A lot is up for grabs this November in America—the presidency of the United States, for one. Not to mention a third of U.S. Senate seats, all seats in the U.S. House, and state-level amendments on issues ranging from voter ID to same-sex marriage (Minnesota has both on the ballot).
But almost six million Americans will sit this one out because of something they’ve done. They’re felons—perpetrators, at some point in their lives, of a serious crime. (more…)
A UA study has found poverty, water scarcity, food insecurity and interdependence between the United States and Mexico along the border.
The U.S.-Mexico border is the border in the world with the greatest disparity in access to food and water needed for human survival, according to a report commissioned and published by the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona.
An endowment from the Kellogg Foundation and a UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry grant supported the study and its focus on assessing transborder food systems to understand water scarcity and food insecurity within the borderlands region.
The report underscores how in the globalized economy, Arizona and the rest of the United States rely on the skilled labor, water, fresh produce, fish, shellfish and livestock originating in northern Mexico; while in Mexico, the population is increasingly dependent upon frozen and processed foods originating in the United States. (more…)
A University of Colorado analysis of state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980 forecasts that the 2012 winner will be Mitt Romney.
The key is the economy, say political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver. Their prediction model stresses economic data from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including both state and national unemployment figures as well as changes in real per capita income, among other factors.
“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” said Bickers, also director of the CU in DC Internship Program. (more…)
Professor and students study how microbial life changes along the river
The mercury is pushing 100, but professor Michael Sadowsky and two assistants leave the indoor coolness for the bank of the Mississippi River as it flows by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.
The three men send a bucket splashing into the current and haul back a water sample. That doesn’t affect the river much, but information locked away in bacteria from the sample may tell them a great deal about how the river’s microbial communities change along its course through Minnesota and how human activity affects them. (more…)
*Loss of milkweed in Midwestern farm fields harms butterflies, a study shows*
If you’re a gardener, milkweed may not be at the top of your list.
But if you love Minnesota’s state insect—the monarch butterfly—maybe it should be.
Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, but the plant is disappearing from what used to be a prime reservoir: Midwestern farm fields. A new study by University of Minnesota monarch expert Karen Oberhauser and her Iowa State colleague John Pleasants ties a decade-long decline in monarch populations to the loss of milkweed from the corn and soybean fields that blanket the region. (more…)
Durland Fish has researched ticks and their associated diseases for decades. A professor in the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, he has, among other things, contributed to the discovery that the bacterium that causes Lyme disease has European ancestry and that the disease, once nearly eradicated in North America, roared back with reforestation. More recently he helped develop a Lyme disease “app” for the iPhone and other Apple devices that provides users with detailed information about tick populations in any given area in the United States and even comes with a video on how to safely remove a tick. He has also worked on mosquito-borne West Nile virus and dengue fever. Students selected Fish as the school’s mentor of the year in 2010. (more…)
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL — Minnesota’s Iron Range is pocked with ponds – abandoned open pit mines – that could help energy providers more efficiently use intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind, to meet state renewable energy mandates. A study released Friday by the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute shows that the water-laden pits have the potential to store wind energy using a process developed in Europe in the late 1800s.
The pumped-hydro storage process would use excess late-night wind energy to pump water uphill from the pits to a higher-elevation holding pond. Then, when electricity demand goes up during the day, the process reverses the flow and captures the energy in hydro turbines. For every 100 megawatts used to pump the water upward, the plant generates nearly 80 megawatts through the turbines. (more…)
Deforestation, considered by scientists to contribute significantly to global warming, has been shown by a Yale-led team to actually cool the local climate in northern latitudes, according to a paper published Nov. 17 in Nature.
“If you cut trees in the boreal region, north of 45 degrees latitude, you have a net cooling effect,” says Xuhui Lee, the study’s principal investigator and professor of meteorology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “You release carbon into the atmosphere by cutting down trees, but you increase the albedo effect — the reflection of sunlight.” (more…)
