Photosynthesis has unique isotopic signature |

Photosynthesis leaves behind a unique calling card, a chemical signature that is spelled out with stable oxygen isotopes, according to a new study in Science. The findings suggest that similar isotopic signatures could exist for many biological processes, including some that are difficult to observe with current tools.

"We've found a new type of biosignature," said co-lead author Laurence Yeung, an assistant professor of Earth science at Rice University. "We show that plants and plankton impart this type of biosignature on the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis. "Yeung, who joined Rice in January, conducted the study with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles. Isotopes are versions of an element that differ in their atomic weights. For example, most oxygen atoms contain eight protons and eight neutrons and are represented by the symbol O-16. More than 99.9 percent of Earth's oxygen is O-16, but two heavier oxygen isotopes exist in trace amounts: O-17, which contains one extra neutron, and O-18, which has two extra.

"Looking at oxygen through the lens of clumped isotopes will give us a lot of new information about how oxygen is made and consumed by plants," said study co-lead author Jeanine Ash, a graduate student at UCLA. "I'm very excited about what this approach holds for the future." Read More | Isotopes of oxygen | There are three stable isotopes of oxygen that lead to oxygen (O)
having a standard atomic mass of 15.9994(3) u. Also 10 unstable isotopes have been characterized.
Using stable isotopic analysis, Laurence Yeung, Jeanine Ash, and Edward Young discovered that plants and plankton impart a unique biosignature on the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis. Credit: Doug Rumble Continue reading |

Sustainable Business and Educating Girls |

What is Girl Rising? 14 million girls under 18 will be married this year. That’s 38 thousand girls today. With just 8 years of education a girl is 4 times less likely to be married as a child.
Which means … she will be allowed to wait to have children until she herself is an adult.
Which means … an educated female is 50% more likely to send her children to school.
Which means … her daughters will be educated.
Read more at: Girl Rising

Educated girls and women not only provide a business with a wider future customer base, but also add to the depth and quality of the workforce. {The Guardian/Partner Zone Unicef}

Educating girls is key to sustainable economic development | Sustainability, therefore, can no longer remain a complementary adjunct to our discourse on development. It must replace it.

'The Burden' film demonstrates how seriously the military takes climate change |

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Second Hand Smoke And Mirrors |

APR 9, 2015 | "Merchants of Doubt" trying to derail action on climate change |
No person today would grant equal time to the Surgeon General and a Tobacco Lobbyist in a debate about the dangers of smoking. For 50 years, Big Tobacco — one of Berman’s first clients — was allowed to play point/counterpoint with mainstream scientists. [Breathing other people's smoke is known as passive smoking or second-hand smoking] As a society, we’ve accepted the injurious effects of smoking and moved on. Today, with Climate Change and Air Pollution, the same can’t be said. We’re still allowing the same old debate to continue on cable news, in newspapers, in Op-ed pages. And our news outlets still cover the issue in terms one opinion versus another, not as fact vs. fiction. Read More |

Does Calif. capture enough water to justify new dams |

|If taxpayers do front some money, what are they really buying? Are they propping up a project with shaky economics, or buying something with real public value? |Should California build dams, reservoirs to help with future droughts?|Sacramento Bee 6/6/14 READ MORE Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on Monday blamed environmentalists for what she called a "man-made" drought in California. “With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Fiorina, a likely 2016 Republican presidential contender, said in an interview with radio host Glenn Beck. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”

NextGen Climate, the climate-focused political group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, on Monday evening called Fiorina's comments "irrational."
"For a science denier to opine that Democrats caused the drought in California is about as irrational as believing someone who failed at running a business in California and then failed as a candidate for office in California has any cause to be running for the highest office in the land," Bobby Whithorne, the group's spokesman, said in a statement.The Sierra Club, a national environmental group, disputed Fiorina's assertion that more dams and reservoirs would have lessened the impact of the drought.
"For more than 100 years, environmentalists have failed to stop the damming of nearly every significant river in California. And yet all of the hundreds of dams out there have done nothing to produce rain or snow pack over the last four years. That's because you can't store what's not there," said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club's California chapter. "We simply don't have rain or snow pack and are suffering the worst California drought since water agencies and weather trackers started keeping records."
"What we are seeing is exactly what climate scientists have predicted would happen in California with the onset of human-caused climate disruption: Weather and precipitation would become less predictable and droughts would become more frequent and more severe," Phillips added. Huffingtonpost 4/06/2015 Read More |

Massive Energy-Independent ‘Tree of Life’ Pavilion Unveiled for the World Expo 2015 in Milan |

The Italian team’s “Tree of Life” proposal is an energy-independent four-block community hub that features an expansive open courtyard space. The project includes a 12,000 square meter main pavilion and smaller exhibition and institutional spaces positioned along the 325-meter-long Cardo. The building will be divided into four blocks connected by bridges for easy circulation. The team plans to make the structure as energy-independent as possible.

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