Sailing and studying the bottom of the ocean food chain

GSO oceanographer studies microscopic organisms in world’s oceans

Elizabeth Rau

On left, Kerry Whittaker, a lecturer in marine ecology at Bates College
and faculty chair at Costal Studies for Girls, a semester school in
Freeport, Maine, and Tatiana Rynearson, an oceanographer at the
University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
Photo courtesy of Tatiana Rynearson

You can’t see them with the naked eye, but they’re all over the ocean: diatoms, single-celled organisms that drift on currents.

These microscopic creatures are key to the planet’s health. 

They sit at the base of the food chain, feeding everything from zooplankton to fish. 

Through photosynthesis diatoms also regulate the air people breathe, and they regulate the global climate.

Yet they remain a mystery to many scientists.

Tatiana Rynearson, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, and Kerry Whittaker, who received her doctorate from GSO in 2014, are contributing their knowledge about diatoms through a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If you build a 50-foot wall, you'll start see 51-foot ladders

Former ‘Border Czar' Gives Real Facts About Immigration
By Sebastian Rotella for ProPublica

It's hard to find anyone in Washington who knows border issues better than Alan Bersin. His unique perspective combines years of frontline law enforcement experience with academic knowledge and intellectual interest in the historical, economic and social forces that are at work at the borders of the United States, especially the U.S.-Mexico line.

Bersin became U.S. attorney in San Diego in 1993 and subsequently spent almost five years as President Clinton's "border czar," overseeing a border-wide crackdown on illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

During the Obama administration, he served in several key posts in the Department of Homeland Security, including as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, the force of 58,000 employees that includes the U.S. Border Patrol as well as CBP officers guarding air, land and sea ports of entry. 

He later served as assistant secretary for international affairs and chief diplomatic officer at DHS, a job he left last month.

ProPublica sat down to talk with him about the history, politics, rhetoric and reality surrounding the border issues that are driving a fierce national debate during the first weeks of the Trump administration.

The only fraud in Trump’s election claims are his YUGE lies

Trump’s Most Shameful Act So Far

By Robert Reich

On Febuary 12, White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller claimed 14 percent of non-citizens are registered to vote. 

“We know for a fact, you have massive numbers of non-citizens registered to vote in this country,” he said, appearing on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.”

Miller is repeating an assertion Trump continues to make. 

It is absolutely false. 

What do we do when we have a president and White House surrogates, along with enablers in the right-wing media, who continuously lie about something as fundamental to our democracy as whether we’ve got massive voter fraud?

The answer is we find the truth. We spread the truth. We continue to speak the truth. And we use every chance we have – in opeds, in letters to editors, in local media, on national media – to state the truth.

And we demand that big lies like this be corrected.

Common cold Do's and Don't's

From FAKE SCIENCE

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PRIVACY: You can’t hide

New reliable technique to track web users across browsers

Lehigh University

For good or ill, what users do on the web is tracked. Banks track users as an authentication technique, to offer their customers enhanced security protection. 

Retailers track customers and potential customers in order to deliver personalized service tailored to their tastes and needs.

The method commonly used for tracking is called web fingerprinting. Web fingerprinting is a way of collecting information that can be used to fully or partially identify a given user, even when cookies are disabled.

Such techniques have been evolving quickly. Yet, the most advanced and commonly used methods track users in a single browser only.

Vitamin worth taking

Vitamin D protects against colds and flu

University of Queen Mary London

Vitamin D supplements protect against acute respiratory infections including colds and flu, according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

The study provides the most robust evidence yet that vitamin D has benefits beyond bone and muscle health, and could have major implications for public health policy, including the fortification of foods with vitamin D to tackle high levels of deficiency in the UK.

The results, published in The BMJ, are based on a new analysis of raw data from around 11,000 participants in 25 clinical trials conducted in 14 countries including the UK, USA, Japan, India, Afghanistan, Belgium, Italy, Australia and Canada. 

Individually, these trials yielded conflicting results, with some reporting that vitamin D protected against respiratory infections, and others showing no effect.

As big as Watergate?

Dan Rather, who reported it all, thinks it might be

By Dan Rather

Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now. It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now.

On a 10 scale of Armageddon for our form of government, I would put Watergate at a 9. This Russia scandal is currently somewhere around a 5 or 6, in my opinion, but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour.

And we may look back and see, in the end, that it is at least as big as Watergate. It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged. It has all the necessary ingredients, and that is chilling.

When we look back at Watergate, we remember the end of the Nixon Presidency. It came with an avalanche, but for most of the time my fellow reporters and I were chasing down the story as it rumbled along with a low-grade intensity.

We never were quite sure how much we would find out about what really happened. In the end, the truth emerged into the light, and President Nixon descended into infamy.

This Russia story started out with an avalanche and where we go from here no one really knows.

Each piece of news demands new questions.

We are still less than a month into the Trump Presidency, and many are asking that question made famous by Tennessee Senator Howard Baker those many years ago: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

New reporting suggests that Mr. Trump knew for weeks.

If we can agree on one thing, this is it

We Must Know the Truth

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship for Common Dreams

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: there MUST be an investigation by an independent, bipartisan commission of Russia’s ties to Donald Trump and his associates and that nation’s interference in our elections. Emphasize independent and bipartisan. 

That commission must have full subpoena power to call witnesses and make them testify under oath or risk prosecution. Hearings must be held out in the open, and televised live for the nation and the world to see. That’s what a democracy is all about.

The resignation of national security advisor Michael Flynn and Tuesday night’s news of repeated contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence make such an inquiry even more imperative. 

On February 10, winging his way to Mar-a-Lago on Air Force One, Trump told the press he knew nothing about the previous night’s Washington Post report that Flynn had secretly discussed lifting sanctions against Russia with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. But on February 14, press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump had known about Flynn’s phone calls – and his lies about it – weeks ago.

Why was nothing done until the media broke the story? And why did Trump lie? As the National Lampoon joked back during the Watergate era, rephrasing the crucial questions aimed at Richard Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he STOP knowing it?”

Why we don't need to worry about Trump's fascism

For more cartoons from Ted Rall, CLICK HERE.

VIDEO: Mattiello says stop worrying and learn to love Trump. Right.

Mattiello says RI “should be supportive of” Trump

By Samuel Bell in Rhode Island’s Future

To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE56tDaxzl8

A Democratic activist has uncovered comments made by conservative Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello urging Rhode Islanders to support Donald Trump. 

In the video, which was recorded in January right before Trump was sworn in, Mattiello, says, “we should be supportive of the President-elect.”

Send them to Mexico, Part II

Alien particles from outer space are wreaking low-grade havoc on personal electronic devices

Vanderbilt University

When your computer crashes and you get the dreaded blue screen or your smartphone freezes and you have to go through the time-consuming process of a reset, most likely you blame the manufacturer: Microsoft or Apple or Samsung.

In many instances, however, these operational failures may be caused by the impact of electrically charged particles generated by cosmic rays that originate outside the solar system.

"This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva, professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University, in a presentation on Friday, Feb. 17 at a session titled "Cloudy with a Chance of Solar Flares: Quantifying the Risk of Space Weather" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

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DEET and PMD spray-on repellents most effective at repelling mosquitoes

Entomological Society of America

In a crowded marketplace of products advertised to repel mosquitoes, consumers are wise to trust spray-on repellents containing DEET or PMD, say researchers at New Mexico State University. 

In a comparison study of several mosquito-repellent products, "wearable" devices such as bracelets or sonic repellers were found to be largely ineffective in repelling Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

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