Global Forest Change

Results from time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat images in characterizing forest extent and change, 2000–2012.

Trees are defined as all vegetation taller than 5m in height and are expressed as a percentage per output grid cell as ‘2000 Percent Tree Cover’. ‘Forest Loss’ is defined as a stand-replacement disturbance, or a change from a forest to non-forest state. ‘Forest Gain’ is defined as the inverse of loss, or a non-forest to forest change entirely within the study period. ‘Forest Loss Year’ is a disaggregation of total ‘Forest Loss’ to annual time scales.

Reference 2000 and 2012 imagery are median observations from a set of quality assessment-passed growing season observations.

ORIGINAL: Earth Engine Partners

by Hansen, Potapov, Moore, Hancher et al.

These 7 Countries Are Responsible for Over 60 Percent of Global Warming

And guess how the U.S. rates?
Throughout a century of climate-damaging activity, seven countries have emerged as the worst offenders. According to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters, the U.S., China, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the UK top the list.

The research, as digested by New Scientist:

Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues calculated national contributions to warming by weighting each type of emission according to the atmospheric lifetime of the temperature change it causes. Using historical data, they included carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and changes in land use – such as deforestation. They also accounted for methane, nitrous oxide and sulphate aerosols. These together account for 0.7 °C of the world’s 0.74 °C warming between 1906 and 2005.

The US is the clear leader, responsible for 0.15 °C, or 22 percent of the 0.7 °C warming. China accounts for 9 percent, Russia for 8 percent, Brazil and India 7 per centeach, and Germany and the UK for 5 percent each.

(Credit: IOP Science)

The above map shows the U.S., Western Europe, Japan and India bloated by their disproportionate contribution to global temperature rise as compared to their size — in this visualization, the blame shouldered by Russia, China and Brazil appears less extreme, while places like Canada, Australia and most of Africa all but disappear.

“It is these very questions of equity and responsibility that currently represent major barriers to progress in international negotiations attempting to set national emissions targets, ” the researchers write, “and yet are critical to resolve as we move forward with climate mitigation efforts.” Of course, as the Onion brilliantly pointed out, 7 billion key individuals are responsible for the global warming crisis — and we’re all equally responsible for working to reduce our contribution to climate change.

ORIGINAL: AlterNet / (Salon.com)
By Lindsay Abrams
January 17, 2014

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon and a former writer and producer for The Atlantic's Health Channel.

World Map Installation uses E. Coli and Jellyfish Proteins to illuminate our population in 2100

A Buckminster Fuller-style Dymaxion Map

Terreform’s Bio City Map in full, one side

If you think about it, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map is a perfect example of how reductive approaches to science may be necessary to resolve some of the world’s more pressing complications. To best understand the Earth as a total entity, Fuller suggested we go pre-Magellan, back to the days when the earth’s shape was physically unproven, by unravelling our beloved sphere to a flat, non-symmetrical surface. Like peeling an orange while keeping the peel intact.

Close up of Dymaxion Map

This is why it fits so well as a model for Terreform’s Bio City Lab – in ethos and in structure. Putting Fuller’s concept to practice, the New York-based design firm constructed a vertical plane of two-sided triangular pieces that model Earth’s surface, as if it were peeled directly off the mantle. Each side of the installation houses physical representations of data that snapshot a coming reality: by 2100, an anticipated 11 billion human bodies will be hustlin’ in all corners of the globe.

Instead of relying solely on computer algorithms or census trends, Terreform employs what it refers to as “bacteriography” to drive Bio City Lab’s glowing body. Strains of E. Coli and protein structures from sea anemones and jellyfish combine to bio-illuminate population fluctuations from now until 2100, ultimately mimicking the natural ebb-and-flow of urban densities with purely biological means.

Terreform’s website details why: “Bacteria in this constrained form and under the right conditions, behave almost identically to urban population patterns […] In many cases, they are as good as computational versions because they are the source which algorithms are derived from. In time, the mapping installation may illustrate patterns yet unobserved in typical digital models.”

The protein structures are injected into the DNA of genetically modified E. Coli strains, which are then gathered in petri dishes and subjected to UV rays. These rays effectively flip a switch in the bacteria, resulting in a neon mesh of blues, greens, reds and yellows. Green glowing blotches indicate where we are now; red ones indicate what our numbers will look like in the coming century.

Opposite the petri dishes are mountainous 3D graphs detailing population peaks across 2100’s world.

As a result, the structure becomes both static and mutative: the rigid and plastic population graphs depict future projections, while the ongoing biological reactions depict the fluid, amorphous quality of population changes.

It also takes into account contemporary phenomena like megacities (urban areas with populations of more than 10 million) and instant cities (urban areas with an infrastructure erected in anticipation of a population, usually at the cusp of economic booms).

But instead of specifying which petri dishes or 3D graphs correlate with which cities, the Bio City Map is geographically indiscriminate. Current urban areas, countries, continents or even bodies of water remain unreferenced, so that the populationstatistics and data of each city come together to form a single, transcontinental urbanity. In turn, it becomes a city of cities.

Through this, the installation suggests that if we’re to tackle problems of saturated population density and their potential corollaries (water, energy, food, housing, etc. crises), we need to stop worrying about national or regional interest and look at the bigger global picture. Literally.

Bio City Map for Terreform’s Biological Urbanism at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada

Detail of population spike graph Terreform is an international contender when it comes to these things.

They’re one in a series of contemporary design firms looking to explore the romantic tendencies of futurism through experimental approaches to society building. Along with recent curations like Liam Young’s Future Perfect exhibition at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (which we partially covered here) and the writings of William Meyers, they’re giving breath to the argument that creativity, technology, and biology must unite if we’re to effectively solve societal dilemmas down the road.

Each of these groups and creators recognize the need for cross-collaboration. It’s no longer just architects, just urbanists, or just engineers hashing out blueprints – it’s all of the above, plus a cadre of fiction authors, artists, futurists, mathematicians, and more. Which makes more than enough sense: how can you guide the growth of a society without soliciting the thoughts of those who grow its culture?

All photos courtesy of Terreform

ORIGINAL: Creators Project
By Johnny Magdaleno

Oct 22 2013

Neuroscience: Solving the brain

ORIGINAL: Nature

Alison Abbott

17 July 2013

The United States and Europe are both planning billion-dollar investments to understand how the brain works. But the technological challenges are vast.

GRANDEDUC/SHUTTERSTOCK

When neurobiologist Bill Newsome got a phone call from Francis Collins in March, his first reaction was one of dismay. The director of the US National Institutes of Health had contacted him out of the blue to ask if he would co-chair a rapid planning effort for a ten-year assault on how the brain works. To Newsome, that sounded like the sort of thankless, amorphous and onerous task that would ruin a good summer. But after turning it over in his mind for 24 hours, his dismay gave way to enthusiasm. “The timing is right,” says Newsome, who is based at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. He accepted the task. “The brain is the intellectual excitement for the twenty-first century.”

It helped that the request for the brain onslaught was actually coming from Collins's ultimate boss — US President Barack Obama. Just two weeks after that call, on 2 April, Obama announced a US$100-million initial investment to launch the BRAIN Initiative, a research effort expected to eventually cost perhaps ten times that amount. The European Commission has equal ambitions. On 28 January, it announced that it would launch the flagship Human Brain Project with a 2013 budget of €54 million (US$69 million), and contribute to its projected billion-euro funding over the next ten years (see Nature 482, 456–458; 2012).

Although the aims of the two projects differ, both are, in effect, bold bids for the neuroscientist's ultimate challenge: to work out exactly how the billions of neurons and trillions of connections, or synapses, in the human brain organize themselves into working neural circuits that allow us to fall in love, go to war, solve mathematical theorems or write poetry. What's more, researchers want to understand the ways in which brain circuitry changes — through the constant growth and retreat of synapses — as life rolls by.

Related stories

• The benefits of brain mapping
• Mapping brain networks: Fish-bowl neuroscience
• High-throughput anatomy: Charting the brain's networks

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Reaching this goal will require innovative new technologies, ranging from nanotechnologies to genetics to optics, that can capture the electrical activity coursing through neurons, prod those neurons to find out what they do, map the underlying anatomical circuits in fine detail and process the exabytes of information all this work will spit out. “Think about it,” says neuroscientist Konrad Kording of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. “The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the Hubble Space Telescope has produced in its lifetime.”

Researchers are already chipping away at the problem: the past few years have seen startling advances in techniques that allow the stimulation of precise neurons deep in the brain using light, for example, and the construction of anatomical maps with unprecedented detail. So far, most neuroscientists are using simpler species such as mice or worms to learn basic principles that evolution may have conserved in humans. Here, Nature examines some of the technological advances that will be necessary to drive further, and faster, into the brain.

1) Measuring it

If researchers are to make sense of the frenzy of electrical signals coursing through the brain's circuits, they will need to record simultaneously from as many neurons as possible.

Where Earth's Life Lives: Famous Map Gets an Update

ORIGINAL: Our Amazing Planet

Douglas Main, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer

Dec 20, 2012

This new global map shows the division of nature into 11 large biogeographic realms and shows how these areas relate to each other. CREDIT: University of Copenhagen 

Alfred Russel Wallace was one of the 19th century's foremost naturalists, independently describing what became the theory of evolution, for which his contemporary Charles Darwin is more widely known. Like Darwin, Wallace was influenced by the creatures he encountered on his travels around the world. From these travels, he made a map of global biodiversity that revolutionized the way people thought about the variety of life on Earth.

Now, the map has been updated to include data from 20,000 species, where they live and how they interact with one another, said Ben Holt, a researcher at Denmark's University of Copenhagen. It allows users to see where just about every species of amphibian, mammal and bird lives, Holt said. The updated map is published today (Dec. 20) in the journal Science.

"The map summarizes all the information we have learned … regarding where species are distributed and how they are related to each other," he told OurAmazingPlanet. "The consistency among the groups is quite striking."

Regions in the Southern Hemisphere tend to have an abundance of unique animal communities, with Australia, Madagascar and South America standing out, he said. The variety of life above the equator is less distinct. It's thought this is because of the relative isolation of the areas south of the equator, as well as their unique habitats and abundance of rain and warm temperatures – ingredients for a wide variety of life. 

The map is made by inputting species distributions onto a gridded globe, producing a species list for every grid cell, which can then be compared with the species lists of other grids, Holt said.

Alfred Russel Wallace is depicted inspecting two globes, representing his own highly influential global biogeographic map from 1876 (upper) and the updated modern version of this map (lower).
CREDIT: Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate

The resulting map divides nature into 11 large biogeographic realms and reveals how these areas relate to each other. The map incorporates genetic information that wasn't available in Wallace's day, Holt said. [Amazing Species Discovered in 2012]

The map doesn't yet include data for reptiles, plants or insects, because that information is less complete. But those data can be easily incorporated once they become available, he said.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was a British explorer, scientist and collector whose theories on the distribution of life, or biogeography, laid the foundations for many fields of modern biological science.

"The original Wallace map clearly had a massive and unquantifiable influence on the study of global biodiversity," Holt said. "The new map shows the incredible progress that we have made since Wallace's time and also serves as a reminder that we still know very little about how these patterns [of the distribution of life] were formed."

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

First human whole-brain genetic map created

ORIGINAL: LATimes Sciencwe Now - Blog

By Jon Bardin. Los Angeles Times

September 19, 2012

This image shows data from the Allen Institute's Human Brain Map, which shows gene expression throughout the human brain. (Allen Institute for Brain Science)

Stress and depression, linked in the brain

Neuroscience mapping brain connections

A team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science has created the first human brain-wide map of gene expression data.

The achievement marks a major milestone for the Allen Institute, which previously had released similar data sets for the mouse brain. The data set will allow scientists to test new hypotheses about how the particular genetic codes of different brain areas lead to the unfathomably complex, unified organ.

The task of creating an atlas of human gene expression in the brain is not an easy one. First, acquiring clinically normal brains can be a drag -- brains can be among the hardest organs to get permission to excise, and to chop up for study.

Once a sample is available, the scientists need to be extremely precise with how they partition the brain so they can reliably connect genes to regions. One wrong cut and the data become imperfect.

Scientists at the Allen Institute -- which is based in Seattle and is run by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft -- acquired two brains, one from an NIH tissue bank and another from a bank at UC Irvine. The brains had belonged to men ages 24 and 39. The process included acquiring permission from the next-of-kin.

The scientists then put the brains through a complex pipeline.

• First, they collected high-resolution pictures of each brain in an MRI machine. 
• Then, they chopped the brains up into smaller pieces so they could detect gene expression in 900 distinct brain regions — possible because genetic transcripts remain in the tissue after death if it is cared for properly. 
• Finally, they combined the imaging data with the gene expression information. The result is the most accurate and thorough collection of human brain gene expression data ever produced.

The main benefit of the data set, which is publicly available, will be to the thousands of neuroscientists whose hypotheses would benefit from genetic information but who currently rely on what we know about mouse brains for that information. For example, a scientist who studies fear in humans by taking images of brain activity in an MRI machine while a subject looks at fearful images can now look to see what genes are expressed in the parts of the brain that "light up" during the study. Before, they would have had to look to a scattered literature of individual studies, or to gene data from animal models.

The Allen Institute researchers have come up with some interesting nuggets of their own hidden in the data set. For example, when they looked at the gene expression data from the cortex -- the outer shell of the brain that is generally related to higher-level thought and cognition -- they found a surprising amount of uniformity in the genes that were expressed there when compared to other areas that sit below the cortex. This suggests both that the cortex is easily expandable -- perhaps explaining its rapid evolution in primates -- and that the cortex is not complicated simply because of its genetic programming. Instead, aspects like the delicate balances of activity from different types of cells may distinguish the functions of different cortical areas.

The researchers point out that it is still way too early to say for sure, and they also note that these are only two brains (though a third half-brain was also analyzed as part of the study). While the team found striking consistency in gene expression between them, the two brains that formed the heart of the study came from men of similar background, belying the likely diversity of human genetics.

The next steps, they say, will involve collecting many more brains to see just how consistent their findings are across the human population.

To boldly go under: Director James Cameron embarks on his record-breaking descent SEVEN miles to the bottom of Pacific's Mariana trench

ORIGINAL: Daily Mail

By Rob Waugh

UPDATED: 16:00 GMT, 22 March 2012

• Aims to be first human to visit bottom since January 1960
• Solo submersible so cramped he can't move his arms
• First of several competing missions to deepest point on Earth
• Mariana Trench is deeper than Everest is high
• The descent takes about 90 minutes
• Cameron will film the journey for a feature-length documentary

Avatar director James Cameron's attempt to be the first human being in 50 years to visit the deepest point on Earth - the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles down in the Pacific - is under way.

The director aims to become the first of at least four teams racing to the ocean floor, an icy, alien environment with pressures 1,000 times higher than the surface.

Many liken the journey to man's steps into space. 'The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet," says Cameron.

Scroll down for video

James Cameron emerging from the hatch of Deepsea Challenger - the tiny submarine the director will use to travel to the bottom of the Pacific's Mariana trench

James Cameron's team prepare Deepsea Challenger for its first test in the ocean at Jervis Bay, south of Sydney, Australia. In the coming weeks the submersible will travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

James Cameron (far right) and Don Walsh (far left), who was aboard the only other successful manned descent to the Mariana Trench in 1960 

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh emerge from the bathyscaphe Trieste following their successful manned descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in January 1960. In the coming weeks, 52 years later, explorer and filmmaker James Cameron aims to repeat the feat

Deepsea Challenger, the submersible designed by explorer and filmmaker James Cameron and his engineering team to travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, is lowered into the water for testing

The only people who have ever reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench were Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, who used the huge, blimp-shaped submersible Trieste in January 1960.

The director recently completed a test dive of five miles in Papua New Guinea, using his solo submersible Deep Sea Challenger.

Cameron had to build his own vehicle for the attempt - a craft capable of withstanding 1,000 atmospheres of pressure.

Cameron is inside a pilot sphere - the shape most able to resist pressure - so cramped he will not be able to extend his arms.

He will be the sole occupant in a complex, 24-foot-long craft made primarily of highly specialised glass foam.

The descent will take around 90 minutes and he will spend around six hours at the bottom, filming the attempt for a 3D documentary.

More...

Pictured: Stunning photos of the Titanic shown on the base of the ocean nearly 100 years from that fateful night (2012 marks the centennial of  that event)

Protection: Cameron will command the sub from a spherical cockpit - the best shape for withstanding pressure

Rolex sent a watch down with the Trieste in 1960 and produced another timepiece for Cameron's odyssey.

It's a complete one-off and not for sale - and is capable of withstanding the extreme pressures of the Mariana Trench - and more - right down to 12,000m.

Cameron looks set to beat rival teams to the bottom - Sir Richard Branson's Deep Flight Challenger, and DOER Marine, backed by Google's Eric Schmidt.

A Florida company, Triton submarines, are working on a submarine that will take people to the bottom for $250,000 a ticket.

A unique Rolex watch will also be journeying to the bottom with Cameron. Time for deep exploration: A one-off Rolex capable ofwithstanding pressure down to 12,000mis attached to the side of the sub

'I've always dreamed of diving to the deepest place in the oceans,' says Cameron. 'For me it went from a boyhood fantasy to a real quest, like climbing Everest.'

'There is currently no commercial submersible on Earth capable of diving to the ‘full ocean depth’ of 36,000 feet. The only way to make my dream a reality was to build a new vehicle unlike any in current existence,' says Cameron.

In-water testing of the submersible that explorer and filmmaker James Cameron will pilot to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

Swinging above the docks in Guam's Apra Harbor is the Trieste, the submersible that took Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard on the first and only successful manned dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

Deep-water testing of tthe submersible that explorer and filmmaker James Cameron will pilot to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

Deepsea Challenger undergoes deep-water testing in preparation for Cameron's dive

The measurement - using echosound - of Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Marianas trench may be the most accurate yet

The Mariana trench: The last visitors to the bottom went there in January 1960

A 'hydrographic' ship from the U.S. Navy recently mapped the Marianas trench from north to south using a 'multibeam echosounder', a standard device for mapping the ocean floor.

The ship, associated with CCOM, the Centre for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, mapped the whole of the Marianas Trench to a 100m resolution - including an accurate 'map' of the deepest place on earth, Challenger Deep

Cameron is an avid explorer with 72 submersible dives to his credit—51 of which were in Russian Mir submersibles to depths of up to 16,000 feet, including 33 to Titanic.

Sub Sphere: What Protects Human Deep Divers?