Year after year, monarch butterflies make Mexico’s Sierra Madre their winter home. For years, scientists struggled to figure out how they knew where to go. They recently discovered the answer: the butterfly’s antennae. (In Spanish with English subtitles)
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After spending numerous meetings with Maya Lin at the Academy and seeing how she distilled the stories told by some of the most venerable figures in the field of conservation biology into a final artwork, it seemed fitting that we should give a voice to someone who took a chance to give a different perspective to science. Shaped like a giant megaphone, the “Listening Cone” unveiled September 17, 2009 on the Academy’s East Terrace is not just an art exhibit, nor is it just a memorial. It is at once a portal to planet Earth and a sounding device to the work that is currently being done to conserve its resources. Take your shoes off and step inside!
The Listening Cone is part of a multi-site memorial called “What is Missing”. To learn more about what others are doing and what you can do to prevent species and habitat loss visit a selection of the institutions and organizations that played an advisory role to the “What is Missing” project.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
National Geographic Society
Conservation International
National Resources Defense Council
World Wildlife Fund
Freedom to Roam
-Lindsay
Open access is changing the way scientific research is being published. And many say for the better. When people discover they have a serious illness, they often want free and easy access to medical research. Open access allows this. But there’s so much more to it.
Open access allows researchers to build on other research. It allows taxpayers to see what type of research the government is funding. And it allows a larger audience for the researcher’s publication.
So who pays in the open access model? The researcher. Often this can be written into their research grant. In addition, five prominent universities, including UC Berkeley, recently signed a compact promoting open access publishing and a commitment to underwriting publication fees.
PLoS is just one 0pen access publisher. Happily, it seems to be a growing movement.
More information is trickling in… Images, too. But did LCROSS find water on the moon? We may have to wait until December to find out…
Even without the immediate reward of a brilliant flash or decisive evidence for water on the Moon, the LCROSS impact promises success. As the principal investigator put it during the press conference, he expected to be surprised and he was. No fifth magnitude flare-up or giant plume of moondust, admittedly, but that’s the risk explorers take.
Infrared data suggest that the impact heated surface material enough to produce viable results, so the mission should eventually achieve its primary goals. If water exists in the basin of Cabeus Crater, its presence should be revealed as scientists study the results of this morning’s impactful experiment. Such discoveries don’t come without effort, however, and now the real work begins: analyzing the images and spectra from both the spacecraft and various ground-based observatories, and continued monitoring of the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere to see what changes take place.
More pictures are dribbling in, and the Science in Action team will update the LCROSS story next week when we hope to say more about the mission. In the meantime, scientists have their work cut out for them! We look forward to learning about their discoveries when they’re ready to report.
—Ryan
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