I worry a little bit about the direction research funding is going. It’s shrinking, and people are looking for creative methods to fund basic research — like this crowd-sourced project to study the neuropharmacology of amphetamines. It looks like a worthy effort and I wish the investigator well, but whoa, where are we going? Are researchers going to have to sing and dance on street corners with their hats out to eke out funds to support their obscure and esoteric efforts?

It’s also going to skew funding in new ways (not that our existing methods don’t bias the directions research takes). Which would you throw a few dollars at: biomedical research into human mental health, or a pure science project to study bone morphology in some species of herps?

But don’t let my general reservations hinder you: if you think the work looks cool, help them out.

That’s what it looks like in Rancho Santa Margarita, Orange County, California. It’s a lovely suburb if you swing that way, I suppose. It’s fairly affluent. Median household income in 2007 was just over 95K, according to the usual completely unimpeachable sources, and the percentage of RSM residents living at or below the poverty line is less than 3%.

RSM is also described by the above-mentioned unimpeachable source as having had phenomenal growth in population during the 1990s. The city went from around 11,000 residents to more than 47,000. But the following decade was different. Between 2000 and 2010, RSM added fewer than 1,000 new residents to its Homeowners Association’s membership rolls. That’s not a situation anyone wants, as long as you define “anyone” as “developers.”

The problem is water. RSM is in southern Orange County. Southern Orange county doesn’t have enough groundwater for the people who already live there: there’s no way it can make those needed further 300% increases in its population without finding some.

And so the Santa Margarita Water District is very interested in whatever water they can find. And right now they think they’ve found some.

[Read more…]

This is interesting: a new paper in Science purports to chart the cost of protecting what’s left of the world’s biodiversity, and the figure seems be eliciting gasps:

We estimate the cost of reducing the extinction risk of all globally threatened bird species (by ≥1 IUCN Red List category) to be US$0.875-1.23 billion annually over the next decade, of which 12% is currently funded. Incorporating threatened non-avian species increases this total to US$3.41-$4.76 billion annually. We estimate that protecting and effectively managing all terrestrial sites of global avian conservation significance (11,731 Important Bird Areas) would cost US$65.1 billion annually. Adding sites for other taxa increases this to US$76.1 billion annually. Meeting these targets will require conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.

I haven’t taken a look at the methodology, what with being on the wrong side of the JSTOR Curtain, but a reviewer quoted by Daniel Cressey in Nature’s article on the paper has said the work seems “smart,” though he does point out that its scope is limited.

Henrique Pereira, who works on international conservation issues at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, says that although there are uncertainties inherent in extrapolating from birds to all species, the work is an “extremely smart paper”. “For the first time we have an estimate of how much these targets will cost,” he says. “For any negotiations that occur over the next few years [on CBD targets], these numbers can be used as a reference.” But Pereira also points out that the figure is for just two of the 20 targets agreed by the CBD. “If you look at the range of targets for 2020, the total bill will be higher,” he says.

If the paper’s emphasis is on protecting habitat, as the abstract and the Nature coverage seems to indicate, then there are a few issues unaccounted for. The North American pika, for instance, is in trouble — and not because its habitat isn’t legally protected. Of course in the absence of a copy of the full paper I really can’t do anything but armwave on its possible limitations. [Edit: I now have a copy. thanks!]

But writer Daniel Cressey’s angle on the $76 billion figure in his news piece in Nature is interesting. His lede:

Protecting all the world’s threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year…. If that number is not staggering enough, the scientists behind the work also report that effectively conserving the significant areas these species live in could rack up a bill of more than $76 billion a year.

Cressey does include a quote from study leader Stuart Butchart mentioning what we get back from protecting that biodiversity, including things like pollination services (estimated at $2 billion) and carbon sequestration ($6 billion), Butchart also mentions that $76 billion isn’t a huge amount given what we as a species spend on other things.

An example: the world plowed $1.74 trillion into military expenditures in 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. $76 billion is a scoche more than 4% of that.

Or, for a less obvious example, $76 billion spent worldwide to conserve biodiversity is a significantly lower amount than tourists spent in California in 2011, according to one estimate. A person with access to surveys could tease out how much of that gross income would disappear if California lost its biodiversity; at least some of those tourists came to see the redwoods and the Joshua trees.

… is that no matter how inflammatory a blog post you might write, Matthew Inman will step up and make you look utterly reasonable by comparison.

“How much do cats actually kill?” at The Oatmeal. Note that there are many, MANY red pixels in his cartooning this time.

I keep telling you guys this, but some of you non-developmental biologists dare to disagree — but it’s true, I’ma gonna tell you, developmental biology is the greatest scientific discipline of all time. We have confirmation, too: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2012 has been announced, and it goes to two developmental biologists, John Gurdon (about time) and Shinya Yamanaka. It also goes for research in stem cells.

Gurdon carried out the initial crucial experiment years ago. He sucked the nucleus out of an adult frog skin cell and injected it into an enucleated frog egg. What happened next was that in some cases, the nucleus was reprogrammed into a pluripotent state — instead of being a skin cell with its specific suite of active and inactive genes, it was transformed into an egg cell equivalent, and went on to divide and dutifully create a genetic copy of the donor frog…a clone. This was the precursor to all the animal cloning experiments that have gone on since.

Gurdon’s experiment worked, but we didn’t know how — we knew that the environment of the cytoplasm of the egg cell somehow reset the epigenetic state of the skin cell nucleus, but we were blind to what was actually doing the work.

Enter Yamanaka and his colleagues. What they did was figure out what genes constituted the reset button of the cell, and by expressing them could force adult cells to revert to a pluripotent state. Their approach is a kind of brute force global activation of the four genes identified as key triggers in mammalian cells, but it works: adult mouse cells have been transformed, and then go on to develop into clones of the donor, and it also works on human cells, although no full human clones have been produced — just tissue collections in a dish, or teratomas in mouse hosts.

These are important steps in developing tools to allow us to sculpt adult cells into tissues and organs and whole organisms. Notice that the work was done at Cambridge and Kyoto which, for the geographically challenged, are not American universities. There is good stem cell work being done in the US, but it’s hampered by regulations and restrictions that European and Asian universities do not suffer from. Unleash all the developmental biologists, because we must rule all the things everywhere!