Thank you, U.S. Geological Survey. Pretty cool visualization of the amount of water on the planet earth versus the total amount of, well, other stuff.

This is what 332.5 million cubic miles of water looks like compared to the earth’s almost-sphere of solid material. I think USGS is trying to get us to think…

Read on! http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html#.T7EX4sWE63N

A new solution stops light from scattering without interfering with fluorescent highlighting techniques. This means researchers could more easily construct 3D images of biological structures—including the human brain and all connections between individual brain cells. For now, it means we get to see amazing new images like this one. But I can’t wait to see what exponentially-more-awesome visualizations result from this new technology! [Links after the break.]

Read on about Sca/e here: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n11/abs/nn.2928.html

Learn about the “Brainbow” method of highlighting different areas of the brain with different colors: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/10/researchers-create-colorful-brainbow-images-of-the-nervous-system/

Old-style processor cores—the types that run at 600 Mhz or less—are gaining popularity again. Known as wimpy nodes, these older and smaller machines suffer from very low individual processing power compared to currently available server technologies. Duh. But put them together in extremely large arrays, make them work equally as a team, and you’ve got gold.

Dave Anderson, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, is attempting to change the anatomy of internet-company-used processors—and he’s facing a lot of skepticism, according to Wired. But if Intel is sponsoring it, I say it’s worth a second look. Also, tiny, long-forgotten computers banding together to take over the big supercomputers of the modern age just sounds so darn endearing.

Read on! http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/wimpy_nodes/

Anderson’s research: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/index.html

Imagine being able to tell your friends today that you work for NASA. It’s easy, thanks to the Citizen Science Alliance and programs like the Zooniverse.

With advances in technology come advances in data rates. Scientists are gathering more data than ever, but they need help to sort through it all. The Zooniverse is a web-based organization that invites you to be a part of the solution. Essentially, you too can be a scientist (no PhD needed).

The Zooniverse is partnering with NASA, TED, Scientific American and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago to present real science content online including serious research projects that allow for any interested individual with a screen and a modem to contribute. In fact, they are requesting your help.

Sign onto zooniverse.org and you could analyze whale songs, identify Kuiper Belt Objects, search for exploding stars (supernovae) or even discover new planets.

I love the whimsy and wonder of Whale FM. While sitting on my couch in Chicago, feet on the coffee table, I am transported to cold waters off the coast of Norway and introduced to a long-finned pilot whale identified by his whale call record Delphinus 1.

By comparing this animal’s call to others presented to me, I am participating in efforts to learn more about this species and to understand how and why marine mammals respond to various sound stimuli. According to the website: “These studies are badly needed in order to establish regulations and guidelines to mitigate the impact of man-made sound on marine life.”

No joke, this stuff is seriously cool. Check it out, fellow scientists: https://www.zooniverse.org/

From glpf.org

Over one trillion gallons of basin waters are used each day. Those waters are used for drinking, generating electricity, irrigating agricultural fields, treating wastes, and supporting a wide range of industrial operations. They also support an ecosystem of living things that, in turn, supports a recreational industry. There is no “unused” water in the system.

Until recently, the governance of users and uses was fragmented, driven by a patchwork of regulatory and common-law schemes, and only loosely connected to the health of the Lakes and the natural resources that depend upon those waters. When a firm secured the rights to export millions of gallons of Lake Superior water in tanker ships to Asia, the region was challenged to rethink how the two countries—eight states and two provinces—manage their shared waters.

The Great Lakes Protection Fund assembled, directed, and funded a team of legal experts to advise the region’s Governors on their legal authority over their shared waters. That team concluded that a single decision-making body needed to be created through a multi-state compact approved by Congress and the President. Further, it was advised that conflicts be resolved through the lens of what is best for the region’s water dependent natural resources, not on the basis of economic advantage or the sale of water as a commodity.

The Fund supported multi-year negotiations and an expansive process of public participation to make possible a unified submission for Federal approval. In parallel, The Fund supported a broad set of project teams that explored the scientific, technical, and practical dimensions of such a governance system. These teams:

• Created technology to link water development, land cover, geological features, and ecological impacts. This work led to Michigan’s groundbreaking Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool.
• Demonstrated how habitat, flow, and stream restoration techniques can improve the health of the basin’s waters and water-dependent natural resources.
• Documented how uses of the same amount of water have differing impacts depending on where and when the withdrawals are made, what the water is used for, and where those flows are returned.
• Developed online monitoring, mapping, and networking platforms to encourage campus, neighborhood, city, and basin cooperation in adopting new conservation practices.
• Developed scenarios of likely water withdrawals and informed how governance systems should be designed to anticipate those reactions.
• Facilitated the design and development of what became the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and associated Regional Agreement, providing over $1 million for expert advice, travel support, and staff time.

The work of these teams has led to a new generation of water governance in the Great Lakes region. The federally-approved Great Lakes Basin Compact requires the states to act with a single voice on new, regionally significant water uses.

Building upon the Compact negotiations, the states and provinces also entered into an international agreement about how water uses decisions will be reviewed and managed across borders. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement was signed on December 13, 2005. These agreements place the health of the basin’s resources at the center of governmental decision-making. Both agreements were driven by the objective “…to protect, conserve, restore, improve and effectively manage the Waters and Water Dependent Natural Resources of the Basin…”

Teams supported by Great Lakes Protection Fund have explored the nexus between human actions and the physical hydrology of the environment with the aim of providing greater benefits to the natural resources we use. These teams have:

• worked to identify, demonstrate, and refine the most promising strategies for dam operation, run-off regimes, wetland restoration, and shoreline processes;
• built a suite of tools to identify candidate restoration projects, measure impacts, and assess alternatives;
• supported frameworks for water resource use decisions that allow for a more natural flow regime in the Great Lakes ecosystem.

What began as a wake-up call—a formal approval to export water in bulk for sale abroad—became a concerted set of research explorations and led to the creation of a new regional authority to manage major new uses of water. Along the way, the region pioneered new science and created new practical approaches that tie our management of water uses to the value of our natural resources.

The Fund has helped to ensure that new uses of water are better than those they displace. The legal, technical, and practical products of these teams have accelerated the rate of innovation, which will allow both our region’s economy and ecology to emerge stronger and more resilient.

From glpf.org

International shipping routes intricately link the world’s waters with unforeseen consequences. The unintended linking of the world’s ecosystems was revealed upon closer examination of global shipping fleets—they carry more than just goods. Safety measures involving the taking on, and the expelling of, ballast water in a variety of global ports have provided the pathway for an estimated 3,000 marine species to travel around the world. In many cases, these non-native species are deposited into foreign ecosystems where conditions are right for them to thrive.

Over 185 non-native, invasive species now live in the Great Lakes region. These species foul our beaches, clog water intakes, and destabilize the ecological structure of our lakes. New introductions must be stopped. The solution must address the contents of the global fleet’s ballast tanks.

The Great Lakes Protection Fund supported a series of efforts to tackle this challenge. Expansive, cross-disciplinary project teams of university researchers, engineers, utility companies, ship owners, policy specialists, and government agency personnel began work in 1996. From this portfolio of work, a significant series of “firsts” were produced.

• Designed, installed, and tested the world’s first ballast water filtration system on a working vessel.
• Developed and demonstrated the first set of protocols to evaluate the effectiveness of ballast water treatment—on ship, on the shore, and in the lab.
• Developed, verified, and used the first set of methods to evaluate “hatch out” of organisms that remain in ballast tanks after water is discharged.
• Documented the makeup of the sediment in tanks on ships categorized as having no ballast on board.
• Designed and deployed the first remote monitoring technologies to track water levels, pumping activity, and water chemistry in ballast tanks while ships are underway.

Fund-supported teams have come at the ballast issues from many angles and determined that because the threat of invasive species is dynamic, any response must be dynamic as well. They have found effective ways to evaluate not only the specific risks imposed, but the treatment systems at hand to prevent the transfer of invasive species… and they didn’t keep these exciting findings to themselves.

On an ongoing basis, project teams told the story of their work and relayed findings through a variety of channels. Journal articles and news stories reached a broad audience to inform the public about the potential harm of invasive species. Meanwhile, videos and conferences educated technologists and business investors about the cutting-edge developments coming out of the Great Lakes to improve the handling of ballast water.

These projects laid the groundwork for additional Fund investments to further the science of species detection. A current project team is working to produce an innovative, rapid detection technology—a real-time genetic probe to test ballast water for non-native organisms. This probe moves invasives detection technology out of the laboratory and into the field, drastically reducing the time it will take to learn the specific invasive species threat posed by a particular vessel.

Looking forward, the International Maritime Organization has established guidelines for ships to maintain specific ballasting standards. As these guidelines become requirements, it is estimated that the global ballast water treatment industry will be worth $34 billion over the next 10 years.

The Fund’s initial investment laid the foundation for a new, global industry and shaped a new fact of maritime commerce—ballast treatment systems. What originally began as a series of projects supported by the Great Lakes Protection Fund catalyzed widespread environmental and economic change.

From glpf.org

Great Lakes agriculture generates more than $15 billion a year in products from livestock, dairy, grain and corn, and it accounts for 7% of total U.S. food production. The environmental issues related to agricultural practices directly shape the current and future health of both our water and our region’s farming economy. The sustainability of the industry depends on the health of the land it uses.

The work supported by the Great Lakes Protection Fund examines the hydrologic cycle, following water as it passes through the watershed in surface waters, ground waters, and through time. Where land is used for agricultural purposes, we must pay special attention to how actions affect the health of all natural resources. Pesticide and fertilizer use, nutrient runoff and changes to water structures can have a negative impact on the land and on the watershed. The future of water—upon which both the lakes and our region’s agricultural resources depend—needs assurance of improved human choices.

Teams guided and supported by the Great Lakes Protection Fund are actively addressing issues that most directly affect the water moving through the region’s economy and ecology. These teams are working in fields, laboratories and meeting rooms to change these symbiotic relationships for the better. Fund-supported teams have looked at issues related to agriculture from many different perspectives and have developed a series of game-changing practices.

• Improved the ecological function of man-made drainage with 2-stage ditches that permanently reduce sediment, capture phosphorous, and denitrify nitrogen in the water that flows through them.
• Developed a nutrient yardstick to help farmers determine more precisely the actual nutrient needs of their particular soil to curtail excessive chemical inputs.
• Provided warranty products to protect farmers against financial losses that could result from adopting conservation tillage or new practices to reduce fertilizer and chemical use.
• Developed new ways to reach absentee landowners to introduce and implement conservation practices on land they may lease to others.

This portfolio of Fund-supported work has demonstrated that the economic interests of agriculture can be sustained and improved through next-generation resource practices that improve the integrity of our waters. Fund-supported teams have tested their ideas on the landscape and have developed tools and practices that can have value and impact throughout the basin. These teams have prevented significant amounts of nutrient and chemical inputs from entering our soils and water and created assurances that improved practices will sustain themselves.

The investment in service warrantees and educational programs to support farmers experimenting with new practices sparked new trends in field conservation that have spread across the Midwest and from California to North Carolina. Likewise, conservation organizations are currently implementing improved ditch designs on farms across Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan.

Projects guided and supported by Great Lakes Protection Fund demonstrate that businesses can maintain a profit while having a positive environmental impact and innovative thinkers can develop and apply creative solutions that will shape regional actions. This work is transforming the landscape in the Great Lakes region and beyond, improving the physical, chemical and biological integrity of our water.

Toy animals from the Museum of Science and Industry’s special exhibit Dr. Suess and the Art of Invention were spotted in the museum’s famed Genetics exhibit. Cloned mice, mutated flies, hatching chickens and glow-in-the-dark frogs got new roommates for the Christmas weekend. I suspect the design team has a sense of humor… More after the break (photo gallery below).

My favorite of the animals featured: frogs injected with jellyfish DNA. Scientists isolated genes for bioluminescence found in jellyfish, manipulated them to make them even more pronounced, and finally, injected them into frog embryos. Voila, frog eyes that glow neon green. Pretty cool stuff. Update to come with frog eye photos.

MORE INFO! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemistry-nobel-glows-green

Not to be missed: AlphaDog’s reaction to being pushed by a human…

Repost from Video Description*:

“The AlphaDog Proto is a lab prototype for the Legged Squad Support System, a robot being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA and the US Marine Corps. When fully developed the system will carry 400 lbs of payload on 20-mile missions in rough terrain. The first version of the complete robot will be ready in 2012.

This video shows early results from the lab where we are developing the control systems and locomotion platform. This lab prototype is powered remotely. AlphaDog will draw power from an internal combustion engine, which we designed to be 10x quieter than BigDog. The field version of AlphaDog will have a sensor head packed with terrain sensors.

Boston Dynamics leads a development team that includes AAI Corp, Bell Helicopter, CMU/NREC, FEV, JPL and Woodward HRT. For more information visit us at www.BostonDynamics.com.”

And here is the Legged Squad Support System (LS3)’s glamour shot on the Boston Dynamics homepage.