The Palouse starts south of Spokane and is readily apparent. Small mountains vanish from the foreground and are replaced with rolling farmland, devoid of trees and covered in wheat. Upon entering the Palouse I was overcome with a strong urge to speak to myself in Spanish and yell things like “donde esta las montanas?” and “Ahhh… esta bonita, no?”. Perhaps it triggered something deeply embedded in me, something from the old west, of cowboys, and ranchers. Or it was just a result of driving for three hours without radio.

The view from Highway 195, south of Spokane, the Palouse Loess is nearly ubiquitous. A few road cuts expose ancient basalt with origins from a volcano near the corner of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, called the Grande Ronde volcano, which was active during the late Miocene. The numerous eruptions make up the region in southestern Washington know as the Columbia Plateau. In the far eastern distance the foothills of the Rockie Mountains rise up above the flood basalt flows. One such hill, similar to those in the distance, is much closer. It is little over five miles from Highway 195 and is named Steptoe Butte.

Steptoe Butte is composed of rock much older than any other around. The rock was here before the basalt floods and before the loess was blown here from the glacial outwash plains. It stood tall before the conglomerate of exotic islands that compose Washington State were united, before the Kootani Arc was formed and even before life had evolved. Steptoe Butte is made up of Precambrian belt sedimentary rock and is over a billion years old.

There is a campground at the base of the butte and a road that spirals up to the peak. The road allows nearly everyone an easy way to the top but scars the hill’s facade. I, of course, had to reach the top. The road was narrow. Big trucks barreled down swerving into the middle of the road so I was forced to move inches from the edge just to avoid them. Large rocks sat in my path, marmots scurried all around me, and no guardrail was present. By the time I got to the top I felt as if I just drove through the gauntlet. It was worth it as I was rewarded with an amazing view of the Palouse and its huge sky rich with cumulus clouds. In less than three months I will be one of the many specks in these vast plains and I am nothing but excited about it.

Springtime is a great time of the year. The days are longer, the seedlings spring from the earth, and the buds finally open. But most enjoyable is the warm weather. So it was a bit of a surprise to me when I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and saw… snow? In fact, it snowed three days now with lows near 20 F. The weather hasn’t been warm this Spring, it’s been abnormally cold.

The relatively cold weather is a slight annoyance to me but it is something that I can tolerate. What I cannot tolerate are how some people are reacting. They view the chilly Spring as proof, absolute, empirical, in-your-face proof, that global warming is false and that all the science, concise peer reviewed models, thousands of meticulous studies conducted by some of the worlds most intelligent and educated people, are all false. “Look outside you dimwitted liberal hippie, it’s cold. It’s obvious the globe isn’t warming.”

There is, of course, a simple rebuttal to their claim. It’s so simple it scares me that people do not grasp it on their own. I do not think that people are unintelligent, uneducated, or lack critical thinking skills. What I do think is that their ideals and values block their tools of logic. But that’s besides the point.

Here’s the rebuttal: Weather and climate are two different things. Weather is short term and will have fluctuations. Climate is a long term average of weather. Snow in spring is weather. Global warming is climate (that’s why it is also referred to as “global CLIMATE change”).

The above mentioned naysayers have a blatant misunderstanding of global warming. Somewhere in their heads, I assume, they conclude that because the globe is warming each day at every place in the world MUST be warmer than the corresponding day during the previous year. This is not true as I mentioned before – weather fluctuates.

Weather is an incredibly complex system and it is very difficult to make prediction about it. There are random factors contributing to it that we cannot explain. To disprove a long-term trend based on a short term occurrence when random events are a factor is a mistake. It would be like disproving that the chance of getting heads on a flip of a coin is 50% by getting tails on the first two flips. Or that the chances of rolling a six with a six-sided die is greater than 16.67% because the first two rolls were sixes.

Weather is not completely random. In fact part of the cooler spring this year is attributable to an event called La Nina (the opposite of El Nino) where equatorial ocean currents are colder than usual which cools the air above it. But casual factors aside, it is foolish to extrapolate trends, or basically anything, solely based on a few occurrences.

I was asked to write about how I got into graduate school at WSU. I think reading about other’s experiences would have helped me while I was applying to grad school so I figure I better make my response public so other may benefit. Feel free to ask me any questions. Enjoy.

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The program that I am starting in August is at the graduate school of biological sciences in Washington State University. I will be pursuing a Masters of Science (M.S.) degree in physiological ecology with a concentration in plant sciences. Basically, physiological ecology means that I will be using the very minute aspects of biological systems (biochemistry, hormones, nitrogen and carbon cycles) to answer very large questions concerning things like whole ecosystems or even the entire biosphere. One great example of this is research being conducted by a professor at WSU, Asaph Cousins. Cousins and others have realized that photosynthesis and ecosystem respiration have distinct effects on the isotope composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels (the two contribute a different ‘version’ of the CO2 molecule). Using this knowledge Cousins is able to address questions concerning global exchange of CO2 by using molecular techniques to elucidate specific processes in leaf gas exchange. Basically, he is looking at the very specific mechanisms that gas is used in plants and using that knowledge to better understand the plant’s signature on the ecosystem level.

To get pass the first step for getting into grad school at WSU I had to meet certain requirements and do a lot of busy work. The most important, and awkward, experience was wooing a faculty member. Yes, I said wooing. Graduate school in the sciences is a lot like an apprenticeship so it is necessary to find a mentor (in academia we call them advisors – spelled incorrectly ). To find an advisor I presented myself in the best possible light by writing an essay about my ambitions, experiences, etc and telling the potential advisor how much I like him/her and how much we have in common. Yes, I was basically asking the person out on a date. For someone who has never tried online dating it was very strange for me.

Luckily Dr. Al Black (a very good professor, the head chair of the Washington natural heritage advisory council, in charge of a large research area called Smoot Hill, and the top dog of the biological graduate program), took some interest in me. I was flown to Pullman, put up in a hotel, and given a personal tour of the campus and faculty. Little did I know that the tour was actually an eight hour interview process where they attempt to break my brain. I was put in front of numerous professors who would rapidly teach me abstract concepts concerning each of their research interests and ask me very detailed and difficult questions concerning my own research experiences and knowledge. I was told I did an alright job during the interview but I was unable to be happy with myself because I was too busy drooling all over my shirt and sputtering nonsense.

So I got accepted and have Al Black as my advisor. I also was offered a position as a teaching assistant where I will co-teach biology labs to punk freshmen who do not want to be there. In exchange I get free tuition, free health insurance, and some money to buy oatmeal and Top Ramen. It’s a pretty good deal but not entirely special in the world of grad school in the sciences (to quote some lady: “If you pay for grad school in the sciences you’re a sucker. A sucker. Don’t do it!”).

Some facts:

WSU is ranked 2nd in the nation in plant sciences based on faculty research and publications, 7th in zoology, and 3rd in veterinary school (http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?year=2007&institution=3875&byinst=Go).

It is common to associate moss with moist environments; in the temperate rain forests of western Washington and Alaska or covering trees and decaying stumps in the tropics. For one to cognitively link moss to moisture is not necessarily wrong because their entire method of reproduction relies on the presence of water. However, as illustrated in the picture above, mats of moss can grow in the relatively cold and dry climates of northeastern Washington. In fact, they are found in the hot deserts and the cold tundra; both of which are seriously lacking in moisture. How does this mat of moss survive and reproduce on something as barren as the surface of a chunk of limestone rock?

The ability for moss to survive in such marginal environments as the surface of a rock is a product of their extremely low maintenance. They are small and they are tough. The predominate generation of a moss has no vascular tissue like trees or grass and has leaves that are only one cell layer thick. Because moss lack strong water and nutrient transport they must grow low, sometimes in mats, giving them less structural mass to maintain with nutrients, moisture, temperature, and other concerns. The single cell layer of the leaf allows gas and water to be absorbed quickly and efficiently. Pore some water onto a mat of dried moss to see how quickly the plants spring to life.

The reproductive cycle of the moss is radically different from what may be intuited by a naive observer. The dominate life stage of a moss, the structure most of us are familiar with, is the gametophyte which is the stage where only one set of chromosomes is present in the organism. This is different than, say, a tree or a human. Both of which have two sets of chromosomes (the tree’s pollen and egg have one set just as our sperm and egg do). The male gametophyte produces sperm which must use water as a transport vessel to the female gametophyte. Fertilization occurs from the union of the egg and sperm and a young sporophyte (two chromosomes, one set from the male, one from the female) grows as a sort of parasite right out of the female gametophyte. The sporophyte matures and releases male and female spores that grow into male and female gametophytes. The cycle continues. [Note: the yellow in the picture above is the sporophytes and the brown/black is the gametophytes]

As stated above, water is required by the moss to transport the sperm to the egg. This is the exact reason why mosses grow best in moist areas. Because sperm is tiny, made of only a few cells, any minute bit of water is able to transport a bundle of them. A single drop of rain splashing onto a male gametophyte can engulf a group of sperm and transport them to multiple eggs. Thus one raindrop, timed and placed perfectly, can sustain a mat of moss for another generation.

The Loom has a very interesting guest post by evo-devo expert Dr. Jerry Coyne. Coyne lets off a nice diatribe against a New York Times blog post by Olivia Judson that claims recent evidence related to evo-devo corroborates with the theory that new species can arise as a result of single, small, genetic mutations that have large morphological or physiological effects. Coyne argues that the idea of macromutationism is completely wrong and that Judson’s arguments are fallacious conclusions of basic evo-devo research.

Coyne’s essay is a great read and I recommend it to everyone.

Just in case you need an evo-devo primer the New York Times has a good video by Sean B. Carroll and below is a video by 60 Second Science that does a great job of explaining the field of study.

What is Evo-Devo?

According to BirdWeb (Birdweb, 2005), Poecile rufescens favors “dense, moist, coniferous forests.” Although this picture was taken in a similar environment near Snoqualmie Falls, a study by Artman (2003) suggests that P. rufescens prefers a thinned habitat to those left untouched by commercial forest management.

A possible explanation of this may be increased food availability in thinned habitats due to increased ground vegetation and thus a higher density of seeds and berries.

References
Artman, V. (2003). Effects of Commercial Thinning on Breeding Bird Populations in Western Hemlock Forests. American Midland Naturalist, 149, 225-232.

BirdWeb. (2005). Chestnut-backed Chickadee. Retrieved January 13, 2008 from http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?id=330.

To better understand our natural world would you be willing to stick your tongue into a green sea anemone? No? Then do it vicariously through this weirdo (see video).

You have to love this stuff. And as a bonus, that guy is my housemate now…

The Encyclopedia of Life is a daunting project aimed at making key information about life on Earth easily and readily accessible (demonstration pages).  EOL has an incredible goal, to document life before it goes extinct.  Since the launch of the promotional site there has been little news on when the species pages will actually go live.  Until now.

Near the end of February, 2008 EOL will have 30,000 interactive pages live for the world to view.  Excited?  I sure am.

Why? Because it rhymes.

We have noticed that science and technology lie at the center of a very large number of the policy issues facing our nation and the world – issues that profoundly affect our national and economic security as science and technology continue to transform our lives. No matter one’s political stripe, these issues pose important pragmatic policy challenges.

- sciencedebate2008.com

Recent scientific advancements have brought us to a time where our next president must be able to address moral questions with logical means.  The science debate should act as a vehicle to insure that our next leader will not allow illogical and pseudo science to persuade him or her in making decisions.