Twenty-four faculty members from colleges and universities from around the country left the Yale campus on Aug. 1 with a new mission: to inspire their freshman and sophomore students to pursue scientific research, specifically by discovering new antibiotics from soil bacteria.
In a week-long workshop called “The Small World Initiative” and held at Kline Biology Tower, the teachers developed the tools to engage their students in real-life research projects with such life-saving potential. (more…)
HONOLULU — While the iconic Haleakalā silversword plant made a strong recovery from early 20th-century threats, it has now entered a period of substantial climate-related decline. New research published this week warns that global warming may have severe consequences for the silversword in its native habitat.
Known for its striking rosette, the silversword grows for 20-90 years before the single reproductive event at the end of its life, at which time it produces a large (up to six feet tall) inflorescence with as many as 600 flower heads. The plant was in jeopardy in the early 1900s due to animals eating the plants and visitors gathering them. With successful management, including legal protection and the physical exclusion of hoofed animals, the species made a strong recovery, but since the mid-1990s it has entered a period of substantial decline. A strong association of annual population growth rates with patterns of precipitation suggests the plants are undergoing increasingly frequent and lethal water stress. Local climate data confirm trends towards warmer and drier conditions on the mountain, which the researchers warn will create a bleak outlook for the threatened silverswords if climate trends continue. (more…)
Researchers at the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) made a discovery that challenges a major theory in the field of coral reef ecology.
The general assumption has been that the more flexible corals are, regarding which species of single-celled algae (Symbiodinium) they host in coral tissues, the greater ability corals will have to survive environmental stress. In their paper published August 29, 2012, however, scientists at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) at SOEST and colleagues documented that the more flexible corals are, the more sensitive to environment disturbances they are. (more…)
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) completed a three-year long investigation of Sea Disposal Site Hawaiʻi Number 5 (HI-05), a deep-water military munitions disposal site in U.S. coastal waters approximately 5 miles south of Pearl Harbor, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.
