skin

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Scientists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), CIEMAT (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research), Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, in collaboration with the firm BioDan Group, have presented a prototype for a 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin.

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January 18, 2017
This article details how 2016 had topped the record of high temperatures. Over the past three years, the surface of the Earth has warmed up .5* F, more than any other three year data collection since 1800. It explained how many coastal communities are doing everything they can to prevent damage from rising sea levels. India had its hottest day in history, 123.8*F. Temperatures in the arctic have ranged from 20-30* higher than usual, causing glaciers to melt and arctic animals like polar bears to suffer. Since El Nino is officially over, it is expected that 2017 will be a cooler year. Africa had experienced droughts more than ever before. Global warming began to become an issue in the 1970's. 16 out of 17 of the hottest recorded years have occurred just since 2000. This shows that the climate is warming and there will be issues if it is not stopped soon.

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Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor's efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

In reality, the Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.

In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperatures, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

"A single warm year is something of a curiosity," said Deke Arndt, chief of global climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It's really the trend, and the fact that we're punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we're undergoing big changes."

The heat extremes were especially pervasive in the Arctic, with temperatures in the fall running 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal across large stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Sea ice in that region has been in precipitous decline for years, and Arctic communities are already wrestling with enormous problems, such as rapid coastal erosion, caused by the changing climate.

"What's going on in the Arctic is really very impressive; this year was ridiculously off the chart," said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a unit of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that tracks global temperatures.

But Arctic people were hardly alone in feeling the heat. Drought and starvation afflicted Africa. On May 19, the people in the town of Phalodi lived through the hottest day in the recorded history of India, 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

El Niño has now ended, and climate scientists almost universally expect 2017 to be cooler than the year before. But the scale of the heat burst has been startling to many of the experts, and some of them fear an accelerated era of global warming could be at hand over the next few years.

Even at current temperatures, billions of tons of land ice are melting or sliding into the ocean. The sea is also absorbing most of the heat trapped by human emissions. Those factors are causing the ocean to rise at what appears to be an accelerating pace, and coastal communities in the United States are beginning to spend billions to fight increased tidal flooding. Their pleas for help from Congress have largely been ignored.

The finding that a record had been set for the third year in a row was released on Wednesday by three government agencies, two of them American and one British, that track measurements made by ships, buoys and land-based weather stations. They analyze the figures to correct for known problems, producing an annual average temperature for the surface of the Earth. The national meteorological agency of Japan confirmed the findings in a preliminary analysis.

In the British data set, 2016 set a record by only a small amount; the margin was larger in the NOAA data set and larger still in NASA's. NASA does more work than the other groups to take full account of Arctic temperatures, and several scientists said they believed the NASA record to be the most accurate for 2016 for that reason.

NASA's calculations suggested that the planet had warmed by well over a half-degree Fahrenheit from 2013 to 2016. That is a huge change for the surface of an entire planet to undergo in just three years, and it appears to be the largest temperature increase over a three-year period in the NASA record, which begins in 1880.

The findings about a record-warm year were also confirmed by the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project, a nonprofit California group set up to provide a temperature analysis independent of governments. That group, however, did not find that three records had been set in a row; in its analysis, 2010 was slightly warmer than 2014.

In addition to the surface measurements, satellites are used to measure the temperature of the atmosphere within a few miles of the surface. Two groups that analyze these figures showed a record-warm 2016 in data going back to 1978, though in one data set it was a record by only a small margin.

Since 1880, NOAA's records show only one other instance when global temperature records were set three years in a row: in 1939, 1940 and 1941. The Earth has warmed so much in recent decades, however, that 1941 now ranks as only the 37th-warmest year on record.

The modern era of global warming began around 1970, after a long stretch of relatively flat temperatures, and the past three years mark the first time in that period that three records were set in a row. Of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 have now occurred since 2000.

Two of the agencies that issued Wednesday's figures, NOAA and NASA, will soon report to cabinet secretaries appointed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has expressed doubt about the findings of climate science. In 2012, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive."

Fear has erupted within the agencies about whether their data will now be subject to political manipulation. Mr. Trump and his cabinet nominees have given no detailed indication of what their broad climate policies are likely to be, much less how they will manage the scientific enterprise of monitoring the climate.

Since he was elected president, Mr. Trump has acknowledged there may be "some connectivity" between human activity and climate change, and he promised to keep an open mind on the subject.

On Wednesday, in questioning before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Trump's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, said, " I do not believe that climate change is a hoax." He did not, however, say whether he believed that Mr. Trump was wrong on climate change.

The three record-setting years in a row undercut longstanding claims by a handful of contrarian scientists that global warming stopped after 1998. That argument was never backed by good statistical evidence, but it was highlighted repeatedly in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail in 2016.

When the heat buildup in the ocean is taken into account, global temperatures are rising relentlessly. Scientists have calculated that the heat accumulating throughout the Earth because of human emissions is roughly equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day.

It is true that at the Earth's surface, the warming seems to be proceeding in fits and starts. "The arc of global warming will be variously steep and less steep," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "It never stopped."

In fact, the rate over time has been reasonably close to predictions that scientists first offered decades ago. Those same scientists have long warned that humanity is courting disaster by failing to bring fossil-fuel emissions under control.

For example, many experts on sea level believe that a rise of 15 or 20 feet has already become inevitable, though they cannot say how fast it will happen. A rise that large would drown most of the world's coastal cities without heroic efforts to fortify them.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Third Year, the Earth in 2016 Set Heat Record. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

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Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

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February 7, 2017
Scientists have been tracking the amount of excess nitrogen dioxide and pollution particles created by cars and power plants, in the atmosphere in Latino communities. The scientists found that these air particles were breaking down the beta cells that secrete insulin in someones body, leading to a forming to type 2 diabetes. Air pollution also leads to greater chance of obesity. When the Latino communities were examined and people were tested, they had a greater increase of chance to get diabetes than people living in less polluted areas. Researchers say that in order to prevent future risk of diabetes if you live in polluted areas, try not to go outside in the early morning and night, which are peak hours of pollution and fog. There are over 8.1 million diagnosed people in the US who have diabetes and if global warming continues and greenhouse gasses  continue to be emitted into the atmosphere, more and more people may develop diabetes or become obese.

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Latino children who live in areas with higher levels of air pollution have a heightened risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, according to a new USC-led study.

Scientists tracked children's health and respective levels of residential air pollution for about 3.5 years before associating chronic unhealthy air exposure to a breakdown in beta cells, special pancreatic cells that secrete insulin and maintain the appropriate sugar level in the bloodstream.

By the time the children turned 18, their insulin-creating pancreatic cells were 13 percent less efficient than normal, making these individuals more prone to eventually developing Type 2 diabetes, researchers said.

"Exposure to heightened air pollution during childhood increases the risk for Hispanic children to become obese and, independent of that, to also develop Type 2 diabetes," said Michael Goran, co-director of the Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and corresponding author of the study. "Poor air quality appears to be a catalyst for obesity and diabetes in children, but the conditions probably are forged via different pathways."

Published in the journal Diabetes on Jan. 30, the study, researchers said, is the first to follow children for years to find a connection between air pollution and diabetes risk in children.

These children lived in neighborhoods that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, had excess nitrogen dioxide and tiny air pollution particles that are generated by automobiles and power plants, formally called particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5).

Researchers found that the beta cells that were still functional were overworking to compensate for the damaged cells, leading to burn out. As the cells failed to secrete insulin efficiently, regulation of sugar in the bloodstream overwhelmed the system, heightening the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes has quadrupled in the past four decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If the trend continues, 1 in 3 Americans will have diabetes by 2050. Serious complications include blindness, kidney failure, limb amputation or early death.

"Diabetes is occurring in epidemic proportion in the U.S. and the developed world," said Frank Gilliland, senior author and a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine. "It has been the conventional wisdom that this increase in diabetes is the result of an uptick in obesity due to sedentary lifespans and calorie-dense diets. Our study shows air pollution also contributes to Type 2 diabetes risk."
Latino children living in polluted areas are at higher risk
Researchers examined the data of 314 overweight and obese Latino children who were between 8 and 15 years old when they enrolled in the National Institutes of Health-funded Study of Latino Adolescents at Risk of Type 2 Diabetes (SOLAR) study, a 12-year undertaking.

Scientists tracked the Los Angeles County children for an average of 3.5 years. None of them had Type 2 diabetes when they enrolled, but some may have been on the road to the disease toward the study's end.

Each year the participants fasted and then came to the Childhood Obesity Research Center at USC for a physical exam and to have their glucose and insulin levels measured over a span of two hours.

When they turned 18, the participants had nearly 27 percent higher blood insulin after having fasted for 12 hours. During their two-hour glucose test, they had about 36 percent more insulin than normal, indicating that the body was becoming less responsive to insulin. This observation illustrated that increased exposure to air pollution was associated with increased risk factors for Type 2 diabetes.

The researchers adjusted for body fat and socioeconomic status. In some instances, at age 18, the effect of long-term exposure to higher air pollution was larger than the effect of gaining 5 percent body weight, meaning air pollution is definitely a risk factor for diabetes, said Tanya Alderete, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research scholar at the Keck School of Medicine.
Steps people can take to reduce their risk
The findings suggest that the negative effects of elevated and chronic exposure to nitrogen dioxide and tiny dirty air particles begin in early life. If other risk factors such as having an unhealthy diet persist, then risk for Type 2 diabetes is compounded, researchers said.

"Air pollution is ubiquitous, especially in Los Angeles," Alderete said. "It's important to consider the factors that you can control -- for example, being aware that morning and evening commute times might not be the best time to go for a run. Change up your schedule so that you're not engaging in strenuous activity near sources of pollutants or during peak hours."

None of the children developed Type 2 diabetes during the study, but many showed signs that they may eventually develop it and were characterized as pre-diabetes.

Some 8.1 million people in the United States have diabetes but haven't been diagnosed, according to the CDC. That means some 28 percent of people with diabetes do not even know they have diabetes. Undiagnosed diabetes raises the risk of afflictions such as stroke, kidney damage and Alzheimer's disease.

Future studies will also include participants who are not overweight or obese and should collect data on diet and physical activity, researchers said.

Findings from this study may be generalized only to overweight and obese Latino children, mostly of a lower socioeconomic status, according to the study.

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diabetes; hormone disorders; obesity; air quality; air pollution; pollution; public health; environmental policies; poverty and learning

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Air pollution linked to heightened risk of type 2 diabetes in obese Latino children: High levels of pollution may make insulin-creating cells become less efficient, increasing the risk for type 2 diabetes, researchers say

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Latino children who live in areas with higher levels of air pollution have a heightened risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a new study. Scientists tracked children's health and respective levels of residential air pollution for about 3.5 years before associating chronic unhealthy air exposure to a breakdown in beta cells, special pancreatic cells that secrete insulin and maintain the appropriate sugar level in the bloodstream.

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Feruary 15, 2017
Scientists have discovered that changes in temperature of the ocean rather than the air have effected glaciers more than we previously thought.  There was an ice sheet from the last ice age called Laurentide that caused scientists to question their theory of glacial melting. When this glacier began to melt, it was melting when the air was the coldest during the Ice age which is the opposite of what should really have happened. The scientist, Jeremy Bassis, claims that the parts of the glacier that are touching the ocean will melt more than the parts that are just floating. They then use this new theory to compare it to the Greenland Ice sheet and Antarctica and said that the Antarctica ice sheet should raise sea levels by more than 3 feet. This will effect places all over the world because changing sea level by just a tiny but can rapidly destroy homes and cities along the coast.

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New findings from the University of Michigan explain an Ice Age paradox and add to the mounting evidence that climate change could bring higher seas than most models predict.

The study, published in Nature, shows how small spikes in the temperature of the ocean, rather than the air, likely drove the rapid disintegration cycles of the expansive ice sheet that once covered much of North America.

The behavior of this ancient ice sheet -- called Laurentide -- has puzzled scientists for decades because its periods of melting and splintering into the sea occurred at the coldest times in the last Ice Age. Ice should melt when the weather is warm, but that's not what happened.

"We've shown that we don't really need atmospheric warming to trigger large-scale disintegration events if the ocean warms up and starts tickling the edges of the ice sheets," said Jeremy Bassis, U-M associate professor of climate and space sciences and engineering. "It is possible that modern-day glaciers, not just the parts that are floating but the parts that are just touching the ocean, are more sensitive to ocean warming than we previously thought."

This mechanism is likely at work today on the Greenland ice sheet and possibly Antarctica. Scientists know this in part due to Bassis' previous work. Several years ago, he came up with a new, more accurate way to mathematically describe how ice breaks and flows. His model has led to a deeper understanding of how Earth's store of ice could react to changes in air or ocean temperatures, and how that might translate to sea level rise.

Last year, other researchers used it to predict that melting Antarctic ice could raise sea levels by more than three feet, as opposed to the previous estimate that Antarctica would only contribute centimeters by 2100.

In the new study, Bassis and his colleagues applied a version of this model to the climate of the last Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago. They used ice core and ocean-floor sediment records to estimate water temperature and how it varied. Their aim was to see if what's happening in Greenland today could describe the behavior of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

Scientists refer to these bygone periods of rapid ice disintegration as Heinrich events: Icebergs broke off the edges of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and flowed into the ocean, raising sea level by more than 6 feet over the course of hundreds of years. As the icebergs drifted and melted, dirt they carried settled onto the ocean floor, forming thick layers that can be seen in sediment cores across the North Atlantic basin. These unusual sediment layers are what allowed researchers to first identify Heinrich events.

"Decades of work looking at ocean sediment records has shown that these ice sheet collapse events happened periodically during the last Ice Age, but it has taken a lot longer to come up with a mechanism that can explain why the Laurentide ice sheet collapsed during the coldest periods only. This study has done that," said geochemist and co-author Sierra Petersen, U-M research fellow in earth and environmental sciences.

Bassis and his colleagues set out to understand the timing and size of the Heinrich events. Through their simulations, they were able to predict both, and also to explain why some ocean warming events triggered Heinrich events and some did not. They even identified an additional Heinrich event that had previously been missed.

Heinrich events were followed by brief periods of rapid warming. The Northern Hemisphere warmed repeatedly by as many as 15 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades. The area would stabilize, but then the ice would slowly grow to its breaking point over the next thousand years. Their model was able to simulate these events as well.

Bassis' model takes into account how Earth's surface reacts to the weight of the ice on top of it. Heavy ice depresses the planet's surface, at times pushing it below sea level. That's when the ice sheets are most vulnerable to warmer seas. But as a glacier retreats, the solid Earth rebounds out of the water again, stabilizing the system. From that point the ice sheet can begin to expand again.

"There is currently large uncertainty about how much sea level will rise and much of this uncertainty is related to whether models incorporate the fact that ice sheets break," Bassis said. "What we are showing is that the models we have of this process seem to work for Greenland, as well as in the past so we should be able to more confidently predict sea level rise."

He added that portions of Antarctica have similar geography to Laurentide: Pine Island, Thwaites glacier, for example.

"We're seeing ocean warming in those region and we're seeing these regions start to change. In that area, they're seeing ocean temperature changes of about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit," Bassis said. "That's pretty similar magnitude as we believe occurred in the Laurentide events, and what we saw in our simulations is that just a small amount of ocean warming can destabilize a region if it's in the right configuration, and even in the absence of atmospheric warming."

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global warming; climate; ice ages; oceanography; snow and avalanches; geography; environmental awareness; el nino and la nina

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How an Ice Age paradox could inform sea level rise predictions

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New findings from the University of Michigan explain an Ice Age paradox and add to the mounting evidence that climate change could bring higher seas than most models predict. The study, published in Nature, shows how small spikes in the temperature of the ocean, rather than the air, likely drove the rapid disintegration cycles of the expansive ice sheet that once covered much of North America.