HALF-EARTH - How to Save Life on Earth

"How to save life on Earth, according to E.O. Wilson" PBS NewsHour 4/28/2016

Sorry Prof, but extinction is natures methodology, and you "can't fool with Mother Nature."

IF doable, the first step is mandatory human population control.  Cut our population 50% (cut Trump and friends loose with AK47s).  Or we could use the method used in the movie "Logan's Run," no one lives past 30.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Biologist and Pulitzer winner E.O. Wilson has spent his life studying animals and fighting for their conservation.  As species go extinct at 1,000 times the normal rate thanks to human interference, Wilson’s new book “Half Earth” holds a bold plan to preserve the world’s biodiversity: set aside half of the entire planet for natural habitats.  Jeffrey Brown talks to Wilson for more.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Scientist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson first gained fame for his study of ants.  Through the years, he’s moved from small insects to big ideas, and now a very big one, one made more urgent by the problems of climate change.

Jeffrey Brown has our profile in his second report from Southern Alabama.

E.O. WILSON, Author, “Half Earth”:  I was just a 12-, 13-year-old boy, and it was just a wonderland to me.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Edward O. Wilson spent his formative years in Mobile, Alabama, looking for snakes and insects in the surrounding delta.

E.O. WILSON:  If I could, I would just do the same thing today that I did then, but it would look funny.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN:  The experience would shape him, as biologist, evolutionary theorist, naturalist, and at age 86 perhaps most important to him now conservationist.

E.O. WILSON:  What is man?  Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.

JEFFREY BROWN:  His new book, “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life,” takes on nothing less than the survival of plant and animal life on earth.

E.O. WILSON:  Yearning to be more master than steward of the declining planet.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Wilson’s solution is in the title, setting aside half the Earth as natural habitat.

We spoke beneath the old live oak trees at Fort Blakeley Historic Park, where Wilson’s great-grandfather fought in one of the last battles of the Civil War.

Half Earth.  Are you serious?

E.O. WILSON:  I’m serious.  I know it sounds radical, but we must have it if we’re going to save most of the species remaining on Earth.  And it’s easier to do than most people might think.

JEFFREY BROWN:  It sounds impossible.  It sounds for some people crazy.

E.O. WILSON:  I was just going to use the word insane.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Yes.

E.O. WILSON:  Yes, it sounds that way, because they envision cutting the Earth into two hemispheres, one for us and one for the other 10 million species.  But, no, we mean giving 50 percent or setting it aside, patches, some large wilderness areas, others far, far smaller, in order to make that amount of reserve area.

ANTARCTICA - The Biologists' Penguin Robotic Spy

"Roving Chick Spy Keeps Tabs on Shy Penguins" by Associated Press, NBC News 11/3/2014

The newest tool for biologists is the baby penguin robotic spy.  It's pretty darn cute, and so convincing that penguins essentially talk to it, as if it is a potential mate for their chicks.  Emperor penguins are notoriously shy.  When researchers approach, these penguins normally back away and their heart rate goes up.  That's not what the scientists need when they want to check heart rate, health and other penguin parameters.  So international scientists and even filmmakers, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France, created a remote control rover disguised as a chick to snuggle up to shy penguins in Adelie Land, Antarctica — the same place where the 2005 documentary "March of the Penguins" (48:50) was filmed.  Researchers watched from more than 650 feet away.  The first disguised version of the rover, made of fiberglass, didn't pass muster and scared the real birds, Le Maho said.  Researchers tried about five versions until they hit upon the right one.  It's covered in gray fur, sports black arms, and has a black-and-white painted face and black beak.

HEALTH - Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria

"How societal, economic factors play into rise of drug-resistant bacteria" PBS Newshour 10/22/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Has the age of antibiotics come to an end?  New strains of bacteria are on the rise, landing normally healthy people in the hospital with life-threatening, drug-resistant infections.  Ray Suarez talks to David Hoffman, the journalist who led the investigation for Frontline's "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria (53:41 full show video)."

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Next: the mounting worries and public health concerns over the rise of drug-resistant bacteria.  That's the subject of tonight's episode of FRONTLINE.

To tell the story, the program examines three notable cases, including that of Addie Rerecich, an 11-year-old girl in Tucson.  After complaining of a nagging pain in her hip, she ended up fighting for her life in the hospital in 2011.

Here's an excerpt, beginning with her mother's recollection.

SCIENCE - Return of the Cicada

"Cicada Mania: The Entomologists' 'Super Bowl'" PBS Newshour 6/19/2013

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MILES O'BRIEN (Newshour):  These boys likely do not know it, but they are playing with some bugs that are older than they are.  The periodical cicada invasion will stop soon enough, but the once-every-17th-summer event is impossible to ignore.

TATIANA LOWE, Dealing With Cicadas:  This is like a bit much.  It's like every day you hear this racket, and then at night, it gets quiet, and then in the morning, you see all the dead ones everywhere.  It's pretty gross.

MILES O'BRIEN:  Of course, beauty is in the compound eyes of the beholder.  And like them or not, with the emergence of one of the big East Coast broods, the cicadas are ready for their close-ups.

This is a scene from "Return of the Cicadas."  For six years now, filmmaker Samuel Orr has been capturing cicadas in spectacular, close-up, time-lapse fashion as they emerge from the ground, climb, molt, reproduce, and then die.

Sam is, naturally, a big cicada fan.

BIOLOGY - Unfertilized Human Egg, to Early-Stage Blastocyst, to Heart Cells

"Major Embryonic Stem Cell Advance Raises Ethical Quandaries" PBS Newshour 5/16/2013

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JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  And finally tonight, a major advance in stem cell work, but one that again raises ethical questions.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University were able to create embryonic stem cells through a cloned human embryo, a longtime goal, since such cells are capable of transforming into tissues and organs genetically identical to a patient who needs them.

Researchers took the DNA from a donor's unfertilized egg, then inserted mature skin cells containing the DNA of a patient.  That led to the creation of an early-stage embryo called a blastocyst, a group of 50 to 100 cells.  From that, scientists derived stem cells and then transformed them into heart cells.

The blastocyst was destroyed in the process and was never implanted in a human womb.

Rob Stein has been covering this story for NPR and joins us now.

SCIENCE - So Called 'Junk' DNA Isn't

"Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role" by GINA KOLATA, New York Times 9/5/2012

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Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.

Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.

The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.

As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. The result of the work is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is doing and how. It includes the system of switches that, acting like dimmer switches for lights, control which genes are used in a cell and when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a liver cell or a neuron.

“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”

The new result “is a stunning resource,” said Dr. Lander, who was not involved in the research that produced it but was a leader in the Human Genome Project. “My head explodes at the amount of data.”

The discoveries were published on Wednesday in six papers in the journal Nature and in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology. In addition, The Journal of Biological Chemistry is publishing six review articles, and Science is publishing yet another article.

Human DNA is “a lot more active than we expected, and there are a lot more things happening than we expected,” said Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, a lead researcher on the project.