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50,000 Endangered Species Condoms to Be Handed Out at Year-end Events
Dec 23rd
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TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity is distributing 50,000 free Endangered Species Condoms for holiday and New Year’s Eve celebrations around the country. More than 600 volunteer distributors will hand out the condoms at events in all 50 states. The condoms are part of the Center’s 7 Billion and Counting campaign focusing on the effects of rapid human population growth on rare plants and animals. “There are more than 3 billion people on the planet under the age of 25. The choices this generation makes will determine whether our planet and its wildlife and natural resource base are burdened with 8 billion or 15 billion people. The difference between these paths can be measured by how many other species are left to roam alongside us,” said Jerry Karnas, population campaign director with the Center. “Our Endangered Species Condoms are a great way to get a conversation started about how the growing human population is affecting the wild world around us, especially animals already teetering on the edge of extinction.”
As part of its full-time population campaign launched in 2009, the Center has given out 450,000 free Endangered Species Condoms, featuring polar bears, panthers and other species threatened by population growth, loss of habitat and consumption of natural resources. This year, the Center is providing condoms to college health centers, nightclub owners, environmental activists, women’s reproductive-health groups and other activists around the United States. The world’s human population has doubled since 1970, reaching 7 billion in October 2011. According to the latest research, it could exceed 9 billion by 2050. In recent weeks, several federal reports have noted the impact that population is having on the natural world. A recent decision to propose Endangered Species Act protection for 66 coral species said that “the common root or driver of most, possibly all” of the threats that corals face — like climate change and changing ocean conditions — is the world’s growing human population. Another report, by the Department of the Interior, raised serious questions about the ability of the Colorado River to meet demands of a growing population in the western United States. “The evidence is mounting, and the solutions are at hand if only we’re just willing to start talking about them,” Karnas said. “Universal access to birth control, a rapid transition to clean energy, robust land-acquisition programs and much smarter growth policies can combine to forge a future for wildlife and a high quality of life for people. There’s no better time to start than in the new year of 2013.” The Center is the only environmental group with a full-time campaign highlighting the connection between unsustainable human population growth and the ongoing extinction crisis for plants and animals around the world. In 2011 the Center released a report on the top 10 U.S. species threatened by population growth. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 450,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. [includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]
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CU team receives $9.2 million DOE grant to engineer E. coli into biofuels
Dec 4th
A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has been awarded $9.2 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to research modifying E. coli to produce biofuels such as gasoline.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to take what we have worked on for the past decade to the next level,” said team leader Ryan Gill, a fellow of CU-Boulder’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, or RASEI. “In this project, we will develop technologies that are orders of magnitude beyond where we are currently.”
The team is working with a non-pathogenic strain of E. coli. Among the microbe’s more than 4,000 genes, the team is searching for a small set and how it can be manipulated in a combination of on and off states to change the bacteria’s behavior.
“E. coli is not going to want to make your biofuel at all,” said Gill, who’s also a CU-Boulder associate professor of chemical and biological engineering. “It doesn’t do that naturally. It’s programmed with thousands of genes controlling how it replicates. We’re figuring out what control structure we need to rewire in the bug to make it do what we want, not what it wants.”
Included in the team are Rob Knight, CU-Boulder associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Pin-Ching Maness, principal scientist at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL; and Adam Arkin, physical biosciences director at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The researchers hope to engineer the production of ethylene and isobutanol in the modified E. coli. The two compounds are widely used commodities that can be converted into gasoline among other chemicals.
The greatest challenge is harnessing an efficient and inexpensive process that competes with abundant and low-cost fossil fuels like oil, according to Gill.
“Microorganisms and their genomes are incredibly complex machines,” said Gill. “The first step alone — of pinpointing the part of the E. coli genome that can help us make biofuels or other chemicals on a cost-competitive basis — is a daunting challenge. Then we have to determine if the results we want will take one year or decades, $5 million or $500 million.”
The team will be able to simultaneously identify numerous E. coli genes and the results of turning these genes on or off using advanced technologies. Many of the technologies have been developed by the researchers’ own labs.
The grant is the first of its kind from the DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and was awarded to only seven other research groups including teams led by MIT, Purdue University and the J. Craig Venter Institute.
In 2011, CU’s Technology Transfer Office named Gill an inventor of the year. In 2005, Gill won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award as well as a National Institutes of Health K25 Career Development Award for genomics research and teaching.
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CU-Boulder professor inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Oct 27th
Veronica Vaida, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this month.
She was elected to the academy in recognition of her exceptional achievements in scientific research. Among the other 218 new members elected this year were U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor and director Clint Eastwood, journalist Judy Woodruff and Amazon.com founder and chairman Jeff Bezos.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs.
Vaida’s research uses spectroscopy to explore different chemical reactions in the atmosphere, with many of these reactions having environmental implications. She is the 23rd CU-Boulder faculty member to be elected to the academy.
The academy’s unique strength lies in the distinguished leadership of its 4,600 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members and the wide range of expertise they bring to its multidisciplinary analyses of compelling contemporary issues.
The only other new academy member elected from Colorado this year was Mark Johnston, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at CU Denver.
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To learn more about Vaida’s current research, visit her laboratory home page at http://www.colorado.edu/chem/vaidalab/index.htm.
