Tim Parshall:

Alternate blog title: When is it time to give up on one of your favorite species?

I struggle with this all the time with coast live oak, which is currently being hammered by Sudden Oak Death.

Christopher Mims, writing for Quartz:

From this comes [David Keith’s] daring idea about crops. Since shading the sun doesn’t remove any greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, why not try to make use of that greenhouse effect? Keith argued that in a future world with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, climate models suggest that adding the right amount of sulfur to the upper atmosphere wouldn’t just cool the planet, but would actually increase rainfall in, for example, India.

There’s an old engineer’s saw that says, “Fast, cheap, and good. Pick two.” Solving climate change is this type of problem, and Keith’s solution strikes me as one from the fast and cheap bin. Why those two? It ignores the other effects of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, namely ocean acidification.

David Biello’s take on what it’ll be like to live in a planet of cities.

Michael Balter, writing for Discover:

One stark example comes from Tasmania, an island off southeast Australia. Nearly the size of Ireland, it was colonized 34,000 years ago by people with sophisticated toolmaking skills who came across a land bridge from Australia. By the 18th century, Tasmanians used simple technology, hunting with rocks and crude clubs. In 2004 anthropologist Joseph Henrich used a mathematical model of cultural evolution to tackle this mystery [pdf]. He concluded that the island’s population, about 4,000 in the 18th century, at some point fell below the level necessary for complex skills to be passed from generation to generation. Scientists increasingly think population size and density have had a big impact on human development at certain pivotal points. 

It goes the other way, too. What appears to be serendipitous co-discovery in the archaeological record may in fact be an artifact of population size and density.

You read that correctly. Dr. M at Deep Sea News draws the startling connection. 

Rachel Nuwer reports on a new peer-review paper that attempts to standardize the definition of “surplus” land, including land called marginal, reclaimed, degraded, abandoned, and more. Such areas are often considered ripe for biofuel crops as they are no longer producing food.

Unfortunately, there’s no mention in Nuwer’s article or the academic paper of an important question—when is land “surplus” and when should it be rehabilitated as its native ecosystem? Just because we pressed land into service once doesn’t mean it should always remain in production.

Eric Michael Johnson, writing for Slate:

Ultimately, [Ayn] Rand was searching for the origin of John Galt in the pages of human nature. But was she right? Are we rational egotists trapped in a net of social obligations? Or are we an innately social species for whom altruism was integral to our success on this planet? There was only one place she could look: the Pleistocene.

Alan Bjerga, reporting for Bloomberg:

While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland. Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade due to weather changes and higher prices. 

Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the U.S. — the worst in half a century — isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production.

It’s going to be harder and harder to deny climate change when multinational companies like Cargill are preparing for it.

Hillary Rosner, writing for the New York Times:

In a lab in Princeton University’s ultra-sleek chemistry building, researchers toil in a modern-day hunt for an elusive power: alchemy. Throughout the centuries, alchemists tried in vain to transform common metals like iron and lead into precious ones like gold or platinum. Today, Paul Chirik, a professor of chemistry at Princeton, has managed a new twist on the timeworn pursuit.

Richard Florida interviews Samuel Arbesman, author of The Half-Life of Facts. 

It’s my guess that restoration projects of this scale will only become more common.

Susan Dominus, reporting for the New York Times:

Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.

And then this.

Seriously amazing work by artist Catherine Nelson.

(Via Ed Yong.)

Martin Lukacs, reporting for The Guardian:

Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.

Because one uncontrolled experiment on the climate isn’t enough.

This is Wake Island, a coral atoll in the middle of the Northern Pacific. Because of its strategic position, it’s dominated by an airfield. Images like this give me a sinking feeling.

Adam Frank:

On the roof you can literally hear the city acting like a giant engine. The sounds of traffic, music, construction and sirens all merge together into a cacophony, into a clamor, into noise. But what is noise in this case? It’s an acoustic measure of the second law at work. It’s the city’s entropy made audible!

Every moment of every day, vast quantities of energy stream into the city through all that plumbing we saw on the street. The city then uses that energy to do work, to organize itself into vast architectures of order. But the second law will not let the story end there. Waste, pollution and disorder must follow.

Hari Sreenivasan, for the PBS Newshour:

One of Chicago’s most beautiful gardens is one very few people get to see, a 23,000-square-foot green roof that sits on top of City Hall. The difference a green roof makes is measurable. That side of City Hall’s roof used to be traditional black, like most roofs. On a hot day, when it was 90 degrees out, they came out and measured the surface temperature. It was 169 degrees, vs. this side of City Hall, where they have a green roof, and the surface temperature was 90 degrees, almost an 80-degree difference.

Minnesota looks like a pretty healthy place to live.

This interview of Chris Weuve, a former U.S. Naval War College research professor, is a bit left field given what I normally cover on PSM, but this question and its answer are particularly revealing for what they say about literature’s impact on the real world:

Has sci-fi affected the way that our navies conduct warfare?

And this:

One of the great strengths of science fiction is that it allows you have a conversation about something that you otherwise couldn’t talk about because it’s too politically charged. It allows you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want to have.