Our Own Michael Simpson on NHPR

Michael was interviewed as part of the story, Project to Help NH Coastal Communities Adapt to Climate Change, which aired this morning.

You can listen to the show and hear about Michael’s work with the New Hampshire Estuaries Project assisting communities to assess culverts in light of the increasing frequency of severe storms. This research project is part of the EPA’s National Estuary Program, Climate Ready Estuaries.

Monday’s Mac Tip: How to Right Click

As a recovering PC user, I can’t live without a right click, which of course Macs don’t have. Or do they?

Actually you can right click on a Mac: just press the control key (ctrl) and click, and you’ll be able to access those handy right-click menus in Zotero and other programs and applications.

Google Enters Browser Wars

Google’s Chrome may give Microsoft’s Internet Explorer some stiff competition. But until there are extensions or plugins that can compete with Firefox’s, it likely won’t make much headway with Firefox fans.

CNET’s coverage of the launch includes several stories from different angles.

What’s your browser preference?

Termites Hold Key to Biofuel?

As unlikely as it sounds, termites might provide a partial solution to our energy needs. Lisa Margonelli reports in The Atlantic:

But where humans have failed, the termite succeeds—spectacularly. A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency. The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.

Create a “Unit of Knowledge”

Do you have an expertise? Want to share it? Then you could be the first Antiochian to post to Knol, Google’s answer to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has an article on Knol, but not vice versa. For media coverage, check out ABC and the Telegraph.

Can You Identify This Bug?

If so, get ready for your 15 minutes of fame. ScienceDaily reports that the bug in question has stumped researchers at London’s Natural History Museum.

Experts checked the new bug with those in the Museum’s national insect collection of more than 28 million specimens. Amazingly, there is no exact match.

Massive Bowl of Plastic Soup

It’s convenient. It’s pervasive. And it’s filling our oceans.

Plastic.

At World Changing, Anna Cummins writes about the work of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF).

Enormous quantities of plastic trash enter our oceans daily through watersheds, rivers, storm drains and more. We estimate approximately 10,000 pounds of plastic a day flow into the Pacific from Los Angeles alone. Once at sea, these plastics accumulate in massive, rotating oceanic currents called “gyres,” and are the source of countless environmental nightmares–from sea birds choking on toothbrushes and cigarette lighters, to microscopic particles attracting toxins like PCBs and DDT before being consumed by fish. (Which leads me to ask: is there plastic in my sushi?)

The “massive bowl of plastic soup” that AMRF researches is the the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For additional information, you can listen to NPR’s Scott Simon interview oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer, or read about it at How Stuff Works.

If you’d like to share this story with children, check out Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion. And if you’re interested in reducing your plastic consumption and use, Lucy Siegle has some advice for you, in “Is It Possible to Go Plastic-free?”

Photo Blog Gives Snapshot of the Day’s News Around World

In May, The Boston Globe launched a photo blog called The Big Picture: News Stories in Photographs. The photo essays are visually stunning and cover a range of stories from the Chaiten Volcano to World Environment Day to life in Afghanistan, and much more. Each photo series is followed by links to additional information on the topic, and visitors can leave comments.

It’s a terrific site and worth visiting often or adding to your RSS reader.

New Hampshire’s Changing Human Ecology

The next showing of Communities and Consequences, a film that examines the graying of New Hampshire, will be at Keene State’s Redfern Arts Center, Wednesday, May 14, at 6 p.m. The event includes the hour-long film, followed by a panel discussion, which will be moderated by Steve Chase, and audience Q&A.

Science 2.0

Great article, “Science 2.0—Is Open Access Science the Future?”, from Scientific American about the move toward more open science from several different quarters. One example comes from scientists at MIT, who have created a wiki for sharing lab data and more at OpenWetWare.