Political Ecology

In 2005, an astrophysicist came out with a new picture of the chemical composition of the sun. His calculations showed that the abundances of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon in the star—the most plentiful elements in it besides hydrogen and helium—were about half as high as researchers had previously worked out. The new values solved [...]

Threats to native forests from non-native insects and pathogens (pests) are generally addressed with methods such as quarantine, eradication, biological control, and development of resistant stock through hybridization and breeding. In conjunction with such efforts, it may be useful to have citizen scientists locate rare surviving trees that may be naturally pest resistant or tolerant. [...]

Because of their comprehensive nature, we believe the results of our autosomal microsatellite survey present a resolution to this issue with regard to human genetic relationships. The fact that the STRUCTURE cluster containing Micronesians, Samoans, and Maoris has a detectable signature only in Oceanic-speaking Melanesians and Taiwan Aborigines supports the position that an expansion of [...]

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generated forty carbon production and emissions scenarios. In this paper, we develop a base-case scenario for global coal production based on the physical multi-cycle Hubbert analysis of historical production data. Areas with large resources but [...]

Taken together, the results argue that the common ancestor of cucumber and melon originated on the continent of Asia. Possible ancestral populations from which the domesticated forms derive have been localized in the Himalayas. The genetic diversity of the varieties of C. melo that occur in India and China is particularly striking. “Our data also [...]

Researchers must disclose their data in order to achieve recognition and to enable others to test, validate, and challenge their hypotheses. In doing so, they create bodies of shared knowledge that are analogous to traditional public resources, such as forests and freeways, often referred to as “commons” (1, 2). The rate at which data are [...]

First, mammoth populations began to drop—both because of natural climate change as the planet emerged from the last ice age, and because of human hunting. Normally, mammoths would have grazed down any birch that grew, so the area stayed a grassland. But if the mammoths vanished, the birch could spread. In the cold of the [...]