Posted 06 Sep 2018 / 0
I read about this first in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, but here is the actual article: Journal of Applied Ecology “Quantifying the impact of pesticides on learning and memory in bees” This is an important study, because it suggests that we need to ask more subtle questions about the impacts of pesticides on our pollinators!
A Minor Post, Mutualism, Pollination, Pollution, Sustainable Agriculture
Posted 06 Sep 2018 / 0
I learned about this from reading Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, but here are some other sources reporting on the same study… NPR St. Louis Public Radio “Missouri could offset carbon emissions from agriculture by conserving the soil, report says” Climate Central “Missouri Farms Hold Big Potential as Carbon Storehouse” These are exciting findings! They Read More
A Minor Post, Climate Change, Sustainable Agriculture
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Nature “Fitness benefits and emergent division of labour at the onset of group living” Another Corina Tarnita study that elegantly converts empirical observations into an insightful model. If it doesn’t take a lot for already-social species to harness the power of “division of labor”, that begs an important question: why don’t more species show this Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Group Selection
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Science “What lives in the ocean’s twilight zone? New technologies might finally tell us” We tend to think that there’s nothing unexplored on the earth, that we know what kinds of organisms inhabit different ecosystems. So it’s pretty striking that there’s a whole area of the ocean that we know so little about. The scientific challenges Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Fluidity of Knowledge, Marine Ecosystems, Sustainability
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Science “This ancient bone belonged to a child of two extinct human species” It’s amazing what can be discovered by looking at ancient DNA. It will be interesting to see how robust this finding is: is this just a rare occurence that we happened to find, or will additional evidence suggest that hybridization between hominin Read More
A Minor Post, Homo species, Human Evolution, Speciation
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Science “This parasitic ‘love vine’ is sucking the life out of freeloading wasps” A plant evolves to parasitize the parasitic structure of an animal parasite that targets another plant. You can’t make this stuff up folks: it’s nature…
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Parasitism, Uncategorized
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Science “Insect threats to food security” Science “Increase in crop losses to insect pests in a warming climate” This is scary, especially since this is a global estimate that has never before been modeled. I found it interesting that the temperate-zone effects are most profound because the effects of warming are not so extreme as to lower Read More
A Minor Post, Climate Change, Food, Sustainable Agriculture
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
Nature “Trump’s science-adviser pick hedges on climate change” There’s not a lot of reason to think that anyone can soften President Trump’s irresponsible stance on climate change action, but maybe Kelvin Droegemeier is trying to sneak some climate realism into the White House? It’s bizarre how these things work, but I am actually somewhat more optimistic Read More
A Minor Post, Climate Change, Political Science, Public Policy, Uncategorized
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
PNAS “Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media” This study kind of blew up my head (well, at least blew up the preconceptions in my head). It would seem so logical to predict that gender inequality would be the main cause of the sexualization of women on social media. Read More
A Minor Post, Competition, Economics, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Sexual Competition, Uncategorized
Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0
PNAS “Small room for compromise between oil palm cultivation and primate conservation in Africa” This study reaches what is probably not a surprising conclusion: if we want to grow tropical plants for food, we are likely to displace tropical mammals. Palm oil is particularly frightening because it seems to like to grow in areas where endangered Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Conservation Biology, Primates, Sustainability, Sustainable Agriculture
